la-dee-da

[one hundred, seventy-five]

Are authors, writers, thieves? My playwriting professor told us that we all are, people who write, who make it our business to steal from other people, maybe little details, maybe insignificant details that people themselves forget about they are so mundane, but we do take them from somewhere, nothing is just imagined. I found that tidbit a little Freudian, like everything is predetermined in life due to the experiences, people, socialisation and nurture that is given through out life. Is it weird that I read my own writing, said company business included, with a British accent? I wish it was England so much more than Canada. I think that when writing, you need a couple of important things, one of them maybe be "borrowing," but with a stylistic touch.

You must have an overactive imagination. If you had an invisible friend as a child, or played with a necklace of beads and imagined a courtroom (maybe, just maybe, that was only me) then you are in the right suit to be shuffled in with the writers. Even in journalism you need some vocabulary flaire, something that puts you a part from mundane journalists with a heavy heart and even heavier pen.

You need to love things about people. I love so many things about people that they don't notice. I have this one friend, who when she is paying for something, she flips through every section of her wallet looking for change, gift cards, I don't know she doesn't realise that she does it, but she does it every time, and I notice. That is one thing I miss about being relatively blind, I can't see the details that I think up. I love detail, I love knowing what colour the leaves were, or what song was playing on the car radio during an accident, or the necktie the colour the texture, it is something that interests me, to know the little things, and therefore, you must really want to create a world in which you characters live.

You do have to borrow ideas, as I mentioned, I do have a character who has a sort of wallet-schizophrenia, who always checks every slot, but he does it obviously. I would take something as small and unnoticeable to one person, and magnify it until it is the basis of a story. I had a character once who loved to tie their hair in knots, I don't think that story carried on, but I used to like to tie my hair in knots when I was little, and therefore I will continue to take little tidbits, or just hints of ideas from quirks of people, because many people do just do things.
So if you write, take a little time to notice, people watch, look at the way people do things. How do your neighbours cut the grass? Does your teacher have nervous ticks? It’s a fun thing to do, I like it at least.

Take care,

Jess :]