Goal: Leveling up. How to get there? For me, writing classes. It's not enough to just want more words - that state is eternal. You can always assume I'm looking for a way to make stories happen faster and more efficiently. Over and above that, though, I'm interested in taking skills up a notch. I want to look at words differently. I want to think not just about what makes a story, but what makes a tale compelling. How do I get more emotion from characters into readers - if words are my only tools - I need to experiment with how they evoke a response in someone who isn't me.
It's that old acting chestnut of Sir Lawrence Olivier supposedly saying, "It isn't my job to feel anything. It's my job to make the audience feel everything."
I'd started writing on the theory that if what I wrote made me feel something, then surely reads must, too. T'ain't necessarily so. Without getting into the showing versus telling diatribe, let's just say there are multiple ways to approach reaching out to touch a reader via nothing more than flat words printed on a page.
That's my current work on leveling up. Concentrating on skills. While spurring for more words faster than they are currently being produced.
