(no subject)
Jun. 12th, 2005 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonSo I posted something earlier today about getting back into writing, and in a comment, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cesperanza pointed out that I'm really a "Method" writer, one who (like a Method actor) spends a lot of time upfront thinking through characters' emotions and motivations, and then has to struggle to figure out what the characters should do to express those; whereas she writes in what she calls the "British" method, analogous to the great British actors who stand *here* and say the line and then walk over *there* and do that piece of business, and work back from there to discern and build in the emotional underpinnings.
And now I'm fascinated by this, because I just assumed that everyone goes about writing in the same way I do, more or less, and I'm having fun trying to get my head around what it would be like to simply have some scenes in mind, and write them out, without having already done a lot of sort of preparatory emotional outlining to guide the process. And because I have a ton of other stuff I should be doing, I thought that instead I'd -- that's right, do a poll!
[Poll #511623]
cesperanza pointed out that I'm really a "Method" writer, one who (like a Method actor) spends a lot of time upfront thinking through characters' emotions and motivations, and then has to struggle to figure out what the characters should do to express those; whereas she writes in what she calls the "British" method, analogous to the great British actors who stand *here* and say the line and then walk over *there* and do that piece of business, and work back from there to discern and build in the emotional underpinnings.And now I'm fascinated by this, because I just assumed that everyone goes about writing in the same way I do, more or less, and I'm having fun trying to get my head around what it would be like to simply have some scenes in mind, and write them out, without having already done a lot of sort of preparatory emotional outlining to guide the process. And because I have a ton of other stuff I should be doing, I thought that instead I'd -- that's right, do a poll!
[Poll #511623]
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-13 05:44 am (UTC)This may possible sound incredibly stupid, or snooty, but when I write, I'm not really writing words. I'm writing with words, but what I'm writing is images. My head just gets to be this mass of pictures, accompanied sometimes by lines that, to me, tint the images.
I know what's the the character's heads when I'm writing, most of the time, because the scenes that I see are skewed by what they're thinking. It's part of why my stories tend to be broken down into smaller section. It's possible that my recent inability to say anything out right is also a factor of this -- I write around things now, and I can't make myself write something like "he was angry" any more.
When I look back at my older work, I can see that I used to write words -- I constructed my stories just writing text. I like to think that my writing ability has increased (I've gone from a scarily incompetent 15 year old to a semi-literate 19 year old), and I think my newer stories tend to be much heavier on imagery.
I've always suspected I was wired differently than other people. *G*