Pen of the Gryphon

To Write and To Re-Write

December 11, 2006 ~ Monday

Have you ever written a chapter that you hated with a vengence? You sloughed through it at the pace of a three-legged turtle; barely churning out a paragraph a day if that much, some days the keyboard or pencil just collect dust as you sit and read old drafts of other works and feel sorry for yourself. This is usually known as Writer’s Block. And THEN, when you finally have waded your entire way through this swamp of inactivity and typed the final words up, you look back over it and want to gag?

I recently finished a chapter in this fashion. I swear, I hated it from the beginning. I had no idea what I wanted to do with this chapter, even though I knew what I wanted to happen in it. I just didn’t know how to treat my vision. So I wrote it. Most of it was in past-past tense (A term I use to describe things written in past tense that happened even more in the past… “She watched the old crone pace back and forth across the room…” vs. “She had watched the old crone pace back and forth across the room…” See the different moods that the two envoke? I usually don’t write in the style depicted in the second example.) and that was already out of place among the other chapters I have already written. And because of this, the chapter was summed up much faster because instead of dialogue, I just sort of wrote “they talked” or something of that nature instead of a conversation. Any actions were run over too quickly and scenes that were supposed to be quick dragged out (in my mind) for eons longer than they were even legally allowed to last.

*gag*

So I finished this chapter and looked back over it.
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Have you ever written a chapter that, after you write it, you hated it even more than when you had actually been writing it? That’s about how I felt about this chapter. So now I am rewriting it and suddenly it is working. Huh? Where did this come from?

One word.
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.
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Dialogue.

I feel very insecure about writing dialogue. My characters either sound too modern for an epic “Dark Ages” era fantasy or too old and proper for a modern-day fourteen year-old. As my English teacher is so fond of saying “Speak proper English, people think you’re a freak.” I suppose my English is too proper or something because the way I would normally respond to a situation just looks like something out of a textbook on paper. Now, while it is good to be regarded as a freak in everyday conversation or personally, it is hardly believable for an ordinary character. Either the teenager doesn’t care (not that I am saying that any other teen authors don’t care or that there are not any other people in the world that don’t care about their English but me) or (my personal difficulty) most peasants in the Middle Ages were hardly educated on proper speech. As an example from my own work, I had a lovely reviewer point out that ordinary peasants in a small farming town would hardly have the education to choose the term “ill-begot” or “illegitimate” when they what they meant was “bastard.” They wouldn’t skirt around the issue like I would tend to myself, instead, they would be blunt and straightforward about it. If they were insulting a bastard child (as they are in my book) they wouldn’t call his mother a “trollop,” or “unclean woman,” they’d call her a “whore.”

But then I have a hard time writing ill-educated speech without it reading like a fake Southern drawl or play-acting idiot. Just leaving off T’s and ending “-ing” words “-in’ “ isn’t enough as I have found. Right now I am working quite hard in coming up with something that actually sounds believable, between more simplistic and commonly used words and combining it with maybe some accent indicators (leaving off T’s  or having the character lisp S’s). Any ideas/suggestions?

Anyway, so now I am sitting at my computer currently reworking the entire chapter and hoping that I will get it “write” this time. (ha ha ha ha… *slaps knee*) *ahem* Yeah, whatever.