Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?

[pbray]

Three weeks ago I turned in the manuscript for THE FINAL SACRIFICE, and since then I've been contemplating my next project. I haven't written a word in this time, but I've made notes, read research books, and picked the brains of knowledgeable folks. Gradually the project has taken shape in my mind, and earlier this week I felt I knew the characters well enough that I could begin to name them, a major milestone in my creative process.

Last night I shared this news with jennifer_dunne and informed her that I could almost hear the central character. His voice is coming into focus, and within the next few days I expect to start writing.

She stared at me, then repeated "You hear them?"

Yes, I told her. I have to be able to hear the characters in my head. Right now, whenever my mind is idle, it's turning over dozens of different possibilities for the opening paragraphs. All of this takes place in my head, and it's only when I can hear those opening lines clearly that I'll sit down at the computer.

She continued to stare at me, then shrugged her shoulders. "Huh. I never know what I'm going to write until I write it."

Which just goes to show that there's more than one way to be a writer. jennifer_dunne's process can be referred to either as organic, or as a fuzzy-headed, undisciplined mess, depending on my mood :-)

My process is different. I need to know my characters inside and out. If I can't figure out what the hero would have majored in in college, or whether or not he likes Starbucks coffee, then I'm not ready. Once the characters are in focus, the words will come.

Oddly enough when I hear the words, the voice I hear in my head is my own. It's a bit as if I'm reading aloud from a story I've already written--except, of course, that in my head there are no Errs, Umms, or mispronunciations.

I paused for a moment just now, and I can *almost* hear him--he's just around the corner, and if I wait a bit longer, he'll be here.

And then I'll begin to write.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Guess you won't quite be ready to start tomorrow, then? No matter: novel_in_90 will be waiting when you are.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I'm really damn close. If not tomorrow, then sometime this weekend.

*Crossing fingers*

[jlawrenceperry.livejournal.com]

Do you remember this show on PBS where some dude in a red space-like costume taught kids how to draw? He had this HUGE paper thing and he would draw a little bit at a time every day until this thing was FILLED with this world he created.

My writing is kind of like that sometimes. It's like an archaeological dig for me. It SUCKS! I want it all to just FLOW....

. Butt in chair is a big problem for me.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Cool analogy--I don't remember the show but it sounds like it would have been fun to watch.

Butt in chair is also a problem for me, especially for the first half of a book when it's tough to build up momentum. I'm going to give novel_in_90 another try, but doubt I'll match the insane productivity of this summer.

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

I have his books. His books taught me to draw. I now torture pbray by sneaking into her office and scribbling worried little alien creatures all over it. (At the moment, one is trapped in a monitor, hurtling toward Earth, and looking quite nervous that the parachute above him will not be sufficient to stop him from crashing...)

[(Anonymous)]

What was the guy's name and what was the show?

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

His name was Mark Kistler (http://www.draw3d.com/), and his show was Imagination Station.

[jlawrenceperry.livejournal.com]

What was the guy's name and what was the show?

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

(see above answer)

[jlawrenceperry.livejournal.com]

double post. sorry.

[cathschaffstump.livejournal.com]

I am like this. Characters show up, and they tell me their stories, and I write them down.

Right now, as I reformulate my draft, the book's main villain, who is a main character from the first book, is trying to make me understand her logic and reasoning, so I'm going to spend a couple of days this long weekend taking notes and capturing that. Then, it's back to a richer chapter 3.

I agree with you that character is central to everything. Diversity in how people right is important, but I think if you have good characters, the rest will follow.

Catherine

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a great approach. Good luck with chapter 3!

[elizabeth-welsh.livejournal.com]

I think I mentioned to you that I write in a flood. I always know where I'm going, but I don't always know how I'll get there. I hear characters, see characters, dream characters. In the middle of a project they can seem as real to me as my friends. I even sometimes get crushes on them (a fact I have the tact not to tell my husband). Sometimes things come slowly enough for pre-research, but mostly I have to do it as I go. I'm usually ready to write when a character tells me his or her name. On that point, I have a weird talent -- names seem to come to me. Another writer can be working on a project and say, "I can't find a name." If I suggest one, it's always perfect because I hear it from the ether. Ava_Leigh has a character like that. Once I had suggested the name "Emily" no other would suit, because that was the name she wanted.

Another member of my writers group, Sylvia_rachel, said while writing her first novel, "It took a while for me to find out what [a certain character] was doing each time she went out. When I found out I was surprised." The quote might not be exact, but you get the idea. She had a character who kept slipping away to "call on others", but she actually didn't know where the woman was going until it came to her one evening and she put it to paper. The strangest part -- it worked magnificently. I can't say I'm ever quite that removed from the plot, but obviously it can be done. You'd think she plotted it all, it was that perfect.

Another friend, Sarramaks, plots everything, does the written outline, and gets no surprises. She knows every minute detail before it happens.

We all have our own process I suppose. It's interesting to hear yours. And I like knowing that my version isn't that weird.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I always like hearing about how other writers approach a project--there are so many different ways.

I'm sure yours isn't weird at all, though we could probably poll LJ and come up with some truly weird ones :-)

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

Fuzzy-headed, that's me. Though I do know where the story's going. But I find the only way I can get the level of detail (er, intimacy) that I need to have with my characters is to follow them around for months and months recording their every move like a wacko with a minicam.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Hee! I can picture you stalking through the forest, minicam in hand, as you document their adventures. Then you return to your office and transcribe what you think is a documentary....

but your agent accidentally mails it to Tor instead of National Geographic. The rest, as they say, is history.

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

When I'm preparing to write a story, I always hear my characters having conversations. And they have their own voices (not my voice). Actually, I think they have the voices of people I know who would have similar ways of speaking (accents, phrasing, etc).

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Glad to know I'm not the only one!

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Yes, I hear mine, too. (Except, as elizabeth_welsh mentioned, when they, maddeningly, go offstage and don't leave their contact info.) I hear each sentence in my head before I write it, or as I'm writing it, and work out in my head how it might sound better, or be clearer, or be shorter. I know what sort of singing voice each character would have if he or she were to start singing (including the one who is, poor thing, tone deaf). I don't always know just where the story's going, though, so I'm like jennifer_dunne in that way. Well, actually, make that I often don't know just where the story's going.

I've often told people how the book I finished began as a scene in my head in which two people who don't know each other have a conversation in a country-house garden. Not too long ago I discovered that when I said this people thought I meant I'd seen the scene in my head. I didn't (I don't see things in my head). I heard it -- heard the people talking, heard what their names were, and heard my own voice narrating. (Perhaps not surprisingly, music turned out to be central to these characters, and to the story.) By the time I had written it down once, lost that version to a hard-drive meltdown in the aftermath of the 2003 Blackout, written it down again, gone ahead a couple of chapters, abandoned the MS to write an orgy of fanfic, and gone back to it, the period had slid back from Brideshead Revisited to Persuasion, the setting had developed a Romano-Celtic pagan religion and a university where you can study magic, and the garden had kind of picked itself up and walked across the Channel; by the time I reached chapter 18, my original (16-chapter) plot outline had been superseded half a dozen times, and things had got a lot worse for the characters than I'd expected. There was a lot of rewriting and revising, but those characters are who they are, as they were from the beginning.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you hear the scenes in your head, rather than visualize them. I suspect that we may both be aural-dominant types, where our brains prioritize what we hear over what we see.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that would make sense ...

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

Yup. You guys hear the scenes. The visual-dominant folks see the scenes like a movie playing out.

We poor kinesthetic-dominant ones have to imagine LIVING it, and moving through the motions.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

That sounds very ... complicated ...

Although that's also kind of what I've had to do in order to write fight scenes (always a terrible struggle for me); since I can't keep everyone's position straight in my head by visualizing it, I have to resort to badly drawn sketch-plans, diagrams with arrows, and walking up to DH and going, "If I did this, what would happen?" and pushing him or similar ...