Writing styles...

One thing that has always seemed to confuse Duncan, is how I write.

I can't write if I go into a quiet room and sit by myself. I can't write if I close myself off and just listen to music.
Well... I can I suppose... but it's hard. And the product is never very good.
I seem to do my best work... in front of the television. Usually watching a movie.

You know those tests that they tend to make you take in school? The ones that tell you if you're a tactile, audio, or visual learner?
I was always a highly tactile learner, with visual coming in an average second, and audio a very very very distant third.
I need that visual connection for my mind to really work properly. When I get stuck in my writing, I need those visual images to focus on... even though I'm not really focusing on it...

Wow... did that ever NOT make any sense!

Looking at the TV and letting the images on the screen just kinda flow past me helps me refocus and reset my brain in a way. Like I can think about things better when I'm not thinking of them. My brain works better when my thoughts aren't so busy getting in the way.

And this isn't even what I had intended this post to be about.
Though my digression is a fair demonstration of my other point.

I rarely know where my writing is going to go. I usually have some kind of basic idea, but no clue how I'm actually going to get there. I write my characters, and then they take me along for the ride.
It makes for some interesting times though. When all of a sudden I realize things that are right at the heart of my characters, things that they've been telling me subtly for pages, and I just didn't realize what they were trying to say until they came out and hit me with it. *chuckles* There's been a few things like that in my novel. With one character in particular who keeps giving me trouble... But that's really a whole different post.

Apparently it's an unusual way to write. So many writers talk about outlines, and have huge notebooks of history on their story and their characters. I can't write that way. I've tried, and I wind up with notebooks full of involved backstory, but nothing at all in the current-times story that I was trying to write.
(By the way, can you just imagine what kind of difficulties I had in creative writing in school?! Where the teachers are obsessed with outlines and carefully controlled characters and narration?! It's no wonder I almost flunked English ... sorry Language Arts :p ... in sixth grade!!!)
So I gave it up. I stopped trying to make myself be that kind of writer, and I just write. I have some basic ideas about where my characters are coming from, but they tell me they're life stories as they help me figure out what's happening with them in the story I'm telling.
It may not be the way a lot of people write, but I think it works for me.

I have a few ideas for another post, but it's gonna take a lot more thought before it's ready to go up.
Complex issues, like voice... and what really makes a writer.
Hopefully tomorrow or Friday... Though I don't know if I'll be up to actually posting on Friday, since I've got a nice long massage that afternoon!
We'll just wait and see, I guess!