Readings from Lamott

The reading for Lamott discusses the building of character, plot and dialogue in an interesting fashion. The first part of the reading starts off with Polaroids. This section indicates that "writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop." To paraphrase what Lamott is saying, we write and don't always know the whole picture until is fully developed.  I suppose that is true in a way. I sometimes write little stories in my spare time, and I typically have some sort of outline as to how I want the story line to flow but I don't always know what I want to put in the middle for details. He continues in describing that as the polaroid develops, you will see more of what wasn't initially seen. Writing is similar to this concept. You can write your first draft and you see what the full picture could be. You then go back and add and edit to create a full depiction of what you are trying to tell.

            The next section of the reading is Character. One part that caught my attention was when Lamott mentioned that he asked  Ethan Canin to tell him what the most valuable think he knew about writing. Canin's response was, " Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better." I agree to some extent. I think most writers write to have the main character liked by most readers. But if the story line is crappy, well you can lose interest real quickly if the author doesn't keep the account moving along.

               The next portion is Plot. A section that really was so truthful was a statement by Carolyn Chute. " I feel like a lot of the time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decoration. But no tree. Your going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon." Lamott says that a lot of their writings start in this fashion.  I can see where a lot of writers would feel this way. I have a few novels that I work on in my spare time, and I have all of these notes of what I want to happen and in some form of an order, but I can't seem to connect the ideas right away.

            The final section by Lamott is Dialogue. The most that I got out of this section is that we are supposed to not let your writing sound too uptight. He explains how some of his student's will read a section of their writing and then will be surprised because "the dialogue looked Okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi." I think that good writing usually comes when the writer fully describes the scene occurring. When the reader can fully imagine the scene being illustrated he/she can understand the dialogue much more.