(no subject)

Things that are good:

a) a_mews sent me a cool new photo of Patti Smith, from the Meltdown 2005, and I'm rotating it in in place of my old default icon.

b) The suffocating humidity has finally cleared out, and today is warm and sunny and dry, very lovely, so all those people who like to go outside and do stuff on beautiful June Sundays are at last getting their chance, after a monsoon-like few weeks.

c) Long-term stressor at work has finally been resolved, not in a good way, but to be honest any resolution feels like something of a relief after months of fraught suspense.

d) And possibly related to (c) above, I'm writing again, after months of drought. I've been doing some serious revisions on, and cautious additions to, something that's been stalled on my hard drive for quite a while. Had an unpleasant shock, when I first opened and read through it, of Oh my god, could I GET any more blatant with the overwritten emotional exposition?? until I remembered that I'd been trying out the technique of deliberately overwriting the emotional exposition in first draft, so that when I came back later I could remember what was supposed to be going on emotionally, and could then hack out all the signposting. (This has actually proven helpful so far; there are places where I wouldn't have otherwise been able to recall just why these characters were doing/saying this stuff. Now I just have to figure out some way to make it all clear and coherent *without* the signposts. Ahem.)

Anyway, it feels good to be writing again, and will feel even better when I'm warmed up and nice clear fresh stuff starts coming out of the taps, instead of brown rusty gunk.

(no subject)

So I posted something earlier today about getting back into writing, and in a comment, 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]