Lenses

Irony: you finally feel inspired to write and you have no journal or writing paper so you make do with the backs of coloring pages and napkins.

Someone said something about phones. Someone said something about typing or dictation. I'm old school. I enjoy writing things out. I enjoy seeing how the words transform and feel differently leaving me as I transcribe them from brain to paper to keyboard.

In the early days, before I went completely prosaic, I would sketch illustrations to go along with whatever I was writing--normally, a poem or miniature monologue of some character. Truthfully, the visual art was priority back then. I had it in my head that I would learn Japanese, move to Japan, and become an animator or a manga ka (author of Japanese comic books.)

One of the biggest challenges I had to overcome in making the switch to writing non-visual novels was working clarity of scene and setting into narrative.

In visual novels (especially in the Japanese style), the setting is very clear and established early on within a scene so that a lot of the internal action--the internal monologues, the flashbacks, the daydreams of the characters--are easily understood as being inside of the characters head.

In a prosaic narrative, the same grounding in scene and setting is required, otherwise the reader will get lost--but it can get especially hard to do if a character is multitasking. I recently wrote a scene where a character was jogging while reflecting on a past relationship and most of the revision was splicing together present tense action and setting (the leaves of the mimosa tree in the breeze, the rain puddles she splooshed through from last nights thunderstorm) with past tense action and character (the last longing look over lattes, the way his ice blue eyes never left hers, the call of the streetlamps on the way home that night).

All of this is to say, any narrative is a choice of focus. Whether you're sketching, writing, or photographing, art is a choice of lenses and where to aim them.

Do I focus on the pounding of my narrator's footsteps as her running feet hit the wet pavement or the pounding of her heart as she walks away from the men she accidentally fell for? Do I focus on the mimosa bulbs falling in the wind or the way her breath caught in her throat when he called her name? Do I even, at points, call in the way the trees remind her of him because it was springtime and the mimosas were blooming when they met?

Ideas. All ideas, and questions--questions that belong chiefly in revision.

The character needs to run and to tell me what all of her running and remembering is about before I make final decisions about where to focus.

Trust is paramount.