On the neverending importance of the dialogues

I did not dare to write fiction for over 5 years, and when I think about it, the most complicated problem I have to cope with is the way in which my characters should speak. No, it is not about their accent or vocabulary, but about how the dialogue is such should be built up in order to be relevant for the story. Once, while editing someone else's draft, I noticed without pleasure pages after pages of discussions between the main characters exchanging dozens of 'yeah', 'oh', 'ah's and other non-informational words. I always admired the capacity of many French writers, especially Simone de Beauvoir, to create complicated dialogues and a coherent exchange of ideas. 

Those days, I am reading - especially when walking, a recent addiction of mine - Melissa Bank's The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. The story as such is not exactly my style but the dialogues, oy, the dialogues, are as good as a fine champaign worth 300 Euro the glass. Spontaneous, smart, funny and alive, very much alive. I don't know what class of creative writing I should follow, but at the end of the learning I want to write dialogues at least as good as Bank's. 

Till then, I will continue my cold and serious plans of nonfiction writing, with more and more unfinished projects laying open on my desktop. Each month the same mantra: at the end of the month I am done, promise, all I need is to do some small corrections and check what is the format requested for Kindle, eBooks etc. You know what? This kind of dialogue with myself is extremely boring. 

Laziness in the time of 2.0

Believe me or not, but my relative quiet presence on this blog does not mean that I read less or do not write at all. I read at least once the day something useful for my writing and I put my skills on trial on a daily basis. True is that in the last months I wanted to focus the best of my free time - meaning when I am not busy freelancing for a living  - on my travel writing projects that involve a lot of pitching, reading, documenting and, last but not least, traveling. 

On the other hand, I want to be as honest as possible and make a terrible confession: if I do not need to write right now a very hot fresh news or feature report or even an interview, I put my other blogs on hold for a classical reason: laziness. When I read Oblomov and participated to long discussions about what does it mean to be an Oblomov, blogs did not exist, but I cannot stop thinking about one of my favorite characters from the Russian literature. A lovely gal with a lust for doing nothing. 

In my case, laziness is probably the last word that someone will use to describe me, but me, the humble me feels like being far away from my brilliant writing career that I always waited ahead of me. Take, for instance, my numerous book projects that are sleeping in files on my computer. With a little bit of formatting and probably some basic editing I can be up on Amazon in a matter of days. But simply because I know quite well how easy is to have all this, I don't find it exciting enough and instead, I start new projects that at least at the beginning are much more exciting. 

Another secret of mine is that I currently fluent in a couple of languages, but I did not tried my writing hand in more, as I prefer to have a high proficiency in English and use the other languages for daily work, translation and social networking. However, at least in one case, I should improve considerably a language that will help me to translate some of my blog posts and thus increase the SEO level of my travel writing. I am still hesitant because I am not quite happy to wake up too early in the morning for such mental exercises. Isn't that laziness, ladies and gents?

The most ridiculous reason by far for my lack of blogging activity here is that besides the writing, in our 2.0 world I need to spend a lot of time searching and adding photography, as well as working out various links of the literary references I want to talk about - for example, book reviews of the literature I am using for my daily preparation of the writing skills. Yes, I am lazy enough to do this. 

As I grew up in a world of written word, once I was ready with my article, I did not need to do anything else than go out for the next piece of work. Nowadays, I need to be careful with links and SEO-related issued and many other aspects that do not belong to the act of writing as such. 

However, I consider this post as an incentive to continue my split my attention between different blogs and writing 'avenues' and, I promise that I will not only be back with fresh book reviews and interviews and observations about the literary world, but I will also work out my eBooks and improve my writing portfolio with more than blog posts! 

Write to you soon!