Wow. That was cathartic.
I got some great writing done tonight. Still not enough, only one page. But I've learned something about the way I write.
I don't do character sketches. I start out with dialogue.
Dialogue comes pretty easily for me. I think that's because I learned to speak German and French as an adult, so I had to be quite conscious of how people speak. I had to train myself to listen carefully. So for me, it seems...so far anyway...that it's through dialogue that my characters reveal themselves to me.
The way I'm working with this so far is to put two people together and make sure they disagree about something. Conflict about something. Try to make their language patterns sound different -- different vocabulary so you know who's talking.
Maybe that's the way I have to go...write a lot of dialogue with conflict, using those scenes or whatever as my character sketches, then step back and see what comes next -- let the details of the story arise from the eavesdropping I'm doing on my characters.
Then do the detailed outline as I go, outlining somewhat ahead. I do have a general idea of the story, just not the details yet.
I'm having waaay too much fun for this to be legal!
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