Date:

February 20th, 2005

Some of you may remember that I earlier posted my thoughts on something Lois McMaster Bujold said during a speaking engagement at the National Book Festival about different types of readers, and the act of visualizing a story as opposed to absorbing the story through non-visual means, particularly focusing on the words and the language used. Several people made comments to me about that entry (not on the actual blog, of course, but in other conversations with me), so I thought it might be appropriate to link to this conversation (in which I am merely an observer, not a participant) about that same question taken from the business end : how do writers approach the writing of a story? Is it visual? Is it words? Is it movement? Scent? Action?

I’ve also been thinking about Neil Gaiman’s story in the Smoke and Mirrors collection about going to Hollywood and writing a screenplay (“The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”). It wasn’t my favorite story in the collection on a first read, but I’ve found that I’ve been turning it over in my mind since I’ve read it and finding new and interesting things about it. It was a little like the movie Barton Fink but sweet and melancholy instead of insane. There’s a couple of running gags in it: one is that everyone he meets in L.A. tells him who Belushi was supposed to have been with when he died, and the other being that everyone in L.A. is a screenwriter. I feel a little like that, today, like everyone is a writer. When I think of the number of people out there writing fanfic and the number of author’s blogs and the number of wannabe author blogs (of which, I suppose, this is one) it’s a little bewildering. I can’t imagine there’s room in all this flood of verbiage for my voices. How will I make myself heard above the drone and babble?

iTunes says I was listening to Gouge Away from the album Doolittle by Pixies when I posted this. I have it rated 3 stars.

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