The Adventures of A Writer

For all you writer’s out there, you should check out this blog: http://lynnmcc.blogspot.com/

It is a wonderful site about a writer who loves to write and hopefully can be published one day. She wrote a great article today, that was kind of reminiscent of Stephen King’s On Writing,, but it had me thinking about character development for stories and how people go about expressing there stories thorough there characters. Here is an excerpt of today’s entry called “Living, Breathing Fake People”:

“Any writer who goes about things through her characters is well familiar with the notion that fictional characters become almost real to those of us who conceive them and spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about them and then writing about them. These people who are nothing more than figments of our imagination become as real to us as people we know who actually move and breathe, even if we keep this little fact to ourselves. We can hear voices, imagine what a character will do in a given situation, even attribute a runaway plot to a character who isn't doing what we expected him or her to do.

But in the interest of creating three-dimensional characters who are able to engage a reader and draw them into the story, I have to wonder when a writer has gone too far. When the character becomes a little too real.

I'm sure each writer has his or her own particular line.

I have an entire village worth of characters who populate my brain, each person as unique and familiar to me as my own family members. And I've done some crazy things in my efforts to get to know the ins and outs of these folks.

I've interviewed my characters. Inserted myself into a scene, asked questions like a reporter and responded to the answers I was given, just as if I were as fictional as my character. I find this is a great way to fine-tune my character's voice. It also helps me dig deep, to follow threads that reveal motivation and deep seated feelings I'd never before considered. I have a lot of fun with this, and often it threatens to take over the actual writing of the story…” (Read More Here)

After reading this blog entry and a few others, I though about the question that was brought up. I think it can be hard to do a response for these blog because I think many of us are torn to do our academic duty and respond because its part of our grade. However, it seems that many of us are familiar with how blogging works and feel the ease of being able to express ourselves differenly. Since, we don’t have such a specific subject we have to keep addressing. Many of us have went as far as submitting our own work or bringing up Publishing News. All of this helps us get a sense of what this class is suppose to be about. I don’t think any of us have crossed the line in making anything too personal. It has all been opinion which is health for discussion and commmeting. In my own opinion, I think that we all have done a great job finding out own blog voice. I try to do the responses in away where it is something that I will enjoy reading as well as sharing. My last few responses have personally strayed away from our readings, just because I think many people tend to response on the readings and it has just been away to bring a sort of diversity to our blog. But I love reading comments about Lukeman, King and others because it gives an insight on what people think of the same textbook that is being read. It’s hard to find a blog voice for an academic class, but I think for this experimental case we succed.