Writing is like a muscle. If you don't use it it goes all flabby and useless. I think.
I've been trying to write but I've been to self-critical to make any headway and actually put down anymore than three or four paragraphs.
Rather than trying to force myself to fit into the style of my old work, I've decided to approach things from a more humanistic point of view. I'm going to create a character. And I'm going to make something happen to the character. Then I'm going to see what happens naturally.
It's going to take me awhile to build up that muscle again, so I apologize in advance if the early chapters are awkward, short and poorly written. Consider this my writing rehab.
Finally, on the off chance that Britney Spears' Music Video for Oops! I Did It Again is not part of our shared heritage, here's a link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CduA0T…
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Feedback really helps, the good ones make me feel good and the bad ones help me get better. In this case, I wanted to get some opinion on the alignment of the dialogue. I'm a student of film more than I am a student of literature, and one thing I love about dialogue in film is the way your head moves back and forth to follow the conversation. Characters can be placed in different areas of a set and frame to convey different moods and emotions. In film I feel it helps sell the characters and their relationships, and helps place you in the scene.
With writing, our heads and eyes follow this linear left-to-right motion, which we're all used to, because it works... most of the time. When growing up I read a lot (much more than I do now), and some books would do dialogue on a line-by-line basis, without telling you who said what. You had to figure it out based on the context of the dialogue, and most times it was clear. The result was that the whole exchange felt a lot more naturalistic, and it also became a lot more pacey. It asked you to judge the characters yourself, rather than tell you how to judge them.
That said, maybe i'm just a bit autistic, but when I was reading them, more often than I like to admit - I would get lost. I would have to backpedal and reread the dialogue, counting off alternate lines just to figure out who said what. This was especially annoying when it was in the beginning of the book and you're still trying to figure out who's who. And when you have more than two parties it becomes downright frustrating.
I wanted to take the same punchiness of that style of dialogue, but I also wanted to make it clear who was saying what. By playing with alignments I feel like I can capture some of the visual qualities of film as well. In a conversation with three people, my choice to put one characters dialogue in the center could mean that I want them to be the main focus of the conversation. It lets me simulate ensemble staging without a camera or storyboard.
The only problem is the fact that left-aligned text is supernormal. It's so ingrained in our brains as the way writing should be done that seeing things done any other way is just jarring. I've never seen anyone else really play with formatting outside of the established rules, and that means that insisting on being different is a risk - I risk losing the story.
I hope that you guys can follow me along this little experiment with dialogue as the story unfolds, but if it's really too jarring to read and it affects the accessibility of the content in anyway, please let me know, because then it would be counter-productive. All devices should serve the story, not muddle it. I might not see the muddling qualities because I'm writing it, but if you do, don't suffer in silence. Let me know and I'll find a better way to make it work. Because games prove that art can be engineered.
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