Fiction by Bill Olson


	Giving Characters their own Dialog (4/3/93) 1. Don't concentrate on just word choice, but sentence structure, grammar, pace, rhythm, ideas, emotion, stress, idioms, allusions, clichés, similes, etc. 2. A character might not refer to him/herself as I, but totally drop this pronoun: "Went to the store yesterday." 3. One character might tend to put time at the front of a sentence as opposed to the end, or any other place in a sentence: "Yesterday, I went to the store. 4. Precision in time and place may vary from character to character. For example, one person may be very precise: "Yesterday, about 2 P.M., I went to Olson's store to buy some Billy Beans. Yeah, I bought some carrots, too. 5. One character may use more interjections (short words often at the start of a sentence which are usually unnecessary): "Well, yesterday, I went to the store." 6. In real life, people often get hung up on details of when or where an event happened: "Something really scary happened to me... I thing it was Monday -- or was it Tuesday.... Wait a minute, what did I do on Tuesday? Now, I know on Monday, I went to the store, but... " As you can see, this person never gets his story told. In real life, most people do this. In fiction, a satire would have most characters doing it. In a serious drama, one character may do it predominantly. 7. Trying to decide on how to say something, or how much detail to use, or what words to use, may lead a character to stumble over words. for instance, this person is unsure whether he should say he drove or simply went: "Yesterday, I we-- uh, d-d-d, uh, I we... uh, I went to the store."

	What is a story? 4/11/93: In the April 1993 "Reader's Digest:" Don Hewitt, the creator of "60-Minutes" said: "Even the people who wrote the Bible knew that when you deal with issues, you tell stories. "...[I've told producers] 'acid rain is a topic. We don't do topics. Find me someone who has to deal with the problem of acid rain. Now you have a story."

	Finding the Poetry of a Scene (5/18/93) 1. The basic, obvious description: "He wore a black watch band, and looked often at his watch." 2. In searching for the poetry of the same scene, we find the deeper meaning, and a more vivid portrayal: "His watchband was black, like the knife-gash from some distant suicide attempt, and the watch, a constant reminder that his life was fleeting. Convulsively, he had to look, to count down how much time he had left." 3. Now, when dealing with this in film, the words have less potential for power. The new challenge is to find the poetry of image, montage, movement, and sound: A: The character pulls up his arm to look at the watch IN EXTREME SLOW MOTION. B: Cut to a knife (excuse the pun): its shiny blade frozen in fury, fuzzy from its swift motion, as it swaths into a wrist, violently: A series of fast freeze-frames, almost like slow-motion & a long shutter speed. C: He falls slowly back to a couch. D: the knife falling to the floor. E: He looks up to the clock on the wall. F: The second hand ticks away. G: The clock slowly dissolves to the man, again looking at his watch, as in A.

	Writer's Block March 26, 2000 I sat alone in the fireplace room thinking of what to write. I stared at the blank computer screen before me wondering how ideas could abandon me as they do when I must write. Or perhaps I'm wrong -- perhaps the ideas are there, ready to leap onto the page. Perhaps the problem is fear; every writer is a perfectionist when he first sits down to write. He thinks of a sentence... but it's seldom good enough. Another sentence: no... he tosses it. In fact, he has idea after idea, none of which meets his expectations. In fact his real problem is that he is not in love with the sentences he creates. So each loveless sentence, clause and phrase leaves his mind, dejected. But you know, the funny thing about all this is that once the writer gets something onto paper, he thinks it's gold -- even if it's lead. So what's the answer? Well, the writer must not expect too much to start with. He must write anything that comes to his mind, forgetting about perfection. Perfection will come later as he rewrites, revises. We lower our standards to get things going.