Tag: writing

Research

By

On April 19, 2012

In Learning

Some nights I don’t get a lot of words down on my electronic paper, but I do a lot of reading and researching for points large and small. I love this project because I’ve gotten to read up on such a diverse list of things. Topics so far have included:

  • electric guitars
  • Montmartre
  • tarot
  • strip-club scams
  • keratin in human hair vs spider silk
  • automatic writing
  • Roman mythology
  • Earth energy
  • alchemy
  • funny t-shirts
  • tectonic plates and tidal waves in the Southern hemisphere
  • phobias

Not everything I’ve researched has actually been implemented in the story, but knowing a bit about something that will be useful in the future helps me plot out those sections in my head. I spent most of tonight trying to tease out a synonym for something that I liked the sound of, and just now, at this moment, thought of a way that I could just make up my own instead and have it seem plausible. Because plausibility is important when you’re writing supernatural fiction, right?

Overcoming apathy

By

On April 18, 2012

In Just Keep Writing, Routines

I went away on vacation for a week and despite my best intentions and dreams of sitting on the beach and by the pool all day, writing endless reams of inspired prose, I never typed a single word. Never opened my document, as a matter of fact. Not even on those six-hour flights on planes without seatback televisions.

It’s easy to fall out of a habit. My routine is to write in the evenings, usually from 11pm until midnight or thereinabouts. Taking a bit of advice from Stephen King’s On Writing, I go down to the basement, close the door of the family room, get comfy (but not too comfy) and go to work without distractions. And I find I really rely on my closed-door routine. In a smallish Hawaiian condo basically confined to a single room after 9pm (so the kids can sleep undisturbed) I couldn’t make my closed-door process work. And I don’t seem to have the right frame of mind to write during the daytime. So when we came back home, I felt apathetic about writing again, compounded by the fact that I didn’t really like how the scene I was in the middle of was going. Even after a three-hour Higher Ground cafe writing marathon with my partner in novelling, I still wasn’t accomplishing much. Last night I struggled through 250 measly words, and that in an hour and a half.

Tonight I broke through. I like how things are shaping up again, I found myself composing a scene I hadn’t even imagined until I started writing (which are usually my favourite ones) and I’m feeling good about where I’ll pick up tomorrow.

One of my supporting characters, Dex, is reminding me more and more of my brother Dan every scene I put him in. Tonight I laughed out loud at something he said, and I didn’t even know he was going to say it until the dialogue started flowing.

I also hit page 30 in my document, which is kind of a milestone. At 12-pt, single spaced, that’s around 18,000 words, and I added another 1,300 or so tonight. For me that’s a good night. I’m a slow, methodical, everything-right-the-first-time kind of writer. I need to think it all through first. A lot of people say the only way to write is to just spew it all out and revise later, but that’s not me – and explaining that is a post for another day. Tonight I’m happy with my progress and looking forward to what the future brings – even if I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next 20 pages!

Organization

By

On April 17, 2012

In Organizing

Before I started writing I decided that this time, after my disastrously unorganized by-the-seat-of-my-pants NaNoWriMo 2011 novel, that I would get my thoughts in order and plot out a few things so I’d know what went where. I’m planning a series of three novels and the entire storyline was just stirring around in my head. Which is great because on one hand, when you simmer something for a long time the flavours become concentrated and the thinness boils away, but on the other hand, sometimes stuff slops over the edge of the pot and gets lost.

So I went shopping and bought about five colours each of cue cards and sticky notes and a little box to keep them stored in. Each book would have its own colour card and sticky, with another colour for character notes and a final one for uncategorized ideas. I labelled everything nicely and that box is currently sitting on top of my bookshelf collecting dust, without a single mark on any of the cards. The ones I tucked into my purse for ideas on the go are also blank, other than the ones that were turned into colouring sheets for the kids.

I had a bit more luck with my No Plot? No Problem! book until I got to the part where it started asking me to describe all the characters in detail. That makes no sense to me, because how do I know about them until I write about them? Back to the bookshelf it went too.

Now I’m considering writing out the pivotal scenes already in my head in detail, even though that will mean writing out of order. I tried it a bit with chapter one two but I found it awkward to seam together the pre-written scene with everything else I wrote later that built up to that part. The feedback I got about that chapter said the same.

I don’t want to rely on my less-than-infallible memory to keep everything straight – things are already slipping away and I’ll find myself running through a scene in my head and forgetting some of the dialogue, or why that part was even happening in the first place. Maybe some point-form notes typed out and saved in a separate document? Or give the cue cards another try? I really like the idea of them, I just can’t seem to translate that into actually using them.

In the Beginning

By

On April 17, 2012

In Introduction

Image

I created this blog because I’m in the process of writing my second novel and I often want to talk about how the writing process is going for me, without boring all my facebook friends with the trivialities of this very narrow aspect of my life. If people are reading it, great. If no one is reading it, I’m still getting all the miscellany out of my head, which is also great. This is not about my life, just my book.

Page 16 of 16

← Previous

Archives

Categories