PHATIC COMMUNION

I learned this nifty little term in my English 3 class today. From my understanding it means the “how was your weekend?” variety of conversation. This is the majority of all conversations. A small percentage is the serious stuff where you ask about a person’s day and they tell you in full detail. The small percentage in which you know you need to pay attention instead of the mindless “I’m fine” to “how are you doing?”

I’m almost done with my first draft and I have to make sure this small percentage is shown in body language and not in words, at least not directly. Unless you are looking for how you change in life you don’t notice it. Maybe one day it hits you that you might have acted differently two, three years ago.

Being realistic in fiction is the hardest lesson to learn while writing because it’s a thin line with suspending belief and making something so unrealistic (the way people think or feel) that a reader throws your book against the wall.

So by next Monday, hopefully, I’ll be entering the layering stage of my writing. I’m looking for the dialogue that says, “When I was a child my mother treated me badly therefore it’s why all my relationships fail.”

After I do that I will look for the hard part, at least for me, grounding my characters i.e. not having talking heads for the length of the novel.

Who said writing was easy?