allaboutwriting

Writing Advice, Rules, and Guidelines

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 07:16:29 +0100

Any writer with any interest in the craft of writing eventually winds up with a veritable library of writing guides, style manuals, and how-to books along with a media-player full of podcasts and an RSS reader full of articles by writers. These sources offer advice on any and every aspect of writing; from story development to marketing and everything in between. We wind up with thousands of books, articles, and multimedia discussions on pretty much every topic related at all tangentially to the writing craft or the publication process. I’m no exception.

There are two main problems with this plethora of sources. The first problem is that none of the ‘advice’ is actually advice, as such, at least, not the sort of advice that a lawyer or an accountant will give. And the reason for that is because, unlike law and accounting, which have fairly clear rules about what works and what doesn’t, the act of creative writing doesn’t appear to have any rules at all.

The second problem is that, few of the people giving the advice agree on anything except the broadest generalisations, due, of course, to the nature of the first problem. Another aspect of this is that so much of this ‘advice’ is referred to in confusing and inaccurate terms. You have ‘writing advice’ that isn’t advice but ‘this is how I did it’ memoir. You have ‘submission guidelines’ that aren’t guidelines at all, but are very strictly enforced publisher or agency submission rules. And you have ‘rules of fiction writing’ that aren’t rules, but are more like advice.

I think what we need is a new nomenclature.

We have been told for years that there are rules — rules for good grammar, rules for submissions to publishers, rules of structure, characterisation, plotting — and we have seen, or heard of, any number of works that appear to do everything from gently bending to violently shattering those rules.

If you listen to the podcasts of professional writers, you’ll hear them edging around the whole idea of rules by declaring that, well, really, there are no rules, just guidelines. This is in stark contrast to the old days where you followed a railway-line to publication. It was rigidly controlled, there were a number of stations along the route, and there was no other path but the one laid out.

Nowadays all that has changed. The path to publication is a whole lot more like stumbling across a game-trail through thick woods and hoping it leads you to where you want to go, or, well, anywhere other than around and around in circles.

The major problem with advice about writing, is that there are just too many variables. What sort of writing do you do? Are you a genre writer, or a mainstream writer? (And those two, of themselves, are kind of useless as categorisations because, really, all writing is genre, mainstream itself, is a genre with many sub-genres.)

Who are you? Where are you from? What is your background? What sort of personality do you have? What are your current circumstances? (Are you employed full time, part time, no time? Are you a student? Are you retired? Are you independently wealthy?)

What are your work habits like? Are you a morning person? A lunch-time writer? A night owl? Does it take you a little time to get into the flow so that you need a long block of time for your writing? Or are you the sort of person who can whip out 250 words during that ten-minute coffee break between meetings?

Why are you writing? To be published? To make money? To become famous? To get your story out there? To see your name in print? To justify all the time you spend away from family and friends in a dark closet, your face lit by the ghostly glow of your laptop’s monitor as you tap out the warped tales of your fevered imaginings? To prove that your writing is not just a hobby, dammit!?

All of this is going to change the relevance of whatever advice you hear. The fact is that, really, because we are all unique individuals, no one person’s advice is going to be applicable to us. This is why we get so many books, and listen to so many blogs, and still find ourselves having to hack our own path through the jungle of literary creation. Sometimes the advice we get will enable us to pick up a better machete. Sometimes it will let us sharpen our tools.

Sometimes though, the advice, if we take it too seriously, can actually hinder our efforts, like changing that machete for a pen-knife, or for a chainsaw. You might think that a chainsaw would work better, but, chances are, if you’re stopping to cut down every tree that’s in your way, it’s going to take you an awful long time to make any progress at all, despite the trail of destruction you leave in your wake.

So, what’s this post all about? Well, I’m giving you some writing advice. Something that has stood me in good stead. Read all the books, listen to all the podcasts, talk to any writer who will give you more than the time of day, and then go away and look objectively at everything you’ve heard, look hard, and think carefully about who you are and what you want, and then make up your own tool-kit from those pieces of advice that make sense to you. There are no rules, just guidelines. Be prepared to experiment, and to have experiments fail. It took humanity an awful long time to invent powered flight, but everyone who tried added a draft to the plans that finally made powered flight possible. You can do the same.

Horns of a Dilemma

Wed, 29 May 2013 06:22:56 +0100

If you stop and think about it, as writers, there are really only two things we can do to improve our craft; practice, and study. Practice, is, of course, of great import, but I think it loses the paramount position to study because without knowing what you’re doing (which is the purpose of study) no amount of practice is going to make you any better.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we should just buy all the books on writing and do all the exercises and prompts in them. For one thing, there are just too many of them, and not all of them are going to work with any single person’s style. For another thing, reading all of those books will take time away from the practicing part of the equation. So what should we do? Well, practice and study, study and practice. Take a dual approach to the problem. But, really, just studying writing isn’t really going to improve our writing beyond a certain technical level of competence.

That competence is absolutely necessary, but competence alone isn’t enough. As I mentioned in my last post, what we need is the spark of imagination that turns a competent idea into an amazing story. And the second best way to do that is to study. Second best, because, obviously, the best is to actually go out and live an amazing life and do amazing things, and then come back and tell everyone about them.

Failing the ability to do that, we can read books about people who have done it, or about the places we want to visit, sometime, in the by-and-by. The more we know about the world we live in, the better we can craft those worlds of our imagination, and, hopefully, the better we will be able to realise those worlds in our work.

I hate to break out a crusty cliche like, ‘The internet is a great resource for discovering new things,’ but usually these things are cliches for a reason. Usually it’s because there’s at least a grain of truth hidden in them somewhere. Of course, sometimes that grain is the size of Everest, but we are usually all quite happy to ignore elephants in our rooms, so why not a mountain in our imaginations?

Wikipedia is a great source, but everyone knows about that, and knows the risks and limitations that go with it. It’s a great jumping off point, but not a great place to ground your investigations.

There are all sorts of free books available on Amazon or at Project Gutenberg. These are usually (read ‘almost always’) old, out-of-copyright books. But if your topic is historical, that’s fine. These books don’t necessarily have the most up to date information about the topic, but they do have the information that was common currency at the time they were published, and if you’re writing a fantasy or an alternate history, or just don’t really know what you’re interested in yet, then these old books are a great way to get information about any number of topics. They’re also a great way to get a feel for a period if you’re writing a period piece – read the books that the people of your period would have read.

If you are after a slightly more modern take on a specific topic, I can’t recommend a site called Questia enough. It’s kind of like an on-line library containing journals, newspapers, magazines, books, and encyclopaedias; all of them searchable either by key word, or topic. You have to pay a fee if you want to read the full text of the various articles and books, and they aren’t downloadable, but you can create your own bookshelves on their site, divided into projects. There are monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, and annual payment options available. For someone like me who lives far from a useful library, Questia is like living next to a National Library that happens to be open 24/7 and has really helpful staff.

Another way to study if you’re trying to improve your craft, is, of course, to go back to those books you love and re-read them, but do it a little more critically than you did on first read-through. Look at them and try to see what it was about them that captured your attention, and what things irritate or annoy you now, as a more mature reader. Write all that down and think about it a bit. This is study too. Looking at those books that, obviously, were good enough to make it past the Gatekeepers’ filters and onto the shelves of bookstores, should provide you with some hints as to what you should be focusing on in your own writing.

There’s always more to learn. That is both the greatest bane and the greatest blessing of the world we live in. There’s always more to learn, so don’t stop learning. Get inspired, and then go write.

Ideas & Imagination

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:19:25 +0100

I was talking to a friend the other day and he made a comment about how (un)inspiring country life was and how, as a writer, he needed vibrant stimulation! I suggested that vibrant stimulation was great for the generation of ideas but that constant stimulation was hell on the actual writing process. He reminded me that, without the ideas, there is no writing, which is true enough, but not the whole story, just as the supposed tedium of country life and the supposed vibrancy of city life isn’t an entirely accurate representation — my neighbourhood is pretty sedate, not to say sleepy.

Okay. So, some context would probably be useful at this point. At the beginning of the year I was working on a novel titled Oath-Bound. I’d gotten a complete draft knocked up in about six weeks and then gone back to do a continuity edit. The ‘continuity edit’ quickly turned into a major edit with rewrites, which then turned into a complete rewrite of the story that soon bore only tangental resemblance to the first draft. I finally pulled myself up short when I found that I had just thrown my complete first draft into Scrivener’s ‘off-cuts’ bin and was staring at an empty Draft folder. That’s not how you’re supposed to approach the editing process, at least, not this early in the game. So I found all those orphaned files and brought them back to the Draft Folder and left them there to sooth their ruffled feathers while I went off to scratch up some other ideas.

I’d been working on that manuscript for two and a half months though, every spare hour I could find. And when I walked away from it, I found that my inspiration-well was dry. I had to keep cranking out words though, because I had a nice long chain on the Magic Spreadsheet, and I didn’t want to break that. I went back to my files and notebooks and started pulling out story prompts and ideas and tried to turn one of those into a story. I failed every time. Oh, I could do a treatment of the idea, or develop the prompt into something more concrete than a one sentence character or location description; but it seemed that no matter how many questions I asked myself about the character or the setting or the conflict, my inspiration just wouldn’t latch onto any of those seeds and fertilise it.

I went through another period of self-doubt that lasted several weeks. Then I realised that, to extend the gardening metaphor, I’d been tossing seeds into sterile soil. What I needed to do was add some fork some fertiliser through it. Or, to return to my ‘well’ metaphor, I needed to prime the pump with some water first. I needed, to escape from the circling vultures of metaphor, to go out and live a little, or, failing the opportunity to do that, live vicariously through other people’s books and movies and podcasts. I needed to immerse myself in other people’s imaginary worlds, or even just in the real world as other people saw it, in order to prime that pump or fertilise that field because it’s not enough to have an idea seed, you have to provide it with well-fertilised soil and just the right amount of water and sunshine.

And that, really, might be the difference between a writer and a non-writer. It’s not that the non-writer never comes up with story ideas, it’s that they don’t know how to tend them, how much and what sort of fertiliser to supply, how much water to give them, or what sort of climate the young story-plant needs. Because a story, just like a young plant, is terribly susceptible to the wrong sort of soil and fertiliser or too much or too little water or too much or not enough sunlight. New stories, like young plants, are fragile things, and it takes a careful and skilful gardener to grow them.

But this raises a question. A gardener in London can grow plants that are native to the tropics as long as she or he has a good greenhouse. Is it possible for a writer to create an artificial environment for the growth and development of story seeds? I think it is. I think that this environment is different for each writer, and it will take a bit of trial and error for the writer to get it right. And not every story seed will respond to the same environment in the same way.

There’s another point to this as well, I think. There are natural gardeners, people who just seem to know instinctively what soil and sunlight a seed needs; people who are able to cultivate almost any sort of plant. Likewise, there are writers who can do the same thing. There are others, though, people who love writing, or gardening, and though they are not at first very skilled, because of their love of their craft, continue to work at it until they develop the skills necessary to become experts. This might seem a little pie-in-the-sky optimistic, but, dammit, I’ve got to believe it’s true! And, while I’m testing out my theory, I’m going to keep writing. I’m going to keep trying different ways to ideas into stories and I’m going to keep believing that one day I’m going to have a crop of story-plants that everyone is going to want to consume.

Magic Spreadsheet

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:33:36 +0100

Ok, so it’s been a while, too long really, and, as always, I have some good excuses that I’m not going to share because, as my old man always said, ‘Excuses just aren’t good enough.’ I’d call them reasons, but, really, reasons are the same as excuses when you’re apologising.

What I’d like to talk about today is the Magic Spreadsheet!

This is a Google-doc created by Tony Pisculli (Travis Gramkowski Senzaki added the live leader board). It’s NOT a Wiki. It is, however, maintained by the efforts of Tony, Travis, Mark Lindberg, and myself. Tony is working on a website version because there are now so many people on the Spreadsheet that it keeps threatening to overload.

The Magic Spreadsheet, simply, is just a word-count tracker. You put in your numbers and it counts them up for you. Where the magic comes in is in the gamification aspects that Tony added.

The purpose of the MS is to encourage its users to write a minimum of 250 words every day. That doesn’t seem like much, and it isn’t, but if you do 250 words a day you’ll have a 50k word novel in less than a year. In order to encourage you to write those 250 words, the MS gives you cumulative points for every day you write, so if you write 250 words for 50 days on the 50^th day you’ll get 50 points. But wait, there’s more! There are also bonus points for writing more words. You get an extra point for doing 500 words, another for getting 1000, and another for getting 2000.

There are also level achievements that are reached by getting points which then unlock the ability to get even more points, but at the price of a raised ‘Level Minimum’. At Level 2, to keep the bonus points, you need to write 300 words a day, at Level 3 it’s 350, at Level 4 it’s 400 and so on. This is connected to the consistency – that you have continued to maintain the minimum for your level every day. If you are at level 3 and only do 250 words, you will max out at 30 points instead of the 100+ possible. Tony arranged it so that if you maintain the minimum 250 words a day, you’ll level up about every 30 days. You can do this quicker, of course, by writing above the minimum. But it really only works if you write every day.

I’ve been using it since mid January, I achieved my 100^th link last week (each day is a ‘link’ in your ‘chain’ of daily writing). I have also written close to 200k words in those 100 days at an average of just over 1800 words a day. I don’t think I’ve ever written that much that consistently ever before, and that is the magic of the spreadsheet.

The Magic is enhanced by the Facebook and Google+ communities that have grown up around it. These are full of great people, all writers, all supporting and encouraging each other. And all looking forward to the day the Magic Cricket, Tony’s web-site version, goes live.

Talent vs Skill

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:23:31 +0100

The Roundtable Podcast is amazing. It is interesting, insightful, and instructional, not to mention alliterative. They put out two shows a week. One is called “Twenty minutes with…” and is a discussion with the week’s guest host about writing, editing, and their careers. The ‘twenty minutes’ usually runs a bit longer than twenty minutes, but I’m still left wanting more. The second part of the show is the ‘Workshop Episode’ where a guest writer brings a work in progress to Dave, Brion, and the guest host, and gives a synopsis of it and then has it workshopped. Listening to the workshop is an incredible learning experience. The hosts throw ideas at the story, at all different aspects of the story - from character creation, to world building, to plot – and the guest writer takes what is offered or lets it slide. This podcast has an ‘explicit’ rating, more for the use of ‘vulgar’ language than for anything else. It’s a podcast I highly recommend subscribing to.

Today I want to talk about a pair of episodes that aired in June last year. The ‘Roundtable Goes to Balticon’ episodes, of which there is a part one and a part two. In these episodes, Dave plays recordings of a dozen authors’ replies to the same question: “Is talent something you’re born with, or is it something you acquire?”

I found the answers to this question inspiring. The consensus seemed to be that, while there is such a thing as natural talent, it is of considerably less relevance to success than enthusiasm and hard work. As someone who has often struggled with the idea that I am talentless, and therefore should give up my dream of being a published novelist, I found this to be both satisfying and inspirational. Talent is something you can develop though hard work. If you love what you’re doing, and work hard at it, you can go a lot farther than someone with amazing talent who rests upon the laurels of that talent and doesn’t put in the work necessary to really develop it.

Mozart was brought up at least once, as being the epitome of natural Talent. But the thing that most people forget about Mozart was that, talented as he was, he also practiced a lot, developing that talent.

It’s a relief, really, to learn that, what it all comes down to is hard work. A relief because, well, hard work is something we can all do if we put our minds to it. There is a magic trick to success. Practice. It might not make perfect, and really, who would want it to? But it is the road towards perfection, and on that road lies personal satisfaction with work well done, and through that, success.

Plotting and Outlining

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 07:02:22 +0100

I had planned to write a post about plotting about a month ago and just talk about the different methods I’ve seen discussed and where you can find more information on them. I went through this thing last year where I was really into outlining and trying to learn as much as possible about it. I’d been trying to deal with the Wayfarer edits and was hopelessly stuck and hoped that by learning more about outlining I might be able to make one for Wayfarer that would show me the way forward. It didn’t work, but I did find out a fair bit about different styles of outlining and writing, and I thought I’d share some of that.

Well, that was the plan. I even went and got up a list of links to sites and books dealing with outlining and plotting. Then I got so busy finishing the first draft of my latest novel, tentatively titled Oath-Bound, that I didn’t have any energy left to work on anything else for several weeks. After that, well, I didn’t want to jinx myself by talking about my new system until after I’d seen it perform. So, now that I’ve actually finished an entire draft of a story, and have started doing the continuity rewrites and edits, I finally feel comfortable talking about how I came to like, and be able to use, an outline.

I’ve never been much of an outliner. The few times I tried in the past, once I had that outline done, my interest in the story died. I’ve had similar problems in talking about stories. If I talked about it, that seemed to satisfy whatever crazy sprite it is that drives me to create. The only time I had any success with outlining was when I created an outline for a story that I’d already finished but wasn’t totally satisfied with. By creating an outline for it I was able to see where the holes were and fill them.

Inspired by that success, I wrote a detailed outline for a story that was only half completed. I used several of the methods described in the links below – the Hollywood formula, the Seven-Step formula, the Hero’s Journey. [see links at the bottom] I ended up with a beautiful outline, and a dead story.

So now we come to my latest novel, tentatively titled ‘Oath-Bound’. I started it, sans-outline, during my writing binge late last year. And it died. It was originally a writing exercise based on a writing prompt from, I think, one of the Writing Excuses shows. I can’t recall the exact wording of the prompt but I think it was something like, ‘Retell a fairy story with a totally new twist.’ So my idea for that was to have the princess be the one rescuing herself from the ‘tower’ and having to perform all of these crazy quests in order to break the power of the sorceress who had supplanted her as ruler. Not a bad idea, but it had nothing concrete behind it. It was too vague, which was why it stalled out.

In mid January this year, inspired by the Magic Spreadsheet (a Google-doc created by Tony Pisculli), I returned to that story and tried to write myself out of the corner I had written myself into last year. I did some character and plot development, the broadest strokes of an outline, and some editing of those early chapters, leaving me with about 10k words. Then, February 1st, I started writing.

That first, broad-strokes outline was not a roadmap, it was more like a series of signposts identifying natural landmarks. It was a list of plot points that had arisen out of a series of questions that I’d asked myself – Who, What, When, Where, How, and, especially, Why – about my story. And, key point, making sure that for every desire, there was an obstacle. Out of the crisis of obstructed desire comes plot.

As I wrote, I discovered new things about my characters and began to add some more specific details to those character sheets I’d filled out in January. I still found myself surprised, frequently, by what they were doing and saying, because I was discovering who they were as I went along.

About this time, when I realised that I needed more than one POV character, that list of plot points began to get longer and, because there was more than one POV character now, more complicated. Some points only related to one of the characters and not the other. So I flipped my document on its side and divided the page up into columns, three at first, then later adding a fourth to use for the character arc points.

I created what was, in essence, a plot timeline. Each page was a separate scene I had my page into four columns. The first was for character arc points; the second and third were for POV1 and POV2, to show what they were doing in the scene; and the fourth was for all non-POV characters.

In each column, I put check-box lists of all the signposts that were supposed to take place in that scene that related to that character. And, like signposts in remote places the world over, they were subject to vandalism, the wear and tear of nature, and repurposing.

This ‘outline’ document included all those questions and answers that had lead to the original plot points, a list of characters with the bare bones of who they were, and a list of locations with bare bones descriptions so that I had a quick reference for, say, the name of my main character’s horse, the antagonist’s head henchman, or the name of the town a specific event happened in. I know that without lists like those I can spend a frustrated hour looking through my text for that information, unable to move on until I’ve found it. (Obsessive-compulsive behaviour, I know. I’m working on it.)

Every day I would open up the document with my outline and character arcs in it and have a look at where I was and what was coming up. Once I had looked at what I thought was going to happen, I’d go to the story document and I’d read just a paragraph or two of what I’d written the day before, just as a reminder of where I had left my characters — no editing — and then I’d start writing.

At the end of my writing day, or sometimes in the middle if something drastic happened, I’d go back to my outline and update it to reflect what had actually happened. Sometimes that meant just checking off the various ‘signposts’ that I’d managed to include. Other times, though, it meant going both backwards and forward and rewriting large parts of the outline to reflect some major change.

There was a third document I used throughout the entire process, a ‘notes’ document. I put dated notes in this whenever I made a significant change that would affect the earlier part of the book – like when I made the decision to change the name and gender of my main character – so that I could keep writing without having to go back and spend time on edits. Whenever I made a decision about something, I made a note of it here. It included notes about things like the three different types of magic and how they differed from each other and what they were each able to do. Notes about the social fabric of the culture, notes on dress and hair styles, technology, history, and politics. Basically, anything that impinged on the telling of the story, anything that I had made a decision about and would probably need to reference later, and any ideas for edits or future plot points.

After I was well into the story, beginning to write Act Three, I put all of these notes, the document, and the various parts of the outline, into a Scrivener file. I hadn’t used Scrivener with this project because I was using my iPad to write parts of it while I was going to and from work and Scrivener doesn’t yet have an iPad app. But I found another app, Textilus, that can sync with Scrivener via Dropbox, and I started using that.

Using this method, I was able to write over 62,000 words, almost the entire novel, in February because I was following, however tentatively, an outline that included both plot and character points, a system that I stumbled into, but that I knew was possible because it is very similar to the one that Brandon Sanderson talks about using, except that he develops his before he starts writing rather than as he goes along.

There’s a bonus, too. As I go back and start the rewrites, I’ve got all my notes to look at and see what I was thinking when I wrote most of the scenes, and notes on what edits I need to make in order for them to mesh into the story better. This is making the editing process much easier than I had anticipated, given the painful time I had of it trying to edit Wayfarer. Admittedly, Wayfarer was probably about three or four times the length of this one and a lot more complicated — I wrote a million-word encyclopaedia for Wayfarer, my notes for this one only clock out at around 16k.

But, and here’s the thing, by doing the outline, I actually gave myself ideas for sequels; major landmarks that entire stories could pivot on; with ideas connected to them that I’m actually excited to explore. I’m actually finding writing fun again. For a while there, in the declining days of Wayfarer, it was like pulling teeth without anaesthetic; something that had to be done, but not something to look forward to. And I think rediscovering the fun in writing is the biggest bonus of all.

LINKS

Michael Hauge’s Six Stage Plot Structure

Dramatica’s Comparison of Seven Story Paradigms

Seven-Point Story Structure

Hollywood Formula

Brandon Sanderson on Plotting 1: Lecture at Bringham Young University

Brandon Sanderson on Plotting 2: JordanCon 2010

James Scott Bell, Plot & Structure

Ansen Dibell, Plot

Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Ph.D., Story Structure Architect

Dead Robot's Society, Podcast 1: Outlines

The Snowflake Method

Homecoming

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 03:59:32 +0100

It has been a little over six months since my last post and this is just a quick update on what’s been happening with my writing.

In July I wrote over 60,000 words, almost double my largest count from earlier in the year. Then in August I wrote almost 104,000 words but almost two-thirds of that was research with only 39,000 being new story-text. In September my research total dropped to just over 3,000, from 63,000, but my new story-text total remained fairly steady at 35,000 words. I also wrote over 3,000 words of short reviews for stories posted on YouWriteOn in September. Then in October I only wrote about 25,000 words of new story-text and almost nothing else. This trend continued into November, 8,000 words, and December, 8,000 again.

About mid-way through January of this year, I was reading the blog of I Should Be Writing’s host, Mur Lafferty, over at Murverse, and she talked about the Magic Spreadsheet. I went and checked it out and began to get excited about the idea. When I found myself getting up at one in the morning to get down those 250 words I hadn’t gotten around to during the day, I realised I should start posting my count on the sheet.

The Magic Spreadsheet is a GoogleDocs spreadsheet created by Tony Pisculli. It encourages people to write every day by setting the minimum daily wordcount at 250 words and awarding points for ‘chains’, long runs of unbroken daily work, with extra points for people who write over the minimum. The only way to get a really high point total is to keep writing that minimum day after day. This was a lot like what I had been doing with my productivity tracking, but on a semi-public forum.

Once I started posting my word count on the Daily Writing Challenge ‘Magic Spreadsheet’, I found myself motivated to write every day. For the last couple of weeks of January I worked to edit a story I had started in 2012 but that had stalled on me. I wrote character profiles, and reams of notes on the different ideas I had about the story, then I started editing those first scenes.

Towards the end of January, Tony unveiled the new improved version of the spreadsheet for February which keeps track of more than just our daily wordcount and accumulated points. It also shows, if we want, both our projected wordcount for the story we are working on and how many words remain.

I pushed hard to finish my editing and (minimalist) plotting before the end of the month so that when February 1st rolled around I was ready to start writing new story-text.

[More on plotting in the next post.]

Since February 1st I’ve written over 10,000 words, almost all of it new story-text on this project, tentatively titled ‘Prentice Oath’. I’ve also written another 4,000 words of notes.

The best thing about using the Magic Spreadsheet has been that, once I’ve done my word-count, I can go and do other things like read books or write blog posts without feeling guilty about taking time away from my ‘real’ writing. And that means that when it comes time to write I’m usually looking forward to it because I’m fresh and have had time to think about where the story is going and adsorb new ideas, and there’s nothing a writer needs more if they’re going to keep their writing fresh.

So what do you do to keep your writing fresh and to keep you inspired? What keeps your creativity well full?

Apologies & Updates

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 06:54:24 +0100

I have been absent from this site for a couple of months, for which my sincerest apologies. By way of explanation, I herniated a disc in my lower back in April and was unable to do anything, let alone keep up my blog.

At around the same time I discovered that my big plans for a site dedicated to listing the various genre markets was superfluous as there is already a site that does this better than I would be able to at present. (Duotrope) I was also getting incredibly discouraged about where my novel, Wayfarer, was going and the forced hiatus caused by my back problems made me rethink what I was doing there.

Then, in late May, early June, I stumbled across a lecture series being done by Brandon Sanderson and posted on YouTube. This was for his Creative Writing class at Bringham Young University. Those lectures, and the talks he gave at various Cons which were also posted on YouTube, inspired me to try a different style of plot-driven writing. They also told me that a lot of the problems I was having with Wayfarer stemmed from the fact that I had a chronic case of World-Builder's Disease. I decided to put Wayfarer aside for a time and work on some other projects.

I have, this month, managed to finish the first draft of a new novelette. I'm working towards putting that through the first level of revision by the end of this month with the aim of putting it up on YouWriteOn sometime next month. I live in Japan and don't have access to the sorts of Alpha Readers that Brandon talks about in his lectures. I am hoping that I will be able to use YouWriteOn to fulfil that function instead.

I'm still using some of the techniques suggested by Sage Cohen in her Productivity Pro article. I'm keeping track of my daily word counts, setting goals, and checking back regularly to see how well I'm accomplishing them. So far things have been progressing well. I'm consistently able to achieve higher levels of productivity than I had expected, and most of it is in new writing rather than in notes and research.

I'm also listening to Writing Excuses, a podcast done by Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, Brandon Sanderson, and Mary Robinette Kowal. They have a lot of good things to say to the aspiring writer and I cannot recommend the podcast enough.

What have you been doing, listening to, or watching recently that's got you excited?

Call for Submissions

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:10:41 +0100

I’m putting together a list of genre markets which I’m hoping I’ll be able to put up on this site by the end of the month. This will be a database of both magazine and book publishers in both print and on-line formats with contact information, requirements, and type of publication. Genres will include science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird, mystery, erotica, romance, speculative fiction, historical fiction, and occult fiction.

If you’ve got any other categories you think I should be including, or have any market suggestions, feel free to let me know. If you know of anywhere else that has a genre-only market listing, let me know that too.

Productivity Pro Update

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:09:20 +0100

So here we are again, one month on, looking back on what progress I’ve made from following Sage Cohen’s Productivity Pro advice.

The first point I should make is that looking back and comparing my progress has never been so easy. I’ve got daily, weekly, and monthly running totals to compare. I’ve even got totals that provide numbers for how much ‘writing’ I’ve actually done and how much was actually ‘pre-writing‘ — note taking and outlining.

My totals for March were almost three times higher than those for February, and I worked on twice as many stories. My ‘pre-writing’ for March was just under a quarter of my total (non-business related) output. It had been around one-sixth of my total output for February. Of my ‘writing’ total, in February my Blog accounted for about a quarter of the word-count. In March, despite the count actually being fairly similar, the ratio was more like one-eleventh. And none of this takes into account the unknown number of words written commenting on other people’s blogs and interacting with ‘my community’ over the last month.

These comparisons are not exactly fair. I didn’t start tracking my writing until mid-February, though I was able to put some numbers down from earlier in the month. I was (sporadically) working on my novel for most of the early half of February and working out how to implement the Productivity Pro advice for much of the latter half.

I didn’t work on my novel at all in March, having decided to put it aside and concentrate on the short form for a while. The short story, as short as I’ve been writing, actually makes it harder to come up with significant word totals. On a novel, I can write fifteen hundred to three thousand words on any given day on any given chapter and have it be fairly smooth sailing. A lot of my more recent shorts haven’t been much longer than that. Then I have to put it aside and move on to a new story, develop the idea, do some note taking and background development before being able to write the story. With the novel, every day (these days) would be work on the text itself, mainly because I’ve already spent ten years developing the background, the milieu, the history, etc.

To make things a bit easier on myself, I’ve been setting many of the short stories in the same milieu as my novel, but that has also revealed some places where I needed to do further development. With the novel, I had characters who visited a planet for a short period of time before moving on to other worlds and other adventures that were part of a larger galactic-spanning plot.

With the short story, I’m setting the whole story on that one world and using a native of that world to tell the story, that means I need to know a great deal more about the culture and history of his people than I needed for the cursory visit of my non-native characters. Having developed this for the short story, when I return to the novel and bring my characters to this world I’ll be able to give them a much richer experience, and that will translate into a richer experience for my readers too.

So, to return to the topic, there are some very encouraging signs, and part of that is due to Sage’s advice about tracking progress, focusing on my long-term goals, and paying attention to my platform and my community. None of these areas actually makes you a more productive writer, they can even detract from your productivity if you let them dominate your time. What they do accomplish is to provide motivation, stimulation, and encouragement to get your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard. And that, always, will be what actually makes you more productive.