While my craziness over ability has swaggered back onto a trail of sorts that still leads in the direction of writing, I’m discovering new methods that may be forcing other issues into the open and inadvertantly working to their betterment.
In going back and forth with a friend in a series of e-mails of random story, many things are coming of it. I’m being forced into creativity on-demand and make every effort to add my input based on what is received as quickly as possible while retaining the story line(s).
Which brings me to another benefit; learning to write in a flowing manner that seems to be a merge between psychological realism and plot. I could well see how Storyspace can mimic this what happened next and next and next form that the e-mail writing has produced. But more, the e-mails, a story being written by two individuals without verbal collaboration produces background threads of related but non-linear story plots. Meaning, not merely what happened next, but what else is happening now. Ripe for hypertext. Nice.
What I’m also noticing is that the characters are being formed by the process in a very much show manner. That is, when focusing on writing just a brief sequence, the character’s action becomes important and telling. His assessment of another character is revealed by his thoughts, coming in short spurts of dealing with a situation within an episode. We can see not only what someone does (action) but what someone thinks of the doer and the act as well as getting an idea of how even the thinker deals as judged by his reaction.
Much of this is all part of the basics, and yet I’m feeling that there’s assistance to the writing via the process.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology