Ann, thanks for that lovely picture of you and your father telling stories together. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Sheila, you said:
I see pictures and feel emotions that I have to translate into language. I never hear conversations in my head; there is no obliging muse who provides me with any words. I may see Lois and Clark, feel their emotions, and know what they are discussing, but I have to slowly, painfully pull every word out of my imagination as I translate vision into language. So I do an awful lot of staring at the screen with no words coming.
You and me, both! I think this is what I meant by not being a natural writer - that, for me, it's an awful lot of hard work to produce the words I write down. I, too, don't have a movie playing in head. I have emotions, facial expressions, body language, and a broad sense of the journey I want my characters to make. The rest is extremely hard graft.
On the other hand, in response to the second question, you said:
If my writing were only for myself, I would ignore such points. But I write with an audience in mind because part of my need to write is an almost equally strong need to share what I write.
But when I say I'd write even if no-one reads my work, I don't mean that I write only for myself. I'm still writing for an audience, even if that audience never actually gets the pleasure of seeing what I wrote for them.
I'm almost certain I wouldn't write a word if I started out on the assumption that I was the only person who'd read my stories. I'm
telling a story, after all.
Yvonne
