Don't Think, Just Speak

I was particularly excited to begin the next chapter of my book, entitled "Write Well-Crafted Scenes to Support your Story." I was excited for this lesson, because as I'd written the earlier drafts of scenes for my story, I'd noticed myself falling into a strange funk; depending on whether I was feeling particularly inspired when I sat down to write, my narration came out completely different. Some day I'd write three or four chapters at a time that I loved every word of- feeling almost as if the words were pouring out of me, while other days it was the other way around; I'd feel as if I were pouring myself into the words and getting nothing but emotional drainage out of it. I was ready for this chapter to teach me how to overcome that very type of funk.

This chapter was notable shorter than some of the others I'd read, but it was broken up into five different sections that each covered a different mechanism you could for breaking into your writers block. The methods included ways to make your dialogue flow, how to cut or hide unnecessary exposition, recommendations for flipping the obvious, something called the "closed-eyes" technique, and a lesson on reminding yourself of what you were aiming to accomplish in that particular scene. However, the sections entitled "Making your Dialogue Flow" and "Flip the Obvious" came across as the most interesting to me.

In the first section, writer James Scott Bell recommends "[trying to write] a scene in only dialogue. Let it flow. Don't think much about it. When you're finished, you can look back and figure out what the scene is really about" (Bell). This particularly appealed to me because I can think of dozens of instances in which I'd hit a wall in my mind and have taken a break to take a walk while rolling different conversations over in my mouth between the characters I had been trying to write about. The method Bell recommends is similar to that, only is requires me to entirely cut from the scene things like deep sighs and distant gazes that I was so fond of writing in. In other words, I had to write it blind.

Before I began this exercise though, I glanced over the third section titled "Flip the Obvious" in which James preaches that "our minds work by reaching for the most familiar choices available. For writers that usually means a cliché. So learn to flip things" (Bell). He then continues on to give an example of how if you were asked to picture a truck driver rambling down the highway that you would probably create an image of a big burly man wearing a cowboy hat or a baseball cap. However, if I then told you that the truck driver were a young woman in a cocktail dress, your interest would pique as you ask yourself things like why is she dressed in this way or where is she heading? Now prepared to begin my dialogue only scene, I made myself keenly aware of shifting from the obvious.

Going into this scene, I also made one last change to it. Instead of pursuing the scene with either Blayke, Jake, Jenn, or any other character from What Tomorrow Brings as I have been using to apply all of the lessons from this book to so far, I chose to use a different story, one that I am not as familiar with, in order to more easily create scenes that would surprised me.

The story I chose was a brainchild I've been cradling since last spring with the working title of The Second Katherine Carlisle. The two characters I featured in this quick scene were Katherine and Parker- Katherine's love interest of the story- during a time before they became an official "thing". I further decided that in order to flip the scene from what may be obvious, I needed it to begin with a very cliché opening, so I began with Parker saying to Katherine "You had me at hello." Immediately I switched the scene from what would be expected of it by Katherine responding with "Oh, cut the crap." The conversation continued as such:

P: "What do you mean?"
K: "I mean, that’s what every single guy says to every single girl in every single time they’re lying on the grass in the middle of the night freezing their a***s off.”
P: "I highly doubt that."
K: "I'm sure you do."

The dialogue between the two escalated for several more lines until Katherine makes a point in telling Parker that what she would've said to him was "You had me at 'gorgeous'". She explains to him the connotative meaning that the word has to her, saying "Gorgeous somehow implies curves and acne or other imperfections that you look past because you love her. Gorgeous is what you call her because you love her anyway. That's why you had me then."
P: "I never said I loved you."
K: "Seriously? Cut the crap. I didn't need you to tell me, I already knew."

As aforementioned, I specifically used these two characters from this exercise because of the fact that I hadn't spent much time getting to know them, therefore I didn't know what either of their responses were going to be at any given time. When I wrote the line where Katherine tells Parker she already knew he loved her, I didn't know where it came from either.

I continued this dialogue for about another page and a half until even my subconscious quit knowing what either character was going to say. The conversation ended with:

K: "Sshhh, don't ruin it."
P: "Ruin what?"
K: Tonight. The stars, the rain, the train tracks. Any of it."
P: "I don't-"
K: "-Then don't. It's dark and it's late; that's what the world is promising to us right now. Don't break the promise, Park. Promise me you won't break the promise."
P: "I promise. At least, not until it's light and early."

What does Katherine mean by breaking the world's promise? I have no idea. What is Park going to do when it's light and early to break the promise? I couldn't tell you. There is so much about these characters and this scene particularly that I don't know anything about, but as Bell says "When you're finished, you can look back and figure out what the scene is really about", and that is exactly what I intend to do once I'm finished writing this blog post (Bell).

Time and time again I've heard people in my real life saying things like "I feel like all I do is go to bed just to get up again and go back to work" or "Nothing ever changes anymore; it's just eat, sleep, school." I'm not going to pretend that I don't feel that way at times too, and I'm sure that any number of you reading this can agree with that too, so here's what I want to say to the both of us; DO something about it. I don't care whether it's taking a witty bike ride around your neighborhood for the first time in forever or hosting a movie marathon with all of your friends on the weekend, or even just trying something you'd never had before for dinner. Just DO something. Quit the cliché and flip the obvious.

Bell, James Scott. Crafting Novels & Short Stories: The Complete Guide to Writing Great Fiction. Blue Ash, OH: Writer's Digest, 2011. Print.
 Stray from Cliche. 2013. Boldomatic. Web. 18 Jan. 2015