Book Goodies asks about how you write

[Miriam]

Interested to discover more about the writing process?
This Book Goodies interview asked me for some insights into my writing process. For example:

Question: Do you listen (or talk) to your characters?
Answer: Certainly, I think about them a lot. I mentally test their motivations and their reactions to the conflicts they face. And if I'm writing dialog, I will often say it out loud to make sure it sounds natural and unscripted.

Click here for the full interview:
https://bookgoodies.com/?s=miriam+mur...

What about you? Do you listen to (or talk to) your characters?

And if you have any questions of your own about writing, please contact me here on Goodreads. Love to hear from you.

[Martin]

HI Miriam, not at the first pass. I like to structure the setting and conversation and then rework it. Here's a final version from my self-published novel on Amazon. Tell me what you think: "Released from duty, the starboard watch gathered below on the mess deck of Audacity, where the crew ate, slept, fought and prayed. Matthew Makepeace and his mate, Jacob Varghese, pressed out of a Genoese merchantman many years before, drank small beer while smoking Trinidad leaf, well-pleased with the feel of the ship, heading for home at last. Makepeace was a talkative man, a former ostler and pot boy for a tavern outside Cirencester, bred to the land. He was in his forties, and had been at sea for almost twenty years. While a young man he had taken a shine to the tavern-keeper's daughter, with predictable consequences. Unwilling to face the laughter of his neighbours over a belly getting too big to conceal, the father had persuaded his daughter to cry rape. Makepeace was taken up but escaped hanging by volunteering instead for His Majesty's Navy, just in time to join the Carnatic War being waged along the Mughal Shore. He liked to talk but the men around him noticed he would sometimes fall silent, remembering past times perhaps, a life gone maybe.
“Not that I would not be ashore right now,” said Jacob. “There was a fille de joie at The Pearl on Antigua” - and here he kissed his fingertips in universal admiration - “who would stiffen even the Pope, excusing my English.”
“Excused mate,” replied Matthew, “excused”. Jacob was a black-haired and black-hearted devil if ever there was one, but Matthew liked him. Wicked of temper, worse with a knife. Crooked nose, a battered, weather-beaten face, hairy hands but no beard, a limp from a broken bone that never quite healed. Stupid men thought a cripple no match for them. But it was his hands that did the damage, with one knife or two. Jacob drew again on his pipe, held the smoke in his lungs and breathed it out through his nose. “But I was a sailor before that devil ship Colossus took me from home and family. And a sailor I remain, even if it is in foreign seas.”
“You never sailed the great oceans then? Never saw the Cape nor the Carribee till now, the far northern seas?”
“I never did,” said Jacob, taking a swig of beer and grimacing. “But you never saw Genoa neither. Never drunk wine during the festa dei fiore nor sat in the Piazza Raffaele seducing a beautiful girl, saw dawn come up over the castello after making love to that girl.”
Matthew eyed his mate admiringly and drew on his pipe, filling the cubby in which they sat with aromatic smoke. Caribbean women were all very well, he thought. And women for rent were all very necessary. But he had touched in Spanish ports before the war. And though years had passed he could never quite forget olive skin, dark eyes under full lashes, tanned legs wrapped around his body. If afterwards she said “una plata, senhor” and had taken what she thought fair from the coins upon the table, it changed nothing.
“I never did,” he admitted, getting up to fetch down the roasting pan from its hook while Jacob reached under the counter for the beans. “Why, you make me not to miss old London Town at all,” he grinned, “and that would never do.”
“So where do we go?” Jacob asked. He was a brave enough sailor and had no love for the French, he being Genoese. But Matthew knew he also longed to see his home again and had often talked of deserting in some port where he could work his passage back.
“Well, if I was an officer I would know for sure,” Matthew said, lighting a small stove in the galley next door. “Word is we go to New York, perhaps to fight the Frenchies. Maybe Antigua, the long ways around. If we do, why next we will storm the forts on Martinique and set up as kings.”
“I will not,” Jacob replied, swirling the skillet to roast the beans evenly. “We Genoese care nothing for kings. And I do not like the girls in Martinique. They file their teeth.”Pretenders War

[Lizet]

I spent two years doing the research and detailed outline for my trilogy. The following two years were to write and then edit book one. Now I am writing book two and doing the edits as I go.