Tag: novel-writing Page 14 of 16

Cuddle Up

By

On June 9, 2012

In Routines, Writer's High

How great is writing in bed? I’ve been away from home all week and the only way I can get into my closed-door writing routine is to do it in my bedroom. I lay under all the heavy covers, all snuggled up, with a stack of pillows behind me, and peck away. This is heaven. It’s warm, it’s cozy, it’s quiet – everything I need to get my mind into a good groove for writing.

This is Mark Twain, another bed-writer.

I’m not all that creative when it comes to location, unlike a friend of mine who will carry her hammock down to the river, set it up and write in it there. At home it’s the couch for me. But I like this bed thing. Especially since, as a night writer, when I’m done I can just close my laptop, set it on the night table, switch off the light and go right to sleep. See? Bliss.

I Got The Blues

By

On June 8, 2012

In Just Keep Writing, Learning, My Failings As A Proper Novelist, Revision

I’m developing a serious hate-on for my first chapter. Even when I was writing it I thought it was a bit weak, but now the further I progress – and the more I read about proper first-chapter development – the more I want to rip it up (or since it’s entirely digital, select-all-delete, I guess) and start fresh. There’s way too much back story and not enough dialogue, and a lot of it comes off a bit smug, I think. Chapter two is on similarly shaky ground, although it has some elements of mystery and foreshadowing that are important to the rest of the story. Both deal with character development, I suppose – it’s not like the first 12,000 words are a recitation of the periodic table of elements or anything similiarly pointless – but when I read it back to myself, I think “boring, boring, boring” or maybe TL;DR. Which is the kiss of death for any novel, as I’ve been told over and over. I care about Callie because she lives in my head, and I’ll listen to pretty much anything she tells me, but I’m not sure, having just read the first chapter, that anyone else would. By the time you get to the end of chapter two, I think there’s definitely incentive to keep reading, but the fickle reader, short on time, might decide to move on to something else if the first ten pages don’t capture their interest.

But I have a problem, and that problem is revision.

I’ll tell you a secret – I’ve never revised anything I’ve written. Ever. I don’t do drafts. I do final products. This is how I would write papers in university: I would do all my research, get all my supporting arguments and quotes in order, then sit on it for a week or two and plan the whole thing out in my head, going over and over it until I liked the way it fit together. Then, usually a day or two before it was due, I would sit down and write the entire thing in one sitting, from beginning to end. I’d usually check it over once for spelling and grammar – I often mis-type ‘from’ as ‘form,’ for instance – and then print it and submit. The end. I graduated with a GPA of 3.78 so obviously the system works well for me – when it comes to 5,000-word papers, that is. Obviously this project is a bit bigger than that, which is why, without all the mulling and stewing and planning in my head beforehand that’s occurred with the major scenes but not the connecting ones, I’m sometimes only able to produce 500 words an hour.

So I find myself in unchartered territory here. I need to revise. I need to strip and chop and rebuild and strengthen. It’s not what I’m used to. It’s not something I imagine I’m all that proficient at – I need to find some good ‘how to revise your writing’ blog posts – but sooner or later, I need to head down that road. And with all my unfamiliarity with the process, I have no idea if I should be doing that now, while it’s especially bothering me, or just keep moving forward, and make that the first agenda on the revision task sheet. I have a feeling if I don’t deal with it soon, my feelings about chapter one are going to get worse and worse until I start to question the entire project’s worth, which won’t be good for my future as a novelist. But it seems like such a step backwards, a giving-in to the inner editor who really needs to just shut up and let me work, dammit. I am open to suggestion and wisdom and experience from all sources.

Next up in the series I may start calling My Failings As A Proper Novelist: Why I Also Don’t Write Outlines (But Should Get Over That, Already)

You know when…

By

On June 5, 2012

In Just Keep Writing, Things That Are Hard

…you spend what seems like a good amount of time writing, and you feel like you’ve really accomplished a lot, and then you check your word count for the day and it’s only like 700 words? And then you ask yourself how the hell it took you two hours to accomplish such a meagre output?

Welcome to my life for the past two weeks.

It’s like chipping away at granite, people. With a toothpick.

Count ‘Em Up

By

On May 31, 2012

In By the Numbers, Excitement, Writer's High

I’m 13,000 and change words away from this being the longest thing I’ve ever written. And I feel like I’m just starting to scratch the surface. When I did NaNo I hit this mark and wondered if the story would be over before I made my 50,000 word goal. Now I’m feeling like it’s entirely possible I’ll run over 100,000. It’s a wonderful feeling. 🙂

Diversions

By

On May 28, 2012

In Distractions

The French Open started yesterday and there’s evening coverage every night. I don’t think I’m going to get much writing done for the next two weeks. I’ll call it research into present-day French fashion and pasttimes… I wonder if I can work Roland Garros into the plot somehow?

What’s in a name, and all that

By

On May 28, 2012

In Distractions, Talking It Out, Things That Are Hard

By far one of the hardest things about writing for me is choosing names for my fictitious people and places. Callie is actually the third or fourth name for that character, and while in the context of the story it’s the best fit, it’s still not my favourite, although it’s grown on me quite a bit. I’m constantly googling things like “french names for boys” or “common last names” because I can never come up with anything I like on my own. Nothing derails my writer’s flow like introducing a new character – whether significant or incidental – and having to call them something.

It’s been mentioned to me that some of my creations’ appellations are a bit too trendy, and I suppose when looked at in a group, that’s true, but I strongly resist having a book full of Joes and Marys and Bills.

Tonight I’ve actually stopped writing for the night in mid-sentence – “He introduced himself as detective…” rather than spend twenty minutes struggling to come up with something I like the sound of. That’ll be the first thing I can tackle tomorrow night with a fresh head.

It’s nice when something just clicks though. Awhile back I was on the bus coming home from work and saw a word carved into the wall of a bus shelter and knew exactly which character I’d give it to. But that’s just one name, and it’s not the one I need tonight.

Crisis Averted

By

On May 24, 2012

In Learning, Research, Writer's Low

Let this be a lesson to everyone who uses more than one device. Last week my iPad suffered an unfortunate meeting with a glass of juice and has been a little out of sorts ever since – completely unusable, actually (Lesson within the lesson – don’t leave glasses of juice around your iPad when you have a two-year-old). I realized today that all my research bookmarks for my book were on the iPad, and not only was it not working, it had also been reset and wiped clean of all its apps and data at the Apple store when I took it in to see if it could be saved. Dozens of links to much-needed information gone, I thought, and I’d neglected to check the box to keep bookmarks synced in iTunes when I’d backed it up beforehand. Honestly, the thought that I should back them up too had never occurred to me.

Thankfully, after an hour of frantic forum and help topic reading, as well as many curse words both typed and uttered aloud, I recovered all the bookmarks directly from the iPad and now have them safely synced in Firefox.

Giant sigh of relief.

The lesson: it’s not enough to back up the document you write in. Save EVERYTHING you need to do your work, and save yourself some heartache.

Ideas

By

On May 22, 2012

In Big Ideas, Organizing, Routines

Where a writer gets his or her ideas is apparently a hot topic. Obviously, fiction writers need to have a good imagination and creativity to spare, but the source of the inspiration is pretty varied. Dreams, true events, childhood experiences, even a mystical muse, can all get a writer working on a project.

My ideas mostly come from music. My entire concept for these books came to me because two songs played back-to-back on my iPod one day driving my daughter to school. It was as simple and straight-forward as that. In the first chapter I talk about how sometimes Callie gets an idea for a song all at once, like a high-speed download into her brain. Well, that’s basically what happened to me. The first song gave me the idea for Callie herself, and the second created the scenario for the plot and built more on her as a person and introduced the second main character (who I JUST got to write about for the first time – FINALLY! – the other day and I’m so pleased to start getting into his head at long last). In about eight minutes, I had a whole new world in my head and all these people started talking to me.

The rest is minor details, and like I’ve mentioned before, some stuff I’ve written doesn’t occur to me until I start working through a scene. Other parts have come after copious amounts of research. But the basic story arc all came about because of the whim of the shuffle algorithm.

With that I started looking to some other songs I like to fill in holes or describe relationships or certain scenes, with interesting results. Usually it’s a matter of just listening and waiting for the right song to come up. Sometimes it’s as little as one line of lyrics, others it’s the entire song from beginning to end. And there are definitely specific songs that I think about when I’m describing some of Callie’s work – a detriment to me because eventually I’m going to have to come up with some original lyrics for her, and that’s hard to do when you’re already fixated on something someone else wrote as your inspiration. Nothing beats the car for letting new ideas come to me, although now that it’s getting warmer out, I’m hoping walking can replace a lot of that.

When I’m writing a scene that has a song that inspired it, I usually put it on repeat – like I described in my last post – to keep my head in that emotion I’m trying to convey (I’m often prone to distraction, sadly). The second song of the original duo I’ve listened to over 250 times since I started writing, according to iTunes, and I have a nice little playlist built up with a bunch of songs that have triggered something for me.

Everything else comes from idle daydreams, but without those two songs coming up one day in February, I wouldn’t be on this adventure today. It may not be a typical path for a writer to take, but I’m going to run with it and see where it takes me.

Finally

By

On May 18, 2012

In Musical Interlude, Routines, Talking It Out

I put this song on repeat in iTunes tonight and worked my way through the part I’ve been dreading to write all week. Yes, it was hard. Yes, there were tears. But it wasn’t as hard and there weren’t as many tears as I expected.

Tomorrow I move on and while I can’t really say the story’s going to get any happier, this is as bad as it gets for the next little while.

Avoidance

By

On May 15, 2012

In Distractions, Just Keep Writing

Well it seems I’m taking a little break from my book this week, after scrambling toward the end of chapter six in several marathon writing sessions. I’m avoiding starting it up again because I’m at a painful part in the story, and every time I think about delving into it, I feel a little sick to my stomach. So I’ve been updating this blog, pinned a bunch of stuff to my characters’ Pinterest boards and went over my first readers’ suggestions and comments, but haven’t actually opened the document up to write anything new since last Wednesday.

When I think about it, I cry. And that makes me realize I may have invested a little bit too much of myself into this story. I also feel like I can never find the words to do the emotions of the scene in my head justice.

Or it means I’m a little unstable right now. Really, it’s 50/50.

What I need is a nice quiet evening, a couple glasses of wine, a box of kleenex and a playlist of sad songs.

Or for someone to punch me in the back of the head and scream “start writing!” in my ear as loudly as they can.

Page 14 of 16

← Previous

Next →

Archives

Categories