Wattpad brings you a guest post from David Baird, author of “All We Leave Behind”:
When I write I try to see things from my characters’ perspectives. Before I write dialogue between my characters I have their conversation in my mind multiple times until it becomes organic and natural.
No, you didn’t read incorrectly, I did just admit to carrying on conversations with myself. I could say I’m not really talking to myself, that in fact it’s the characters in my head talking, but I’ve been told that doesn’t help my case any. Sometimes I even slip up and the inside conversation becomes an out loud conversation which leads to my wife questioning my sanity. I argue with her ‘so what if I’m mad, aren’t most writers?’ These conversations never go well for me. Firstly, I try placing myself in the same category as Hemingway, which at best, makes me sound like I have delusions of grandeur putting myself in the same sentence as that legendary writer and at worst, paints me as an alcoholic misogynist.
Hemingway (Image Source)
I’m still not entirely convinced that being crazy or at least mildly to moderately neurotic is a bad thing for a writer. The media love to celebrate our quirkiest nature. There seems to be an entirely unfounded positive correlation between being quirky and a writer’s success. There was one writer that would jog six hours each day as part of his ideation process. I can’t imagine jogging for more than thirty minutes. I have to assume that distance joggers and marathon runners are crazy. Other great writers grow wild and dishevelled beards, an obvious sign of their quirky instability. Now I will prepare my mailroom for the onslaught of angry letters I’ll receive from the national society of beard growers and marathon runners, but truly, I meant no slight. Craziness in this industry seems to be the trump card. It’s as if the press wants to label us unique or different. Perhaps some of the ideas in novels seem so strange and bizarre, or the characters so impossibly unique, that writers must have some source to their creativity. The press seems to label this source as a quirky nature, which is the nice way of saying writers are crazy. So you marathon runners and beard growers keep going, you have a huge head start on the rest of us.
The truth is many writers are perfectly normal individuals with nothing really odd about them. Just as there is nothing odd about marathon runners or individuals who have expressed their desire to grow some unkempt facial hair. But the media and the readers tend to be lost in awe at some of the more creative writers’ ability to bring settings to life and characters and plots to fruition. So if they think our power is derived from a sort of madness then so be it. I for one will try driving around in a clown car while dressed in a lion suit and referring to myself in the third person. I should be a best seller in no time.
Read “All We Leave Behind” on Wattpad!
Thirty-seven-year-old John Morgan’s personal life is already in disarray when he receives a phone call that his brother and niece are dead. His relationship with his father is nearly nonexistent, he barely speaks to his sister, and he has no real friends to lean on. As the tragic news slowly begins to sink in, John realizes he is floating aimlessly in the middle of an unpredictable sea of emotions with no one to rescue him. In this compelling tale that movingly illustrates the devastating effects of a dysfunctional family, John must learn to change what he can, accept what he cannot, and make the difficult decision to leave some things behind.