Friends in Writing

Hello, everyone! I'm back, having survived my finals (I hope, anyway.) I turned in my last paper at 5:30 Monday evening, and since then, I've been writing, editing, and typing up some monologues to take with me on my England adventure, as well as visiting my alma maters (I have two- my regular high school and my theatre high school), decorating the house, and hanging out with my friends.

One of my friends, who I also went to visit school with, had a wonderful writing chat with me today. After visiting EAHS, neither of us were really ready to go home yet, so we went to a local cafe. He's a writer as well, and embarking on some pretty exciting territory as one very soon. We also began a joint novel a few weekends ago when he came to visit me at my college. We're both really excited about the project, as it means a lot of new things for both of us. First of all, we'll be writing together. While we've been working together since middle school, really, on films and reading each other's writing, we've never written together. This in itself will be very interesting, as we have very different styles.

The project also includes some new elements for both of us, like writing adult characters, not teenagers or adults who are percieved as teenagers (a challenge for both of us, as neither of us is one of these yet), having the entire novel take place over one or two days, and he writing in a completely female perspective (though he already writes girls very well.) It's going to be difficult, but a good kind of difficult, I think. At least we live in the age of e-mail; can you imagine the two of us sending pages back and forth through snail mail across an entire ocean? I'm just excited to have a new writing project!

In addition to discussing this project, we talked about basing characters off of real people (I don't do this purposely, though it tends to happen; he does, and asked my permission to make a character very like me. It's possible he's going to use the hardest parts of my life, for which he was present, but the way I see it, his writing about it might help me sort it out a little better), characters making decisions for themselves, writng emotional truths, killing off characters, inspirations, poetry (which I hate and declared "one big secret"), and our futures in writing.

I just love having writer friends :)