I like this writing exercise. It helps you to focus on what you write and what you need to work on, as well as helps you to see what your “style is”. The entire original post is very very long, so you’ll need to click on the link to read the whole thing, as I only quoted the very start of it, so you’d know what I was responding to.
Hi I am… and I tend to write a lot of…
[quote=Kimberly Dawn]
Move at will… but I think this is on topic…
I’m not sure how to get out of the rut of these principle scenes I tend to write tons of. But I thought if I shared what I tend to write a lot of, someone else out there will have another crux and I can try to bum off of them their weakness for writing those scenes and we can help each other…
I tend to write a lot of pet scenes. This has to do with dogs, snakes, whatever pet is on hand. Don’t have a pet I make up one. Dogs are the most useful for me, but I take horses, dragons, etc.
Lots of scenes on food. Almost every book I’ve written has ….READ MORE… [/quote]
And here is my answer about my own writing:
The weather – lots of it. Wind. Fog. Rain. Thunder. Lightening. Hurricanes. Blizzards. I’m really good at lengthy (2000 words or more) descriptions of weather related things. Tonight I just wrote a 2k scene where my MC gets caught walking during a thunder storm, I spent most of the 2k describing the black clouds and lightening bolts! LOL! And even when I’m not writing long descriptions of weather, the weather is there: wind in her hair, wind in the trees, she can smell the fog, he hears the rain on the roof etc, etc, etc. Boy, I should have been a meteorologist or something. I’d be good at writing weather reports for the meteorologists to read on TV! LOL!
Aghasty men who brood about dead wives, and usually have dead wife’s coffin in his bedroom or dining room or some place else in the house so he can sit there staring at it and going all Vincent Price/Edgar Alan Poe monologuing about death and eternity and soul mates and lost love. Yep, I was raised on Vincent Price movies and Edgar Alan Poe books, one look at any thing I write will tell you that in a flash.
Monologuing. BIG TIME! My MCs are prone to sitting themselves down and than talking to themselves about the way things are, the way things should have been, and how cruel and wicked life has been to them. I can make one of my male MC’s drone on like that for 9k words without stopping to take a breath!
The ocean. It’s always there. My characters can’t get away from it. They are drawn too it. Mesmerized by it. Often I have mermen, guys who’s dead wife was a mermaid, silkies, kelpies, eels, and all sorts of other real and mythical sea creatures in my stories. I have writing hundreds of stories over the years and every single one of them was set on a beach, in a cove, on the cliffs, on a ship, under the sea, etc. Always the ocean is there. The ocean is so in your face in every thing I write, that it is almost a character itself.
Pretty much everything I write has a big gloomy stone house overlooking the ocean, owned by a broody goth guy morning a dead wife, and there are lots of dark gloomy clouds and thunder storms rolling in off the ocean. It’s like everything I write, no matter what the story is, that is the basic setting or backdrop for the story.
I did grow up on the shores of the cold, stormy North Atlantic Ocean, and being farmers weather effected our lives a lot, and Vincent Price was my fave actor and Edgar Alan Poe was my fave author, so, yeah, I guess you could say I’m one of those people who writes what I know. =P
Most of that stuff, isn’t all that bad, seeing how I write creepy goth horror, and those things all fit in with the genre well. I do have one problem that I get stuck on real bad, and it is that I write like this:
Dialog, dialog, dialog, MC sits alone and monologues to self for 30 pages, dialog, dialog, dialog, dialog, BOOM! CRASH! BANG! (weather), looooooooooooooooooooong pointless narrative about haunted house-ocean-weather, MC sits alone and monologues to self once again while hallucinating about ghost of dead wife haunting him, dialog, dialog, dialog, dialog, dialog . . .
Yeah. All that dialog is my problem. I’ll have two characters start talking, back and forth – for 100 pages. Not a word of narrative, not even any “he said/she said” tags! Just straight dialog. It’s like reading a play. The only time they stop talking about the MC is when the MC starts monologuing to himself.
It’s not that I can’t write descriptive narrative. I can. I’m wicked good at it too. My problem is shutting up my characters long enough so that I can add some narratives between all that dialogging!
And than there’s one other problem. Sex. Smut. Erotica. When I finally do get my characters to shut up, they all jump into bed together. Usually every one of them all together all at once too. Except for the gloomy MC with the dead wife. Gloomy guy + dead wife – yep necrophiliac, got a lot of that in many of my stories, LOTS of it. I had one guy who was a necrophiliac first gloomy widower later, and ended up with 70 dead wives in his attic, just so he could have sex with a different wife each night. My gloomy guys usually should be in a metal institute, but live so far off in the middle of no where (on a cliff over looking the ocean. . . . the middle of no where is always over looking the ocean no matter where it is.) that no body knows they are out there doing the weird freaky things they are doing while they mourn dead wife. If I could keep the sex scenes a little less freaky deaky, I would have a lot more mass produces books and a lot less indie press books. =P
Incubus: Fear the Night!
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(It’s Etiole, yeah, he ALWAYS gets away) Anyways he has a rather unique way of killing his victims . . . uhm, sex slaves?. . . (yeah, the guy’s a bit of a fetish freak).
