Saturday, May 26, 2007

Complex Sentences

A significant part of the latest script is culled from travel writing that I've done over the past couple of years. I've done a little bit of this before, particularly in Libertarian Rage -- directly adapting blog and journal entries into something to be staged -- but never to this degree, and I'm struggling a lot with converting one style of writing to another.

The greatest obstacle, I'm finding, is probably my fondness for complex sentences in blogging. To a degree this has characterized my scripts as well -- but generally the dialogue is more streamlined, at least slightly more naturalistic. (Which is ironic, since blogging is probably the venue that matches most closely my speaking voice. My natural delivery isn't naturalistic at all, apparently.)

Thing is, when I blog, I'm happy to just chatter away, piling one prepositional phrase on top of another (not to mention throwing in multiple parenthetical thoughts) -- liberal use of hyphens -- thought fragments -- that kind of thing, and sentences never really seem to end, they just go on and on and on and then after that they go on some more -- and this style is a lot of fun to write, and a lot of fun to read (at least for me) -- but it's extremely difficult to *deliver* onstage.

Ah, well. No one ever said the job was supposed to be easy.

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