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So I believe I’ve mentioned that Dawn’s been (off and on) trying to write some comic scripts of her own, and this is where I’ve discovered certain faults of mine as a coach. Writing, especially writing dialogue, just seems to come naturally to me, and any time that’s the case it can be difficult to explain to someone else for whom it’s not as simple. I want to equate it to how it would be if I asked Dawn to teach me to draw faces.
But then again any pro or semi-pro artist I’ve ever talked to, including Dawn, will tell you that drawing isn’t a matter of talent but of lots and lots of practice. Is it the same with writing? I’ve been in love with words nearly all my life but it’s not like I’m going through every paragraph I type over and over…
Except, just now I backspaced and retyped that sentence about three times, and also realized it’s not really a sentence but evaluated the use of ellipses and decided to give a middle finger to Strunk & White because hell, it’s still a perfectly coherent thought being communicated.
That’s a lot of thinking about a few words, isn’t it? I also have a habit of going back and editing things as fleeting as Facebook posts as I think of better ways to get my point across. Meanwhile one of the big reasons I never got into Twitter much was the inability to edit after the fact. Everything on Twitter is a first draft. It can be figuratively crumpled up and deleted (assuming no one has screenshotted it in the meantime) but it can’t be revised.
I just went back and edited that second paragraph because on re-reading it I felt it had one too many uses of the word “over.”
These blogs are something I consider highly informal, even disposable. Now try to imagine what I do with a composition I feel needs to be as perfect as it can be.
The more I think about it the more I realize what an immense lifetime’s worth of prose I’ve composed, even if most of it will never see publication. Before the advent of graphical MMORPG’s I was an active participant in text-based multi-user roleplaying and I’ve recently poked at some old log files of play all the way back in 2002, and you know what? They hold up. I’m impressed with that Clint guy’s writing, much of which was improvisational and needed to be typed in real time within the span of a couple of minutes so that your scene partner(s) didn’t get horribly bored with you.
I was having a great time, too, but now I’m wondering if it’s part of why I can rattle character dialog for Zombie Ranch off my keyboard with nary a hesitation. No secret method. Just practice, practice, practice.
One thought on “It’s dialogical, Captain…”
Alexander Leaking Pen Hollins
absolutely agreed, a lot of my dialouge writing ability is from practice on rpgs and chat rooms. Different media train different things as well. I’m long known as a wordy bastard, but twitter, with the limits to size, helped train me to shorten things and edit tighter.
Comic scripts, when I worked on a comic, absolutely took practice and training, back and forth with teh artist to make my descriptions more clear to what the image in my head was. Its definitely practice.
One of the reasons I will never pooh pooh fan fic and such. Its writing. it’s practice. its learning how to cobble words together into a smooth street, and not a bumpy ride.