And easy it ain't.
Somehow when you're sitting idly and your ideas are running through your mind the story writes itself, the dialogues flow, there's rhythm and order and the words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters merge effortlessly into each other until - voila - it's done and you're up there on the podium accepting your Booker prize and relating to an adoring audience tales of your varied negotiations over the filming rights to your work of art.
Back on Planet Reality you decide you want to bring a couple of characters together so need to decide where and how they should meet - relatively easy - and write a believable, non-stilted dialogue. Which is relatively bloody impossible. I just do not know how to create a setting and a conversation that doesn't look contrived.
Many years ago - perhaps 15 - I harboured pretensions of being a writer and for a period of time I carried a notebook into which I dropped thoughts, ideas, snippets of dialogue and so on. Much of it has little practical application but all of it - I reckon - I could turn into a moderately interesting scene or situation even if that doesn't make it into anything resembling a proper story.
What I am thinking now is that I ought to resume observing and noting because I now have specific scenes in mind and I feel that with them playing in the back of my mind I will be more receptive to examples from real life that can help but which might otherwise have passed me by.
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