Hazia’s Reflections

I didn’t get to update on Beth Yahp’s advanced creative writing workshop last Saturday. Tomorrow is part 2:)

We covered characters and she gave us a character profile list to refer to. Hmm… I think I’ll stick to my present approach of basing my characters on real life people only, no creating, hehe…

The exercise involved the other participants interviewing each person and we had to pretend to be the characters we selected. I chose the one above me and one person actually asked whether I was acting as the older version of myself i.e. me at 60. Mann, that is scary, considering my history with her i.e. she trying to stop me from turning into her in 25 years or so.

We learned about dialog tags. Interestingly, a famous Malaysian author’s blog recommended making do without dialog tags. He said it makes the dialog cleaner and stronger, faster pace too. I guess it depends on the story.

I shared a story - ‘Going Home’. Beth edited and said it was a good travel piece ie travel in one’s own country; lively language, great descriptions and precise sentences. However, she also said that my humour shines through. Ehem… it was a horrific tale, it was supposed to be scary, not funny. LOL! The last time I tried writing a violence story, it became a ‘Happy Teacher’s Day’ tale. Okay, not everybody could write all genres, but I haven’t given up yet.

Oh, she also said that what makes the story more interesting was the ‘psychology of the narrator’. Initially, that was my challenge, it was a silent story with very little dialog. Which gives me an idea -  I can play around a lot with that approach when i write my first novel, yeah on my 7-month tragic encounter with you-know-who.