Sunday, 13 July 2014
WEEK THREE - LIKE RUNNING A MARATHON
In which I say more words about writing my novel and compare writing a novel to running a marathon. It's pretty similar in that you have to be crazy to do it and it consumes your life and becomes the only thing you talk about haha.
Sunday, 6 July 2014
WEEK TWO - FIRST DRAFTS
So I talk more about my current novel and about how I go about writing first drafts. This blog is seeing more action than it has in a long time.
Saturday, 5 July 2014
Wow, I'm a terrible blogger...
So it's been...eight months since I updated this blog? I suck etc. But here, have a video of my face talking about writing.
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
NaNoWriMo Week One
I find it so much harder to blog when I have nothing to write about.
Last week, if I'd written this on Friday when I'd intended to, I probably would have had a bit more to say. As is typical for me during NaNoWriMo, I wrote well for the first few days, and then got extremely behind. But I wrote 9,000 words in three days, so now I'm all caught up again. I think I have tennis elbow, though (a pre-existing injury only exacerbated by letting myself get so far behind).
Largely due to this, I think, the lessons I learned during Boot Camp have somewhat fallen by the way side. Most of the last few days have been taken up by word sprints (where you set a timer and write as many words as you can until it goes off), which I'm somewhat excited to say yield about 1000 words every fifteen minutes. This doesn't exactly lead itself to quality writing, or to considering your work as you create it, something I think is necessary to implement the lessons I only just learned from Boot Camp.
It wasn't a waste of time, though - far from it. I've noticed that I'm far more able to consider what should be happening, and how a particular scene should be going, even if it isn't going quite as planned. I'm realising my mistakes and making notes about how I should fix them.
One of the things I need to fix, again an issue caused by word sprints, is that most of my scenes are far too long. I'm 20, 000 words in, and I'm only just starting the third scene - a scene that should probably have ended 5000 words ago. I also need to move some scenes around.
I feel like, in some ways, that NaNoWriMo is like writing an extended outline of the planning you did beforehand. I'm getting the bones of the story down on paper, but I'm also figuring out all the things I need to plan that I hadn't planned before - like the rules of magic in my universe, for example (kind of a biggie).
On the plus side, though, I'm really enjoying the story. The characters are fun, and I've had some breakthroughs about other characters I need to introduce. I'm also not giving myself the chance to over-analyse anything, which is usually while I write so slowly. Also, although I haven't read over much of what I've read (mostly out of fear of how terrible a writer I am), most of what I've caught sight of my accident hasn't been half-bad, writing wise.
The other bonus of doing NaNoWriMo is the social side. I'm really active in the meet-up groups, and it's great to meet so many new people, especially fellow writers. And, despite the chatter that goes on, I'm still up to date on my word count, so yay, basically.
I was about to say that another bonus is that I've been maintaining a social life, but then I realised that actually, I haven't, really. I went out briefly on the weekend with non-writers (although it turned out that one of them had done NaNoWriMo in the past, so we ended up talking about that), and other than that I've left the house to go to meet-up groups or to go out and write. Or to go to work, but I write for a living too, so not sure if that really counts. So that's a bit of a fail.
But who cares? I've got 20,000 words.
Last week, if I'd written this on Friday when I'd intended to, I probably would have had a bit more to say. As is typical for me during NaNoWriMo, I wrote well for the first few days, and then got extremely behind. But I wrote 9,000 words in three days, so now I'm all caught up again. I think I have tennis elbow, though (a pre-existing injury only exacerbated by letting myself get so far behind).
Largely due to this, I think, the lessons I learned during Boot Camp have somewhat fallen by the way side. Most of the last few days have been taken up by word sprints (where you set a timer and write as many words as you can until it goes off), which I'm somewhat excited to say yield about 1000 words every fifteen minutes. This doesn't exactly lead itself to quality writing, or to considering your work as you create it, something I think is necessary to implement the lessons I only just learned from Boot Camp.
It wasn't a waste of time, though - far from it. I've noticed that I'm far more able to consider what should be happening, and how a particular scene should be going, even if it isn't going quite as planned. I'm realising my mistakes and making notes about how I should fix them.
One of the things I need to fix, again an issue caused by word sprints, is that most of my scenes are far too long. I'm 20, 000 words in, and I'm only just starting the third scene - a scene that should probably have ended 5000 words ago. I also need to move some scenes around.
I feel like, in some ways, that NaNoWriMo is like writing an extended outline of the planning you did beforehand. I'm getting the bones of the story down on paper, but I'm also figuring out all the things I need to plan that I hadn't planned before - like the rules of magic in my universe, for example (kind of a biggie).
On the plus side, though, I'm really enjoying the story. The characters are fun, and I've had some breakthroughs about other characters I need to introduce. I'm also not giving myself the chance to over-analyse anything, which is usually while I write so slowly. Also, although I haven't read over much of what I've read (mostly out of fear of how terrible a writer I am), most of what I've caught sight of my accident hasn't been half-bad, writing wise.
The other bonus of doing NaNoWriMo is the social side. I'm really active in the meet-up groups, and it's great to meet so many new people, especially fellow writers. And, despite the chatter that goes on, I'm still up to date on my word count, so yay, basically.
I was about to say that another bonus is that I've been maintaining a social life, but then I realised that actually, I haven't, really. I went out briefly on the weekend with non-writers (although it turned out that one of them had done NaNoWriMo in the past, so we ended up talking about that), and other than that I've left the house to go to meet-up groups or to go out and write. Or to go to work, but I write for a living too, so not sure if that really counts. So that's a bit of a fail.
But who cares? I've got 20,000 words.
Thursday, 31 October 2013
Blog Post #17
Done! All done! I have completed the last three exercises with one hour and 29 minutes to spare. Now to write about them.
The next exercise is about creating characters arcs for your secondary characters. Even if they die halfway through or leave the main narrative arc you should still know what path they take once they leave, or what would have happened to them if they survived.
This works on the same principle as plotting your antagonists storyline - it makes your overall plotline make more sense, and it fills in space in the storyline you might not otherwise have filled. I've now decided who is going to die in my story, based on their plotline - I didn't know that before. I've also come up with several other scenes for the main plotline which will (hopefully) make it more interesting, and expand the action a bit more.
Knowing their character arc also effects things like dialogue, which I was struggling with. Now I know what they might do or have done, I can understand better how they might react to a situation, and whether it would be important to them or not.
At some point I'm going to go through and create a timeline for all the events within the time-frame of the novel, just so I know what is going on at all times.
That will also involve the next exercise, which is about subplots. In this exercise you were supposed to take the subplots you came up with on day 11 (which for me was about three days ago?), and then think of how they could complicate the main plotline.
I actually already knew a lot of this already, just from all the other exercises I'd done. Some of it came up as recently as the plotting of the secondary characters' plotlines. That made the exercise pretty easy.
However, I did still have to come up with at least three ways in which these subplots could complicate the main storyline.
A lot of this is ground I already covered in the original post about subplots, so I won't go over it here. However, I will say that again this exercise has given my main plotline more depth. It also gave me a way to make a formerly boring characteristic of a character much more interesting.
That is the main point of subplots, really - to make the main plot more interesting. Also, the more complicated your main plot is, the longer your novel and the more you'll have to write about for NaNoWriMo. Can you tell I'm thinking about NaNoWriMo a lot now?
With that in mind, I'm just going to summarise the last exercise quickly. Then I'm going to sleep...
The last exercise is about comparing your characters to characters in published novels. The exercise asked you to do this for all your characters, but I don't actually have time, so I just did it for my main character.
This was actually an amazingly helpful exercise. I picked two books - Fairest by Gail Carson Levine and The Indigo Spell by Richelle Mead. Although the characters are not exactly like my lead, they do share some characteristics.
I read through some sections of dialogue, and then I practised writing my own. Even just reading through the dialogue and thinking about how it worked helped me a lot in improving my own dialogue. I guess that's the general lesson here, though - consciously thinking through how these techniques work will mean you think more consciously about your own writing and how it works. It also means you'll understand how these techniques function, and can hopefully apply them to your own writing.
Here's to hoping everything I've learned doesn't all go out the window when I'm frantically trying to make it to 50, 000 words in the last week of NaNoWriMo.
59 minutes to go...are you ready?
The next exercise is about creating characters arcs for your secondary characters. Even if they die halfway through or leave the main narrative arc you should still know what path they take once they leave, or what would have happened to them if they survived.
This works on the same principle as plotting your antagonists storyline - it makes your overall plotline make more sense, and it fills in space in the storyline you might not otherwise have filled. I've now decided who is going to die in my story, based on their plotline - I didn't know that before. I've also come up with several other scenes for the main plotline which will (hopefully) make it more interesting, and expand the action a bit more.
Knowing their character arc also effects things like dialogue, which I was struggling with. Now I know what they might do or have done, I can understand better how they might react to a situation, and whether it would be important to them or not.
At some point I'm going to go through and create a timeline for all the events within the time-frame of the novel, just so I know what is going on at all times.
That will also involve the next exercise, which is about subplots. In this exercise you were supposed to take the subplots you came up with on day 11 (which for me was about three days ago?), and then think of how they could complicate the main plotline.
I actually already knew a lot of this already, just from all the other exercises I'd done. Some of it came up as recently as the plotting of the secondary characters' plotlines. That made the exercise pretty easy.
However, I did still have to come up with at least three ways in which these subplots could complicate the main storyline.
A lot of this is ground I already covered in the original post about subplots, so I won't go over it here. However, I will say that again this exercise has given my main plotline more depth. It also gave me a way to make a formerly boring characteristic of a character much more interesting.
That is the main point of subplots, really - to make the main plot more interesting. Also, the more complicated your main plot is, the longer your novel and the more you'll have to write about for NaNoWriMo. Can you tell I'm thinking about NaNoWriMo a lot now?
With that in mind, I'm just going to summarise the last exercise quickly. Then I'm going to sleep...
The last exercise is about comparing your characters to characters in published novels. The exercise asked you to do this for all your characters, but I don't actually have time, so I just did it for my main character.
This was actually an amazingly helpful exercise. I picked two books - Fairest by Gail Carson Levine and The Indigo Spell by Richelle Mead. Although the characters are not exactly like my lead, they do share some characteristics.
I read through some sections of dialogue, and then I practised writing my own. Even just reading through the dialogue and thinking about how it worked helped me a lot in improving my own dialogue. I guess that's the general lesson here, though - consciously thinking through how these techniques work will mean you think more consciously about your own writing and how it works. It also means you'll understand how these techniques function, and can hopefully apply them to your own writing.
Here's to hoping everything I've learned doesn't all go out the window when I'm frantically trying to make it to 50, 000 words in the last week of NaNoWriMo.
59 minutes to go...are you ready?
Blog Post #16
More dialogue time!
This exercise asks you to write a dialogue scene and then read it aloud, figuring out which parts sound forced and which parts sound natural.
I wrote a short scene between two of my NaNoWriMo characters. I'm thinking about including the scene in some form in my novel.
After reading the scene out loud, I realised a few things. Firstly, I don't use enough contractions when I'm writing dialogue, so my characters sound a little bit like robots. I also need to work on making my dialogue sounding more casual in general: perhaps I should take some of the commas I use in the text and insert them into the dialogue.
I also need to vary my sentence length. Hopefully that will make my dialogue more snappy. It's definitely an art, making dialogue sound realistic.
I also think my main problem with dialogue is related to the previous exercise on dialogue: I don't know my characters well enough yet to write accurate dialogue. I'll need to do some more brainstorming and planning for my minor characters, otherwise my dialogue won't improve.
Although I do think just doing this exercise has already improved my dialogue, simply because I made myself think about every word before I wrote it, and then thought about it again once I'd read it aloud.
I'm also including the next exercise in this blog post, because that section on dialogue wasn't very long.
The next exercise is about using emotive language. It asks you to write a short scene from the perspective of a character who is angry, then one who is happy, and then one who is terrified. Sarah also phrased the reasoning behind this exercise amazingly, so I'm just going to copy it here:
"If you’re having a bad day, and it’s raining outside, you’ll probably think of the weather as gloomy and miserable. If you’re feeling more positive, you might be grateful to be curled up inside or even see things as romantic. Likewise, a character’s perception of their world should be filtered through their emotions."
This exercise was awesome. This is something I'm good at, writing scenes depending on the mood of the character. It was nice to have an exercise that was relatively easy for me, especially considering I've got just over three hours until NaNoWriMo.
When I'm writing in this way - viewing the scene through the mood of the character - I do several things. First, I choose specific words - I would use scraped or screeched in a scene where the character is stressed, but I might use squeaked or slipped in a scene with a lighter tone. The way I use punctuation is also important - I use more dashes in a scene where the character is angry or scared, and more commas when the character is happier.
I also wrote all these scenes in third person and past tense, which seems to indicate that I should use that when I'm actually writing my NaNoWriMo novel.
It's amazing to see how much richer this makes my writing. It's a really great way to get into the character's head, and add personality to the writing. It could also be a good character exercise - picking a situation and then writing the scene through the emotional point of view of each character.
It would be interesting to see how this would work in first person. Maybe I'll try that sometime.
If I survive NaNoWriMo.
This exercise asks you to write a dialogue scene and then read it aloud, figuring out which parts sound forced and which parts sound natural.
I wrote a short scene between two of my NaNoWriMo characters. I'm thinking about including the scene in some form in my novel.
After reading the scene out loud, I realised a few things. Firstly, I don't use enough contractions when I'm writing dialogue, so my characters sound a little bit like robots. I also need to work on making my dialogue sounding more casual in general: perhaps I should take some of the commas I use in the text and insert them into the dialogue.
I also need to vary my sentence length. Hopefully that will make my dialogue more snappy. It's definitely an art, making dialogue sound realistic.
I also think my main problem with dialogue is related to the previous exercise on dialogue: I don't know my characters well enough yet to write accurate dialogue. I'll need to do some more brainstorming and planning for my minor characters, otherwise my dialogue won't improve.
Although I do think just doing this exercise has already improved my dialogue, simply because I made myself think about every word before I wrote it, and then thought about it again once I'd read it aloud.
I'm also including the next exercise in this blog post, because that section on dialogue wasn't very long.
The next exercise is about using emotive language. It asks you to write a short scene from the perspective of a character who is angry, then one who is happy, and then one who is terrified. Sarah also phrased the reasoning behind this exercise amazingly, so I'm just going to copy it here:
"If you’re having a bad day, and it’s raining outside, you’ll probably think of the weather as gloomy and miserable. If you’re feeling more positive, you might be grateful to be curled up inside or even see things as romantic. Likewise, a character’s perception of their world should be filtered through their emotions."
This exercise was awesome. This is something I'm good at, writing scenes depending on the mood of the character. It was nice to have an exercise that was relatively easy for me, especially considering I've got just over three hours until NaNoWriMo.
When I'm writing in this way - viewing the scene through the mood of the character - I do several things. First, I choose specific words - I would use scraped or screeched in a scene where the character is stressed, but I might use squeaked or slipped in a scene with a lighter tone. The way I use punctuation is also important - I use more dashes in a scene where the character is angry or scared, and more commas when the character is happier.
I also wrote all these scenes in third person and past tense, which seems to indicate that I should use that when I'm actually writing my NaNoWriMo novel.
It's amazing to see how much richer this makes my writing. It's a really great way to get into the character's head, and add personality to the writing. It could also be a good character exercise - picking a situation and then writing the scene through the emotional point of view of each character.
It would be interesting to see how this would work in first person. Maybe I'll try that sometime.
If I survive NaNoWriMo.
Wednesday, 30 October 2013
Blog Post #15
One down for today, five more to go!
The next exercise is on tenses and perspectives. It asks you to write a short scene in first person, third person, present tense, and past tense.
I cheated a little bit, in that I only wrote two scenes - first person and present tense, and third person and past tense. I plan to experiment with third person and present tense during NaNoWriMo too, however - if it doesn't work I'll just edit it out.
I have a confession to make about this exercise: I actually hate first person. That probably makes me a bit biased, but at least I gave it a go, right?
I think my hatred of first person comes from years of reading (and occasionally writing) fanfiction, where first person is frowned upon. I never quite figured out why this was the case, but the prejudice remains. Oddly enough, I don't have this prejudice when reading fiction - in fact, I quite like it, and find it quite easy to read. However, I've never really written anything in first person.
As a result, I'm not as good at first person as I am at third person. This meant the scene I wrote in first person wasn't as strong as the scene I wrote in third person. However, this just means I need more practice. I did enjoy the present tense part of the first person scene, however, so I'm definitely going to work more with that.
I also rewrote the same scene both times, which meant the scene I wrote second (the third person scene) was better simply because I was essentially re-writing the scene.
I'm actually really torn between which perspective and tense to use. I'm leaning towards third, simply because I like using people's name in the narrative, but first person may actually be easier for NaNoWriMo, because I find it quicker to write in (although I do also find it more casual, which could be a downside in a novel with a serious premise). It'll be a nightmare to rewrite it all if I decide to change perspectives halfway through, though.
I guess I'll make up my mind in five hours and three minutes when NaNoWriMo kicks off. Argh!
The next exercise is on tenses and perspectives. It asks you to write a short scene in first person, third person, present tense, and past tense.
I cheated a little bit, in that I only wrote two scenes - first person and present tense, and third person and past tense. I plan to experiment with third person and present tense during NaNoWriMo too, however - if it doesn't work I'll just edit it out.
I have a confession to make about this exercise: I actually hate first person. That probably makes me a bit biased, but at least I gave it a go, right?
I think my hatred of first person comes from years of reading (and occasionally writing) fanfiction, where first person is frowned upon. I never quite figured out why this was the case, but the prejudice remains. Oddly enough, I don't have this prejudice when reading fiction - in fact, I quite like it, and find it quite easy to read. However, I've never really written anything in first person.
As a result, I'm not as good at first person as I am at third person. This meant the scene I wrote in first person wasn't as strong as the scene I wrote in third person. However, this just means I need more practice. I did enjoy the present tense part of the first person scene, however, so I'm definitely going to work more with that.
I also rewrote the same scene both times, which meant the scene I wrote second (the third person scene) was better simply because I was essentially re-writing the scene.
I'm actually really torn between which perspective and tense to use. I'm leaning towards third, simply because I like using people's name in the narrative, but first person may actually be easier for NaNoWriMo, because I find it quicker to write in (although I do also find it more casual, which could be a downside in a novel with a serious premise). It'll be a nightmare to rewrite it all if I decide to change perspectives halfway through, though.
I guess I'll make up my mind in five hours and three minutes when NaNoWriMo kicks off. Argh!
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