Are We Having Fun Yet?

The biggest surprise to me so far, with this course I'm doing, is how much sheer fun it can be!

What could have been sheer hard work - or even thought of as torture - has become an event that I look forward to on a daily basis, and is, in fact, a reason for me to get up early to concentrate on. It's also a great distraction from my various woes both physically, and mentally!

At this moment, we are concentrating on 'showing' and 'telling', learning the technique that should give our narrative voice it's power to draw the reader into our world - and keeping them there - and all by the sheer delights of our ability to show our characters in all their glory, or to tell of their situations without becoming a bore about it. A tricky one, this!

Despite the fact that I've been writing all my life, I was almost unaware of the technicalities of writing. Most of the things we are learning, I have been doing almost instinctively - albeit, not very well - but there is a big chunk of technicalities that I was practically unaware of, so this course is definitely teaching me a thing or two, or three . . . Lol

Right at this moment, I'm trying to absorb a section called Dialogue and Stories - we are supposed to write something with dialogue, and 'show' what's happening, leaving out the 'telling' altogether - not an easy task, and I have to confess to struggling with it a little (hence, the distraction of catching up with my blogging! Lol). But I will do my best, as we have an eTMA looming, due in for 5th January, 2009 - at the latest!

That's ages away, I hear you cry! Well, it may seem so now, but I've got to produce a 2,200-word story, using all the techniques we've learned so far, and it's not as easy as I'd thought it would be. To be fair, I've got the nugget of the story already written down, but am having great difficulty deciding on a narrative point-of-view. I've written it in first-person limited omniscience, but I'm not sure whether it's working as well as I'd hoped - which means I'm going to have to experiment with various other viewpoints, to see which one will work best!

A writer's work is never done! Lol