Ideas, Notes, and Progression

I was doing some cleaning last night around the computer. There is a tonne of notes sitting on the second keyboard—for the second computer, which has not been there for a year or more, but may return soon. Each note page was written in various locations throughout the house and sometimes even outside or in the car. Each note is a flurry of thoughts, ideas, and snatches of stories and conversations as they came to me. What are these ideas for? Short stories, novels, role-playing games, blogs, whatever comes to my mind when I'm not at the computer.

I'm slow to transcribe most of them to the computer. They pile up faster than I deal with them. Even when I put them on the computer they are just in files with names that make perfect sense at the time but become ambiguous later. If the notes are related to a project that I am in the midst of, rather than just the brainstorming stage, then I put the notes in the proper files and folders almost right away. Still they can pile up in their proper places.

Some of the ideas can be rather abstract and need solidification before I can take advantage of them. Sometimes—I think these are the most fun—the ideas are actually questions. The questions can be multiple choices, usual either this or that. Or the questions are just something to ponder.

I threw out a bunch of notes already that have been put to complete use. I also collected a bunch of single thoughts from pages that were otherwise put to use so that got rid of some more of them. Still the stack is pretty thick. It's hard to guestimate how many of the notes have been put to use, how many no longer make no sense—like a beautifully written one that I can't understand what project I was supposed to be applying the idea to, and in what capacity. That’s the way it goes sometimes.

There will be no blog on June 19th so check back on the 23rd. Thanks.

Mood: vacationary.
Music: Awake by The Clay People and Wasting My Hate by Metallica.

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Yak Yak Yak Yak Yak

I have a real love for dialogue in my writing. It's not a secret. Maybe it’s because of the hours and hours on end of watching television during the regular season, and the tonne of movies of which I'm so fond. I don't know that my dialogue is all that great, at least in and of itself. I do read my dialogue out loud when I edit to make sure I'm not letting anything in that sounds bad. It may not be easy to hear, find, or write great dialogue, but it sure is difficult to not hear it when it's bad. What I do like to believe, and no one who proofreads for me has disabused me of, is that I know how to get the most out of my dialogue.

What should dialogue do? The first thing is obvious; convey ideas between one character and another. The second thing is a little more transparent in good dialogue; convey ideas from the characters to the audience. The third thing isn't something that the reader thinks about directly; the dialogue should convey the character's character to the audience. What someone says can speak volumes about the person. This goes beyond just speech patterns, accents, and other indicators of where the character lives and/or grew up.

Then there are the things that dialogue can say about the relationship between the two (or more) speakers. On a side note, this is where I wish that in English we had something akin to the Japanese honorifics, because I really love the added depth they bring. All of these modes of communication bundled up into dialogue lead us to the last thing required for good dialogue: the parts outside of the quotation marks. While I love it best to convey as much as I can inside the quotes I do like the variety of "dialogue tags". There's nothing wrong with every dialogue tag being "he said" or "she said", but there are ever so many words to use in place of said to add even more meaning to your dialogue. This is without even getting in body language to enhance your dialogue.

Mood: level.
Music: Let's Get Rocked by Def Leppard and Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue.

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