writing style

I touched on this in my last entry and wanted to expand on it a little more. I’m fairly new to short story writing. Most of my past writing endeavours have been in the field of scriptwriting.

I once belonged to a comedy scriptwriting group. We co-wrote a sitcom, working up characters and plot between us. We submitted a final draft of one episode to the BBC but without luck.

I have also written four un-produced screenplays, though one did have a Producer attached for a while, which was exciting. Another got me a meeting at British Screen (a forerunner of The Film Council), and one more worked as a writing sample and got me a try out for the now canceled TV soap, Family Affairs.

I then moved away from fiction for a while, studied journalism and wrote content for charity newsletters, and web pages, and also had some essays about film and cinema included in a QueenSpark Books title, Back Row Brighton.

That was all good experience. The journalistic training taught me to be concise in my writing and all the screenplays taught me to write in a very visual way. By which I mean, I have to be able to run a scene through my mind like a home movie, and once I can, I can write it. I block the scene out like a theatrical rehearsal. Dialogue is tried in different mouths, characters are moved about the stage, different backdrops, lighting, and weather might all be tried until I have the right combination and when I do I can set the scene down.

What I first found daunting when I wanted to try straight fiction was the thought that I’d have to produce lengthy chunks of descriptive text. I did try that and it’s really not for me. It’s not my strength or my style. What I now know I can still do in the short story format is write concise interconnecting scenes that add up to a whole. That probably sounds like I’m stating the obvious and it’s probably what every writer does, but I rather think of it as writing episodes in a serial, and I think this is why it works for me.