I once got a piece of advice from a writing coach: “You have to write it like it was when you were there.”
I love this. It embodies for me the act of trying to capture the movie in my head, the one where I am the main character, I am the bad guy, I am all the supporting people, I am the confused witness on the side of the road, I am there, rain in my face, cold on my cheeks, experiencing it all.
What this boils down to, though, is that I make some pretty ridiculous faces when I’m writing.
And I talk to myself. In different voices. And make noises. Gotta have the sound effects. How else can I use onomatopoeia if I can’t hear the sound first?
One weekend morning I woke up well before my husband, decided to get moving on a manuscript I was trying to finish (It’s finished), so I quietly got up, turned on the computer, and got to it while he slept in. When he came downstairs about an hour later, he laughed and said he’d been awake a while, but was listening to me talk to myself while I worked.
He couldn’t see the faces from upstairs, I suppose.
I’m not always aware of myself, either. I started talking in a frightened voice one day, enacting a scary scene, and one of my cats came to check on me, crawling into my lap and meowing in my face. I wasn’t sure what her problem was until I got back to writing and she started meowing at me again. She thought I was actually scared.
This does translate to life outside of writing. I’ve gotten so used to simply speaking my thoughts out loud in different voices with facial expressions and body language to match, I’ve caught myself doing it in public more than once. Especially if I’m working on a scene in my head while on a walk or grocery shopping.
Don’t worry about me, I’m not insane, I’m just a writer! Just talking to the imaginary people who live in my head! Haha! *blush*
I can only hope that this all translates into believable dialogue and appropriate character actions and reactions. Because if not, then I’m just a nut-ball living inside her own world.
Oh, well. I have friends in here at least.
