What's in a name
The town I live in is called Ball. Whenever I go to the Weather Channel website to check the temp and where the rain is, the "sponsored ads" crack me up every time. Apparently, people who live Ball should buy lots of balls.
I spent last night in a writing workshop over at Dancing Word. The "speaker" was Susan May Warren, one of my favorite authors and a former missionary to Russia. She's an amazing writer with an incredible gift for breathing life into her characters. She does it through dialogue and internal monologue (their thoughts). The workshop was all about crafting dialogue.
Boy did I learn a lot! I'm eagerly waiting for the transcript of the chat so I can print it out and mark it up with a highlighter, lol.
At the end of the workshop, she opened up the floor for the attendees to post a scene or paragraphs of dialogue for her to crititque/make suggestions. I did just that. It was the first time that anyone has ever seen a piece of my serious writing. And it was wonderful! She has the same love of all things Russian that I do, so it was surprisingly easy to share part of this particular story.
Her comments were most helpful! I was stuck at one scene in the beginning, and I couldn't shake it loose. She made the simple suggestion of changing the setting, and all of a sudden, there it was! Nearly the entire first third of the book is now sitting in my head, waiting for me to connect the dots and get it down on paper. Or in this instance keyboard to word processor. I also had an amazing spiritual paralle present itself in regards to trains and how far the east is from the west. The story opens in 1962 Russia, with one of the two main characters being seperated from his family. By train. He's going east- to Siberia, they're going west- to the US. It's also given me more ways to build scenes around the title and how important the character's hands are. He's a violinist.
It's really going to be a wonderful book, and is going to be getting a lot of attention from me. I'm ready to get truly serious about my writing and start carving out time for it. And I'll be starting by focusing on this story. It's got so much potential and I just can't let it down. Starting Monday, I'm going to be off in the mornings. I'm going to set aside at least one hour of every Monday morning just to write. I never feel like writing in the evenings, I'm too tired after the events of a full day to let my imagination run wild.
I'm expecting my readers to hold me to that!
I spent last night in a writing workshop over at Dancing Word. The "speaker" was Susan May Warren, one of my favorite authors and a former missionary to Russia. She's an amazing writer with an incredible gift for breathing life into her characters. She does it through dialogue and internal monologue (their thoughts). The workshop was all about crafting dialogue.
Boy did I learn a lot! I'm eagerly waiting for the transcript of the chat so I can print it out and mark it up with a highlighter, lol.
At the end of the workshop, she opened up the floor for the attendees to post a scene or paragraphs of dialogue for her to crititque/make suggestions. I did just that. It was the first time that anyone has ever seen a piece of my serious writing. And it was wonderful! She has the same love of all things Russian that I do, so it was surprisingly easy to share part of this particular story.
Her comments were most helpful! I was stuck at one scene in the beginning, and I couldn't shake it loose. She made the simple suggestion of changing the setting, and all of a sudden, there it was! Nearly the entire first third of the book is now sitting in my head, waiting for me to connect the dots and get it down on paper. Or in this instance keyboard to word processor. I also had an amazing spiritual paralle present itself in regards to trains and how far the east is from the west. The story opens in 1962 Russia, with one of the two main characters being seperated from his family. By train. He's going east- to Siberia, they're going west- to the US. It's also given me more ways to build scenes around the title and how important the character's hands are. He's a violinist.
It's really going to be a wonderful book, and is going to be getting a lot of attention from me. I'm ready to get truly serious about my writing and start carving out time for it. And I'll be starting by focusing on this story. It's got so much potential and I just can't let it down. Starting Monday, I'm going to be off in the mornings. I'm going to set aside at least one hour of every Monday morning just to write. I never feel like writing in the evenings, I'm too tired after the events of a full day to let my imagination run wild.
I'm expecting my readers to hold me to that!
posted by Rachel Leigh Smith | 1/06/2007 06:10:00 PM
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