I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak and put the emphasis on the right syllable.
Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.
All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.
I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
My process is kind of intuitive - I think about how a character will speak according to their station and personality, occasionally making notes with guidelines for their mannerisms, and then I just sort of crack on and write it.
English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.
Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.