Thinking Harder
Posted on June 30, 2009
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My last few shorts were pretty linear affairs. One was a flash done in 90 minutes, so I have an excuse. But some of my other stories were critiqued and other than improving my writing style, which I know about, I learned that I need to get things more complex. Not non-understandable complex, but more layers need to be infused in my writing.
In the novel I just finished doing the basic groundwork, I (with some of my friends at MidSommer Madness) made it more complex. I thought about it and received critiques on my approach throughout the process. That just isn’t going to be the case everytime I sit at my keyboard. So what do I do? I need to think harder. I need to take more time and cogitate on the plot structure and the characters and put down more layers.
I’m a pretty impatient person, which leads me to write too fast. That’s a tendency I’ve known about for all my life, but in writing it leads to cardboard characters and inevitable cliches in my writing. I can stitch a plot together pretty well on the fly, but there’s more to the craft than that.
It’s not those who finish first that succeed in writing, but those who write the best, independent of their speed.
An End to the Madness
Posted on June 28, 2009
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I finished up with Liberty Hall’s MidSommer Madness tonight. I took the time to jump ahead two days to the 30th. My assignments are complete, I will continue to critique other’s work when it comes up, but as for me and my novel, I have made it through the MidSommer gauntlet.
So what to do now? This is my last entry:
Where do I go from here?
I’m going to depart a bit from the paragraph expansion program as I move ahead with Panix, Lorna and Sovad.
I’ve got my Structure & Timeline spreadsheet and will increase the granularity of my paragraphs completely into scenes. ( My paragraphs mostly have multiple scenes.) These will then be rearranged into chapters in on the worksheet, before I continue to write.
I will plot character, POV and action (rising/falling/etc.) in light of the scenes to make sure I’ve got the right balance.
I’ll go back and expand the scenes where needed, then write. I think I will only need at most a half page scene description. I will then go back to my pantser roots and use the spreadsheet as a guide to keep everything in line as I write.
Schedule? I’d like to give myself all of July to get the outline done. Knowing myself, I’ll probably get it done in a couple of weeks and get to the writing, because, for me, that’s where all the fun is.
My goal is to have the first draft done before October 1st. I have a non-fiction book related to work, I’d like to get finished before year-end, but Panix is in the front of my mind, and I don’t want to lose the momentum.
I am still looking forward to some more comments from the participants. They have been and will be valuable in making the novel better.
This has been a great experience. If I had done this all by myself, I am certain the plot would be much more linear and less interesting. An intense and time-consuming experience. Of the eighteen who started, I think there are about seven who were reasonably caught up…
A great experience for me as I continue to learn how to write.
A Little Recognition Now and Then… WotF HM
Posted on June 22, 2009
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Well, well. With all of my struggles learning how to write and become a writer, a few rays of sunshine come out from time to time.
Three months ago, I sent in a quickly cobbled entry into the Writers of the Future contest. I’d only been at this writing stuff for a month. I had a few readers and I rewrote it to get it as tight as I could and waited.
Today I found out I received an Honorable Mention for Ollie’s Dream. It’s sort of an SF/Espionage story. I know, I know. It’s not first or second place, but it’s enough for me to think there might be some hope after a raft of rejections in the last two weeks.
Technically, my writing is improving. I can develop better plots with more depth and write better settings. My first drafts are still littered with rough prose, but I am recognizing my wretchedness more and can improve it.
I haven’t found a sweet spot genre-wise. My fantasy work is littered with cliches and I just don’t have a dark enough personality to write gritty, gut-wrenching fantasy.
I feel the Midsommer Madness exercise I have been involved with at LibertyHall online writers group has helped me in getting novels ready to write. So far we are about three-quarters through and I have a great deal of a new novel planned and ready to write.
I’ll be submitting my next WotF story tomorrow. I’ve struggled with this story for eight weeks. It’s gone from 14,000 words down to 6,500. The beginning and the ending has changed. It has ebbed and flowed in all that time. It was much harder to rewrite and polish than Ollie’s Dream. If I had to handicap it, I would say it won’t get any recognition.
The difference between the two? I didn’t learn a lot doing Ollie’s Dream. It came easily, the little twist at the end popped out in writing. It was easy to polish. This one was born too large with some really lousy writing and a pretty amorphous plot. It is the silk purse out of the sow’s ear that still smells of bacon. But I learned a heck of a lot honing it down. I learned more about beginnings. I learned more about pacing and a ton about Point of View. I had lots of superfluous words. I had a floating plot line that didn’t work. I even cut out the climax, that wasn’t really the climax. So if I don’t get anywhere with it, it’s OK.
It’s all part of the journey. The next goal is to get a short story sold. I’ve got some contest stories that just might make the grade with some rewriting. I’ve put off doing so until Midsommer Madness is over.
All in all a satisfying month so far in June. I feel I’m making some progress.
Flash Work and Filling in the Story
Posted on June 13, 2009
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Some time ago, I mentioned I was outclassed in the weekly flash challenge on Liberty Hall. (You Know When You’ve Been Outclassed) I was. I didn’t know what was going on and it showed.
Well, I’ve participated regularly working on my writing for these challenges. Although I am by no means adept, I have managed to learn enough to have won a couple of contests. The last one was out of nine participants. This is not to pat myself on the back (pat, pat), but to illustrate that working on one’s writing does pay off.
I can see the improvement, although I have much farther to go, I’ve learned more about setting and character. Those are two areas where I was severely deficient.
The key thing is getting to a point where you can recognize the shortcomings in your stories. By the time I’ve finished writing a story, I have built up all the background I need for the story in my head. The problem is not all that backgournd is on paper. Big holes tend to exist in my stories. I can picture the buildings, the houses, the characters, but have had a hard time seeing that I haven’t got those images down. When we read, we often fill in the gaps in our minds. When you go back and review for rewrites, if you can’t see it’s lacking in your story, you have to rely on others to give you that perspective.
Something more to learn.
The Percolation Process
Posted on June 13, 2009
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I’ve been spending the last nearly two weeks participating in Liberty Hall writer’s group Midsommer Madness novel challenge. We started with Blurbs, expanded blurbs, then expanded story summaries. The stories are now out to 20 short paragraphs summarizing the beginning, middle and end. Now we are going through character sketches of the protagonists and antagonists. This was the last exercises.
I’ve learned a lot about process. I call this the percolation process. As you do these exercises the story percolates. I did a lot of preparation that helped me get the exercises done without a lot of new writing, but my story changed quite a bit from my initial summary. The opening improved, the antagonist changed the most. I discovered some things about him, that wasn’t there before. Part of the percolation process is significantly assisted by ongoing crits by the others. I haven’t had the benefit of such interaction during a story before and it has helped in framing the story.
In order to percolate you have to give the story room and you have to move in little spurts. The MidSommer Madness exercise borrows its structure from the snowflake method. There’s critiquing that goes along with the writing and that’s where the writing gets a chance to percolate other’s opinions, suggestions and observations along with your own resulting in a better project (in my case.)
Getting back to being Novel
Posted on May 26, 2009
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After a bunch of short stories, it’s time to get back into the novel game. I am participating in a novel outlining exercise on a writer’s website.
The short stories have been great to fix some serious deficiencies in my writing. I still have a long way to go, but my writing will be much better for my next project a novel.
This one will be a fantasy spy ‘political’ thriller. I realized this morning that I will need to reconstruct the world this story takes place to give it more legs in the slim case I write a sequel. The current world has nine countries and that’s not quite enough running room for a series. So I’ll be putting three continents together. I’ll borrow some technology from previous worldbuilding, but can’t use the same stuff because that’s for another series and I can’t pit them both together.
I already have defined thirty two possible characters to draw from and can use the same plot and political structures that I have already defined. It should be lots of fun. The ‘contest’ consists of daily assignments to get the outline done for the National Novel Write Month in November. I don’t think I will participate in the NaNoWriMo, but I will use this as a writing process exercise. I’ll post more on it as it comes. The process starts June 1.
Sword of Spells Series
Posted on May 11, 2009
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It’s been three weeks since my last post. That’s a big no-no for blogging. I have been concentrating on creating a world and a background for a series of Sword & Sorcery called the Sword of Spells culminating in a novel. So far I’ve written or have in process five short stories based on the warrior-mage Brull on the world of Kellar. I think I will do another two in the series, then tackle the novel.
So, I have written over 20,000 words in preparation for the novel. What have I learned from the experience? Actually quite a lot. Brull has a voice. I’ve moved him from a relative newbie to a seasoned veteran at what he does– bounty hunting magic practitioners.
There are some twists in the magic of Kellar and the gods are not omniscient, but are discreetly absent for most of the time.
What else have I done? Actually for the last few weeks, little else. I have been prepping two previous stories for submission.
After playing around with other genres, this high fantasy comes the easiest for me. The challenge is coming up with characters that aren’t pure cardboard. I feel I’m making progress.
So when do I start on the novel? That’s a good question. I got 30,000 words into a contemporary fantasy book, before I shelved it for not having enough depth. I will probably take a hiatus from SofS when I finish off the next two stories, complete my contemporary novel, then start on the SofS novel. My goal is to have all of this done by November 1st.
Can’t I Ever Get It Right? Finding Errors.
Posted on April 19, 2009
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I just put two more short stories in the submission hopper. I’ve been combing over these stories for days and have received good critiques on them. Yet, after I patted them on their behinds and sent them off, I did some quick reads… ERRORS.
How many times does it take to get it right? I don’t honestly know. It isn’t possible to get a story perfect, because there are too many variables involved. But it is possible to have the punctuation in perfect shape.
One thing I realized is that every time you make a modification you may be introducing an error. I went through one of the stories that had been thoroughly critiqued and I noticed some double periods and some missing punctuation before ending quotation marks. They weren’t there before… I was sure of it. How did they get there? If I took a sentence out and didn’t get the period that would result in double periods. It’s the same thing with dialogue. Taking something out can easily lead to typos.
Another arrow in my editing quill to watch for.
A Glimmer of Progress
Posted on April 16, 2009
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It’s been a bit tough to get something interesting posted lately. I’ve been involved in getting my work critiqued and rewriting three stories so I can submit them.
I’ve made some strides. The character flatness that has been a difficulty remains. But the writing flow that has been difficult for me to figure out, is smoothing out.
I wrote a flash (well, not really a flash, but a challenge where you write for 90 minutes and submit that for a group critique.) I wrote a few posts ago about how I looked so stupid on my first try. Well my third attempt actually was much better. They have six categories then a best story. Admittedly, I’m up against four or five people, but my story was first for three of the six categories. At least some people thought there were elements of my writing that were acceptable.
What’s more important is I can see where my improvement is. I’m still a beginner, but with the immersion technique I have been using to get up to speed, there might be a glimmer of progress. I’m not ready to get back into the novel I set aside a month ago, but I am definitely getting there.
Now how do I slather stuff on to the cardboard cutouts I use for characters????
Slugging It Out
Posted on April 7, 2009
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Opening Day. Baseball. Hooray! Go Giants.
Writing has been a bit of a slug. Sent some stuff out for critiques. I did say I was a beginning writer, didn’t I? It shows. One critique was particularly brutal. Childish, hacked up and hackenied. Well, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
One thing I do know, is I am more cognizant of what good writing looks like. I’m not there yet. In the last few weeks I have fallen into the comfort of too much dialogue. It comes more easily to me than description.
You see there is an art to showing through exposition. I say showing because one of the writing tenets is to Show not Tell. In a recent story I had my character say “I was shaking.” Dialogue, right? Well dialogue can do telling rather than showing. Why was he shaking? What did it look like? Were his actions affected by his shaking? I need to be at the place where I am answering one or all of those questions rather than “I was shaking.”
It’s the same way with character development. My main character is generally OK with having a consistent more complex view of life, but my supporting characters have been cutouts… cardboard or foamboard.
I read this weekend, in a critique of someone else’s work, of the term ‘character arc’. I had never thought of that concept, being the unschooled neophyte that I am. I was aware that you’ve got to have your character change in some fashion to make him/her more interesting… I never thought of it as a character arc in the same sense as a story arc.
So the past week has been one more of practice and discovery. Progress? I think the week has been good for my mind set. I have decided to set aside the novel I have been working on for a couple of more weeks as I get some more practice in short story form about developing a better telling style.
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