I’ve been thinking about my process for building scenes and crafting prose. Slowly, I’m admitting to myself I go for dialog above description. If a building needs to appear in the story, my first instinct is to have the characters talk about the building. (“Huh. Your apartment looks like the one from Ghostbusters.” “What, the place with Signourney Weaver?” “Yeah.” “Oh, I should be so lucky.”
This is the danger of learning to write screenplays and investing time in creating them. I learn to think in terms of scenes, “actors” and dialog, with the rest as set dressing.
I’m working on a story for an anthology and I realized how much I was relying on dialog in the beginning. So, I decided on a small experiment. Instead of fighting my training, creating full descriptions in the first pass and aiming for lush prose, I’m doing the dialog first.
Very simple, very quick, and a few stage directions along the way so I know what’s happening.
Then, I go back in and fill in the rest. It’s less like sculpting from stone and more like building stop-motion puppet. You start with the armature first. Then, layer on the muscles, and the skin, and the features, until you get a full figure you can start to painstakingly photograph.
I’m hoping this will help me get working faster. If my first instinct is to hear the character’s talking, then I need to have them talk. I’ll then get in the descriptions in.
Biomechanoid Blues 