http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html
I can't wait to see the beautiful dance of the re: memos.
Anyways, I hope most of you woke up super refreshed and remembered that it WAS April Fools Day and were not subsequently fooled by the bajillion weird things to hit you while doing your morning surfing. Really, boingboing? I'm going to have to pay for the bananas you make me look at? But I digress. Hope that you were sharper than me, which--at 7 in the morning--isn't saying too much. Hee!
Yesterday while showering (TMI? I feel like this isn't a TMI thing among writers. Isn't that were we do our best thinking? So I was showering. It's like two CEOs saying to each other, "So I was brainstorming about this new merger." Anyways. I was showering.) I was practicing some conversations.
Sidebar: when I was a kid I practiced conversations all the time. I wasn't the most outgoing teen and boys scared the crap out of me so I had to practice some of the more crucial conversations that I imagined that I might have that day. Despite my hard work, I did not give the perfect comeback to any tormentors, nor did I ever kiss a boy using the exact same dialogue between Han and Leia in Empire Strikes Back. (There it is, there's the TMI.) End sidebar.
So anyways, I was showering and I was practicing witty retorts just in case a guard at the Navy base stopped me for wearing a "Pete's UK Fish and Chips" shirt. And I thought to myself, "This is exactly how I write dialogue, isn't it?" Most every line of dialogue in my manuscripts is spoken aloud for authenticity's sake, just to make sure it flows naturally like conversations often do. Of course, in revising, I have to take out a lot of "of course"s and "well"s and "I guess"s...but that's why revising is our friend. Our horrible, mean friend.
Well, I guess where I'm going with this is: how do you write dialogue? Do you keep a journal of phrases you hear from everyday life? Do you write in silence or speak everything out loud? And, most tangentially, are you showering while you do so?
(On second thought, don't answer that last one.)
