I have about 17 dollars in my checking right now if that makes you feel better, PLUS credit card, AND student loan debt. Being broke is such a hopeless feeling. I am reading a story right now where the author does not use quotation marks (well occasionally to make a point) she just has her characters have a back and forth conversation within the paragraph, and it is really effective and blurs the line between narration and dialogue. Maybe you could try something like that. Another thing is to just get a recorder and tape random conversations, transcribe them, and just get a feel of how people talk. But my teacher told me that dialogue should be like the "best of" of a conversation, because regular conversation is pretty boring. Writing like anything else takes lots and lots of practice, you should just keep going. I'm sure Hemingway wrote a lot of crap before the Sun Also Rises.
regular conversation is horiffic, especially when i try to transcribe the soul-baring conversations that i had whilst drunk. when i haven't painted anything good in a while, i get this horror that i should have been a writer rather than a painter. this feeling gets more intense when i wear tight shirts and haven't shaved in about a week; i see bukowski and dylan thomas' bastard child in mirrors and window reflections. i have a delusion that i can turn my priveleged white boy existential angst into fine literature.
if you want to transcribe soul-baring conversations had while drunk, you have to write on several levels at once. you need the conversation and the description and then you need inner counterpoint that does not necessarily correspond with the conversation. i mean it does, but it doesn't. like the beats in the aphex twin song "tha".
i hate quotation marks sometimes because they remove words from context too much. so what you need to be really aware of is whether you WANT the contexts to be separated, and how much you want them separated. when you're drunk, superimposition of thinking & speaking is different, and if you write drunk scenes "normally," it often clashes horribly.
i am really interested in written counterpoint. we may have to discuss this in a drunken soul-baring conversation when i meet you in several weeks.
incidentally, most of the fine literature of the western canon was written by privileged white boys
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I am reading a story right now where the author does not use quotation marks (well occasionally to make a point) she just has her characters have a back and forth conversation within the paragraph, and it is really effective and blurs the line between narration and dialogue. Maybe you could try something like that. Another thing is to just get a recorder and tape random conversations, transcribe them, and just get a feel of how people talk. But my teacher told me that dialogue should be like the "best of" of a conversation, because regular conversation is pretty boring. Writing like anything else takes lots and lots of practice, you should just keep going. I'm sure Hemingway wrote a lot of crap before the Sun Also Rises.
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when i haven't painted anything good in a while, i get this horror that i should have been a writer rather than a painter. this feeling gets more intense when i wear tight shirts and haven't shaved in about a week; i see bukowski and dylan thomas' bastard child in mirrors and window reflections. i have a delusion that i can turn my priveleged white boy existential angst into fine literature.
Reply
i hate quotation marks sometimes because they remove words from context too much. so what you need to be really aware of is whether you WANT the contexts to be separated, and how much you want them separated. when you're drunk, superimposition of thinking & speaking is different, and if you write drunk scenes "normally," it often clashes horribly.
i am really interested in written counterpoint. we may have to discuss this in a drunken soul-baring conversation when i meet you in several weeks.
incidentally, most of the fine literature of the western canon was written by privileged white boys
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