I think I may have discovered a writing technique that will allow me to [gasp!] finish an idea/short story/book. On the bus trip home yesterday, I gave up on reading my Clancy novel to stare out the window and daydream. I noticed several people around me, purely by overhearing conversations, and began to include them in my imagination, even inventing characters for them to interact with, and watching them all 'play around' in my mind. As I finished the idle speculations, I realized something - I had just seen a world more real than any other I had ever imagined. The stories were fictional, of course, but character-driven. The various points of each person around me informed my mind's sketch, and turned the play into all kinds of different directions. These weren't people I knew intimately. The things I had them doing may very well have been quite the opposite of what their real-life counterparts would have done. The characters really weren't "based" on them, so much as on the very abstract and incredibly partial views my mind had of them; but for some reason, even as sketchy as these 'characters' were to me, the world they inhabited, and the interactions they undertook, all felt more real to me than anything I had ever come up with before.

I even arrived at a rather romantic and realistic way for a protagonist to interact with a possible love-interest - something I had never done to this extent before. All my previous attempts - and granted, there had not been many, as I'm not a big fan of the genre in general - were rather hackneyed and contrived interactions between two very hollow and flat subjects. But now, I had the kernal of a love story, a subplot in a larger work that might very well come into being. Good thing I jotted a bit down. Of course, the experience of the daydream sequence is so burned into my head right now, I can't imagine ever losing it (how's that for a full-blown writer's vision?). I'll have to work on this (oh, how I could use that PDA right now!) and I might post some of it later...
-- posted by Austin @ 11:21 AM (PermaLink/Comment) ¶