Quick Slants – 15 Apr 2010 Edition

Quick slants for today:

• I need a haircut.  Desperately.  Thankfully I’ll be getting one tomorrow.  Which is about a week and a half later than I usually get one on my typical schedule.
• Chapter 9 of “Echoes” is about 90% done.  Of the nine previous parts (“Echoes” has a prologue), this is the longest chapter by far.  At last count, Ch9 is a whopping twenty one pages long.  
• The danger with anything too long – whether we’re talking about movies, TV shows, books, chapters of books, songs, and even non-fiction – is that there is always a risk that whoever is reading or watching or listening will lose interest due to the sheer demand on their attention span.  Once your audience’s attention drops, it’s very difficult to recapture it.  

As a writer, you have to be conscious of this danger.  Failing to acknowledge this inevitably results in you losing your audience.  Obviously, this is the most undesirable condition.

How does one generate, sustain, and keep the audience’s attention?  An old college professor of mine who taught creative writing once told us, his class, that conflict and drama are the secret to good fiction.  If you are skillful at weaving tension into your plot and are good at describing your characters’ reactions to those tensions, you’re on your way to writing good, interesting fiction.

Quick Slants – 13 Apr 2010 Edition

Today’s quick slants:

• Something I always try to keep in mind whenever I’m writing fiction (this includes stories, song lyrics, and poetry):  Write what you know.
• An unfortunate consequence of this is coming up with something plausible, much less “truthful,” when writing from a woman’s perspective.  
• Being a man, despite whatever sensitivity I am able to muster, I’ve never been in a woman’s shoes, so it’s a little challenging to get into a woman’s head.  This is especially true when it comes to storywriting when the story’s central character is a woman.
• I don’t underestimate the importance of trying to understand the perspective of a female character.  Nor would any writer attempting to endow his/her work with a strong sense of verisimilitude, particularly when it comes to the credible portrayal of characters.

These aforementioned issues are part of my writer’s struggles in “Echoes,” my ongoing fanfiction project.  As alluded to above, the central character in “Echoes” is a woman.  Not only that, but she is a woman whose heroic journey figuratively takes her to Hell and back, as Dante does in Dante Alighieri‘s La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy).  While it’s fairly easy to come up with plot points and descriptions of scenarios and environments, it is far more challenging to portray a character’s reactions, especially if the character is female.  Foremost in my mind in writing these parts of the narrative is the question:  Is this what a woman would really feel, or is this just what I think she would?

I must remember to emphasize this very point with my crew of trusted reviewers and beta readers, many of whom are, indeed, women.