Getting Into Character
Elsewhere in the Citradel...
So I’ve been re-working this one scene for a few days now. It’s the final scene of a section, a climax & cliff-hanger, & it may be a while before I really nail it. Working its rough draft is a real cringe-fest most of the time. Just one bad sentence after another until I figure it out. But that’s how it goes. What I really need to do it is put it aside now & write the next five chapters, then go back to this one with its destination more clearly in mind. I’ll start that today.
When I’m working on an action scene like this one, it isn’t a sedentary affair. More often it feels like I’m actor preparing to perform the roles (all of them). I’m still by myself at a desk in a quiet, closed room, but I’m usually talking aloud to myself the entire time—reciting the dialogue & narration to hear how it sounds (I want my books to be good read-alouds). Sometimes I’m actually pantomiming through the action. Occasionally I draft E to help me out with this—Okay, stand here, grab hold of me like this, no, how bout like this? Yah, okay now if I come in like that, what direction would you fall?--though what I’d really like is a set of nimble actors on hand—a private troupe that I might store in a big wooden trunk by my desk, say--who will pop out on demand & perform drafts for me.
Meanwhile, I’m also trying to get into character psychologically. With certain characters, it’s probably better for everyone involved to have me doing this garreted somewhere in southeast Asia.
Every once in a great while, though, as a result of a particularly concentrated effort, I have a split second like this one, & it’s odd but I kind of love it, not a madness but a peculiar cognitive achievement, like having dreamed you are an owl, or three people at once, or can breathe underwater, or have died without fear:
This morning I rose from heavy sleep in a slow, upward fall, like a leaf drifting up from the bottom of a lake. I lay floating there on my back, eyes open, neither here nor there. Somewhere nearby E spoke & said my name. For a long split-second, the name touched me only with a feather of nostalgia, invoking a long-forgotten memory of someone I had once known as a child, but hadn’t thought about in years & years. It made me smile to think of her, of that lost time & place, but it wasn’t me…because my name was—---. And then, of course, it wasn’t.
I love it. On to Chapter Next.
So I’ve been re-working this one scene for a few days now. It’s the final scene of a section, a climax & cliff-hanger, & it may be a while before I really nail it. Working its rough draft is a real cringe-fest most of the time. Just one bad sentence after another until I figure it out. But that’s how it goes. What I really need to do it is put it aside now & write the next five chapters, then go back to this one with its destination more clearly in mind. I’ll start that today.
When I’m working on an action scene like this one, it isn’t a sedentary affair. More often it feels like I’m actor preparing to perform the roles (all of them). I’m still by myself at a desk in a quiet, closed room, but I’m usually talking aloud to myself the entire time—reciting the dialogue & narration to hear how it sounds (I want my books to be good read-alouds). Sometimes I’m actually pantomiming through the action. Occasionally I draft E to help me out with this—Okay, stand here, grab hold of me like this, no, how bout like this? Yah, okay now if I come in like that, what direction would you fall?--though what I’d really like is a set of nimble actors on hand—a private troupe that I might store in a big wooden trunk by my desk, say--who will pop out on demand & perform drafts for me.
Meanwhile, I’m also trying to get into character psychologically. With certain characters, it’s probably better for everyone involved to have me doing this garreted somewhere in southeast Asia.
Every once in a great while, though, as a result of a particularly concentrated effort, I have a split second like this one, & it’s odd but I kind of love it, not a madness but a peculiar cognitive achievement, like having dreamed you are an owl, or three people at once, or can breathe underwater, or have died without fear:
This morning I rose from heavy sleep in a slow, upward fall, like a leaf drifting up from the bottom of a lake. I lay floating there on my back, eyes open, neither here nor there. Somewhere nearby E spoke & said my name. For a long split-second, the name touched me only with a feather of nostalgia, invoking a long-forgotten memory of someone I had once known as a child, but hadn’t thought about in years & years. It made me smile to think of her, of that lost time & place, but it wasn’t me…because my name was—---. And then, of course, it wasn’t.
I love it. On to Chapter Next.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 2:53 PM
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