Week five of my novel vlogging. This week I'm talking about my writing process, which includes working on multiple projects at once.
Monday, 28 July 2014
Sunday, 20 July 2014
WEEK FOUR - A COLLABORATIVE HEIST
Week four of saying words about my novel. This week I'm talking about collaborative novels.
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?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)