Writers' Cafe

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Post Paelo, just keep writing. As inventor said

Get it out, redirect the brain to the keyboard, let her rip!

Then later in a cold mood come with the blue pencil of death.

The only discipline you need now is pencil or keyboard. As your style develops you can start counting lines if you want to, but I don't think you'll want to. You are an original.

You and Lau and an overtired Chuck are an awesome team. It's like the best of British comedy - Spike Milligan etc (can't remember )

I went into the cafe to write a book. Not remembering what coffee does to me, I've ordered a black tall with four Splenda. I was drinking my coffee and writing my book. All of the sudden, the coffee started to have an effect of my "British" system that was passed down from my British ancestors. I was dancing around the cafe, and than it happened. My stomach and intestines were feeling very sore. I've let loose in the middle of the room. Luckily I know to wear protection, now. I've waddled into the Ladie's Room and there were all of these slender young women, with long hair that was parted either to the side, or in the middle. They all had on Pheasent Tops and Bell-Bottoms. The Queen Bee looked me over and saw my rolled-up jeans, my Union Flag shirt, my leather jacket and my spiked hair. She pushed me into the corner and sneered, "Go back to the sewer where you came from, Sid"! I begged her to let go of my neck. The Queen Bee said, "I was right! She's a Cockney"! I went into the Handicap stall and I did what I had to do. I walked to my table and grabbed my stuff. I walked out the front door of the cafe, than to the side. I fell into a heap, and than I cried.

Yeah, of course it is. Mind you, editing your writing into something readable is a whole other story.

And yes, you should edit. The thing is, you write for yourself, for your creativity and your ideas. So write as much as you want, in whatever way you want. But if you have any real aspiration of being read, you need to edit. It's great if you're totally in love with your own writing and creativity, but that's the last impression you want to make to a reader. Readers like to be challenged, but they also like to be respected. Most importantly, they don't owe a writer anything and they definitely don't want a writer's ego shoved down their throats by way of rambling, unfocused, excessive slosh simply because the writer was "above" editing. So if you really want to be read, then accept you ain't Proust and edit.

I don't think you need to be the "suffering writer" to do good writing. But ya know, some of march to the beat of a different drummer and we know a lot about that here and we tend to stand out some times, just to feel better about ourselves, which is a good thing. If we march to that same drum beat, what very well may come out is some form of nicer reading instrution book. Not what I want to do, I want to express myself. I don't ever know how it will come out. I was in delete mode, throw a lot of stuff away, I've decided not o, I want to go back and not delet, not edit, I want to put what I thought at the time up and leave it there, flaws and all. The when I look back, I see it better. I may make the attempt again, but not with the edit pen, I'll just try to do it better, with something else. That isn't to say I don't edit, I do, but I hit some rough points, can't seem to do it better at the time, but might later.

That took guts to say about the coffee. My wife has that problem as well, there might be a very good reason for it and not just the coffee. There was for her and it's better for her now. I never had the spiked hair, I'd like to see that some time I just cut mine way down, way down, I don't like to try and cut the tangles out anymore, lol.

Okay...I admit that my reply in this thread is pretty tasteless.

Tasteless, key word, I didn't taste a thing. Feel something, yes I did.

You have no idea what we talked about over lunch, when I worked as a nurses aide, and we would laugh our butts off, not at the residnts expense. It was also a form of communication to as to certian peoples needs that were different. You had to laugh if you didn't it would eat you alive. It was just a form of stress release.

You also painted the picture well with words. I liked your story. In other words, good writing.

Hacking out a book takes endless work, the mechanics are very important. It has to remain consistant over hundreds of pages. Insanity is reading the same book, which you wrote, for the hundredth time.

It pays off when it does read well, and a first time reader does not get lost, but follows and enjoys the story.

It is like a painting, size, composition, lighting, are all considered before the twenth sketch is redrawn on canvas, base coats built up, so the final surface comes across as one thing.

It is only one form, the other is best expressed by CockneyRebel and postpaleo, the rapid capture of a moment from real time. Nothing has more reality, no matter how well crafted, no one can write like that from within. It is a flash photo taken by an observer, never to be repeated.

All the writers I have known hunt for real conversations to steal. There is a reality to life, which art lacks.

Collect little story fragments, they were good enough to keep once, and they can be woven into longer stories.

One good sentence is a good days work.

I take a lot of ideas and experiences from friends and other sources. In fact, for my Aspie character, Kipo, I've drawn and taken a lot of information and stories right from WP! Being here has also helped me get a better understanding of life higher up the Spectrum than I am, and ultimately should help launch Kipo higher than her inspiration: Chris from the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

When I started listening about writers works, I felt I couldn't be a writer because I used to do everything different from what all they used to do. But then, after listening to many of them, I noticed all of them use to work at their own personal style, diffferent to everyone else!

I think writers are like aspies, there are no two of them that are exactly the same, and no one characteristic that is shared by all of them. But for sure most of them steal conversations!

We for sure take inspiration from all around, even when we don't know we are doing it!

I love writing!
If you love radio shows, there is a writer's workshop you can take online this summer.
I ttok it and it is a very wonderful experience, other than the fact you will probably start to stim during the reading of your script.
PM me for more info.

Writing and editing seem to be two different activities. Writing is fluid, creative, and expressive. Editing is rigid, and structured. Editing helps make writing comprehensible and, if it's a person's interest, marketable. One must first write in order to edit.

Communication seems to work the same way. Idea, choice of expression, editing, and presentation. Textually one may express and then edit rather than trying to express and edit at the same time as one does when speaking. Writing is comprehensible to the self, editing makes the writing comprehensible to the other.

In many ways, what one does with their writing seems to depend on their objective. If the objective is to express, or explain.

Writing takes practice, just as anything else does. There's a lot of growth involved. Editing serves the role, I suppose, that after the expression one can go over the words and select the ineffective expressions, or the unnecessary ones, and correct them. There is nothing real about writing fiction. I'm thinking much along the idea of Book X of Plato's Republic (I think) where reality is an imperfect copy of the divine, and art is an imperfect copy twice removed from truth. On the other hand, that contradicts post-modern perspectives that there are multiple truths, and modernist perspectives that emphasise the importance of the subjective over the objective.

Watch me not know what I'm talking about.

Every writer has a style, or a technique.

I once heard a writer read her own work. It was more enjoyable than listening to someone else read it. No one can know a work as well as the person who wrote it. No one else shares that connection with the work. It's fascinating and remarkable.

I look back over things I wrote years ago, and my writing has developed a good deal. Part of it is life experience, and part of it is learning what works, and what doesn't. There's a value to experimenting, and sometimes those experiments work out wonderfully, and other times they don't work out at all.

Yeah, a couple of points to the above. Editing seems to have parts to it. You select a line and it's not hitting the rythmn in your head, so you again need to go into free flow to give it the help or focus you want. Editing it is, but not the same as correcting spelling and the like. Same with commas and periods, I tend to do those later, more import is placed in the style I have choosin, becasue pauses and ends are very important. You miss place a comma in a book and won't much matter. In a poem of only 5 lines, it can be critical. In my head when I write I know the rythemn and the pauses, that still seems to hang on even after the free flow.

I think that's why when you hear the writer/poet read their own works, you catch the flow better, you're not limited to what mistakes you made in the reading it. yeah readers make mistakes just like the writers do at times.

So in a sense I agree and disagree, I think editing has to still be in writing mode, at times. Yet can and has to go into the more rigid, at some point. Maybe I'm doing symantics with the word, but I don't think I am.

The hard part for me is because I read differently then others, I have a poor concept of how others do it. I can guess but I don't know for sure. I don't know if I'm getting my rythemn and beat across.

I got my favourite comment about my writing so far from i_y (username is too long). She said that my characters, when they are speaking dialogue, actually sound like characters, like they're not coming from pre-scripted planks of wood like other works, this makes them more relatable and believable.

Characters start as a blank cutout, they have age, sex, and a role to play in the story.

It is a mix of create and learn, how they play the role comes from within, their past, and to make them consistant, seperate, and real, see where they have to fit as the story is written, get to know them, who you know who is like them, and study the type.

To do it well, they were born, they had a family, got an education, and had opinions. Then they ran into the world and reacted, found a way to cope, developed a personality. Life had it's ups and downs, then they wound up in the story. They are not a space filler, but a real person with consistant responses, dealing with others who are different, but have as much identity of their own.

Lunch is a great way to learn, for a blue collar worker go to places where working men eat lunch, listen, take notes. describe hands and faces, manners, speech patterns, and fill out the whole character, from clothes to boots. Write ten pages, by then you will know them, and how they will act.

Minor details fill large pictures without excess background. One sentence might do to give them, not just a type, but a person within that type.

I often find that others say that I've got too many characters in my story. I've got 10 main characters and more than 30 secondary characters. But I always point out that they aren't all together at the same time, and also that meeting a whole lot of new people is natural if the story were real, so why deviate from that?

Or should I reduce the amount of characters?