Not as easy as it seems.....
Well, there you are,
how lovely to see you again, I hope the world is smiling on you,
wherever you might be as you read this…anyway, as you’re here, I
had better offer you something – this would be so much easier if I
had cake, don’t you think? Or maybe wine, that would be good too.
But as despite the ever-growing world of technological discovery has
yet to work out how to send out cyber edible treats, I guess I had
better write something…
So, perhaps I should
try and talk about writing a book, as I’ve done two and should be
working on the third, but as you’ve stopped by, that would be kinda
rude to ignore you. I wonder if you think as I did, writing a book
was relatively easy, after all, if you know what the story is going
to be, it’s surely just a question of typing it all down, getting
published and waiting for the royalties to roll in to buy that place
in the South of France. I regret to inform you, it turns out to be
anything but easy, in fact, it can be hard, very hard and so
frustrating too. There were many times I just wanted to quit, as I
felt the plot made no real sense, the characters had all the
emotional depth of the average sock puppet and the ending? Well, just
so far-fetched I could have thrown in the unexpected appearance of a
rampant dinosaur and it would have had more credibility, than the
mawkish, contrived nonsense spouted out by my main character. But,
after countless hours of ranting or crying at my stunning lack of
skill and talent, I sat down and tried again, and you know something?
It’s actually true, that saying about the more you do, the better
you’ll get, because after some time, I could read through the days’
work and quite like it! And when that happens, it’s just magical
really, you fall into bed, feeling hopeful for the next day which is,
after all, what we all need to feel – whatever we do.
Another issue is
dialogue and how to make it convincing, now, on the face of it, it
should be simple, we all talk, therefore all you have to do is write
that down! Again, this turns out not to be true either. If you think
about it, nobody really speaks fluently, there are countless ‘ers’,
‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ when most of us hold a conversation. So
what’s the writer to do? If you put them all in, you end up with
the world’s longest and possibly most boring book, or you leave
them all out and every character ends up sounding like they’re
reading the news- either way isn’t good, is it? And what about when
your character has an accent? Do you try and write how they actually
speak? I decided probably no, so when I included an American in my
story, her words are written minus any ‘howdy’,y’all or ‘how
you doin’’ I hope the fact I’ve established her nationality
early on, will be enough to tell the reader what she potentially
sounds like. I guess this could be seen as cheating in some way, but
for me, if your reader’s time is spent attempting to decipher what
the hell your characters are saying, however well you feel you’ve
captured the nuances of the chosen accent, they will eventually lose
patience and your book!
So there you are,
that’s probably enough for now, this third book isn’t going to
write itself – yes that’s another problem, however expensive your
laptop might be, you do have to do all the typing.
It’s been lovely seeing you again, feel free to stop by any time, so until then…
