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

[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 ...