Boudreaux's Blog

Autumn approaches

Boudreaux — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:44:55 +0000

As summer begins to fade and the first day of autumn is just eighteen days away, fantasies of sitting in an early nineteenth century room with quill pen and candlelight emerge. I often think about what it must have been like in those days. No spell check, no computer, not even any liquid paper to correct errors once made.

Writing in those days must have been tedious. But someone had to do it, and we thank them for passing on a sense of history to us. As modern writers, do we also do this? This brings to mind the murder mystery. At what point does the reader become jaded, having seen so many different ways to figuratively slice and dice a victim? Is the method used by the villain so important? Does it need to be unique?

I think not. The appeal is more based on whether we can, as writers, take the reader into the story by providing characters who draw us right into the scene with their revealing dialogue that exposes exactly who they are, along with their reasoning for their actions.

A chat as a source of inspiration and ideas…

Boudreaux — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:20:32 +0000

To have a best friend to talk to can often be a source of inspiration, when you are stuck. They see things through different eyes, and when they pass on their observations, judgments or just off-the-cuff comments to you, you are refreshed in that you have newfound enthusiasm.

And there are other ways in which chats help a writer. As a writer, one is always making mental notes, always observing what is said and watching events happening around him. Therefore, when a vignette is revealed about something like, say, “a time when I almost drowned” by your best friend, it becomes an idea for a scene or a theme in a novel if you pay attention to your sensory triggers, as I like to think of them.

Just this morning, I chatted online with my best girl, and we talked about a lot of things. One has germinated an idea.

Time

Boudreaux — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:07:52 +0000

Think about time. It levels the playing field for all of us. For those of us who must be productive in our daily work; for criminals on the run – everyone. We are limited by it. There is no way of extending it. We spend an unknown amount of it here on earth, and how we spend it is up to us.

We are given deadlines to meet at work. The bank robber must carefully plan to pull off the theft within time constraints. If a murderer gets caught and convicted, he/she “does time”.

Time is a source of fear or stress for many reasons. Older people worry that they may not get their affairs in order before they die. The delivery service driver may be fired if the packages are not delivered quickly enough. Our holiday dinner must be coordinated so that it will be ready when the guests we’ve invited begin to arrive.

Think about it. Time – such a short word with far-reaching consequences…

“You should write a book.”

Boudreaux — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:46:16 +0000

How often do we hear that from a friend, after relating a personal experience to them? And how often are we held back, thinking, “Yeah, right. I’m another Samuel Clemens because I told you a story about being pulled over by a Mississippi cop one night, huh?”

The more I travel, the more vignettes I collect. They are forever stored in my mental library; impressions, expressions, dialects, local cultural peculiarities, customs, traditions.

At some point, I guess they had to come out. I had to take the step forward and use my digital loom to weave a fabric in which they could play parts. Characters who could come to life for someone out there on a rainy Tuesday evening or a snowy Saturday night.

Fires crackle. Fingers type. The characters run from my imagination and present themselves as real players in your thoughts as you read and identify with them.

Writing and technology

Boudreaux — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:43:59 +0000

The link of writing and technology becomes more apparent each day. No more pen and paper, Underwood typewriters, correction fluid for most, if not all, of us.

And yet, the “great time-saver” – the personal computer – has it really saved us time? We must now perform periodic if not daily maintenance. The writer’s blog must be maintained, as I learned the hard way recently. We must also deal with ever-changing software and hardware that introduces new features to make things work better, but may become annoying because of another learning curve to master. This can be especially daunting if one is not tech-savvy.

But looking at these advancements in a different way, I’m no longer surrounded by mountains of crumpled sheets of drafts; no need to run out and buy new typewriter ribbons; and, to some degree, I can be a bit lazy and use spell-check. We have also been given the gift (or curse) of connectivity. Gift, in the sense of meeting with others we may never have known; curse in the sense of being open to spam emails and the maintenance nightmares they hand to us. We can have every kind of spam assassin out there to filter it, but there is always some shadowy figure rubbing his hands because he discovered a new way to circumvent our “assassins.”

The best blessing of all of the melding of writing and technology is the fact that it keeps our minds exercised. How many folks in their later years just sit like vegetables in front of a television screen day after day? Not this writer, and with that I am ending this post!