The reasons for this blog: 1. To provide basic author information for students, teachers, librarians, etc. (Please see sidebar) 2. I think out loud a lot as I work through writing projects, and I'm trying to dump most of those thoughts here rather than on my friends.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

No time to work on my own stuff, but I did glance at the first scene of the new ms last night, just to see how it reads. I was wondering exactly what I'm going to need to figure out as far as voice in my head vs. voice on the page, because it's already clear to me that this is going to take some juggling. Transcribing dialect straight to the paper is usually not a great idea because it trips up the reader's eyes. What we hear in our head is not how other people are going to read it. Often a good way to handle that is to spell everything normally, and let the grammar and sentence structure carry the dialect.

So I looked over the first scene and saw right away that I do need to spell everything correctly, even though it's a long step from how you'd actually hear the guy in person. But I also saw that I probably need to clean up the sentence structure some, too, because transcribing him straight gives an immediate impression that he's stupid. Which he's not. I don't want stupid, I want laconic, removed, with a touch of menace. So...this should be interesting. No time to think about it much right now, though.