Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Entering the World

No, I'm not talking about birth. I'm talking about writing. The cool thing about writing is that you create your own world. It doesn't matter if you're writing science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, historical; the world of the novel is yours even if you base it in reality. You have to know your world to write the story. I lose myself in the world of the story. I sometimes have to remember that the reader doesn't necessarily care about the color of the wallpaper in the bathroom even if I can see it vividly. I have to let the reader do some of the work, to get invested in the story and use his or her own imagination to fill in the images.

The same thing happens to me when I read. I can see the story from the words. They won't be the same images that the author had when he or she wrote the story, but that doesn't matter. Reading is a active thing and requires participation from the reader. At least a good book will require participation. That's one of the reasons I don't like movies made from books (although if Hollywood wants to film one of my novels, I'm all for it). The images and actors just don't match the picture in my head. Not that some movies from books aren't great. Some are; but I can think of only two movies from books that I liked better viewing than reading. One was Seabiscuit; the other was The DaVinci Code.

--Gabi

Books I'm reading now:
The Madness of Lord Ian MacKenzie by Jennifer Ashley
True Love and Other Disasters by Rachel Gibson
The Third Circle by Amanda Quick
Nerds Like it Hot by Vicki Lewis Thompson
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

No comments: