The training lasts for another three weeks, then I'm on holiday and finish when I get back, so posting may be a bit intermittent until the end of August.
Today was supposed to be a writing post day, but there isn't much to write about. I started training for a new job last week and it's eaten my brain. So there hasn't been much writing, revising, or submitting. I've speant a couple of hours trying to put together a post about writing process but couldn't seem to get near a point, so I'm going to call it quits this week.
The training lasts for another three weeks, then I'm on holiday and finish when I get back, so posting may be a bit intermittent until the end of August. No post last week, because I haven't made a plan for months with five Tuesdays and by the time I realised it was one it was late. So I took the week off instead and played Minecraft.
My story "Your Past Life Interferes with My Very Important Studies" went up at Flash Fiction Online last week, along with an interview with me. Last weekend I took myself off for a writing session in a local tearoom. It's not something I do very often these days, although I used to. The place was practically empty when I arrived, but then got so busy they were turning people away. Luckily I'd gone there for lunch as well, so I didn't feel too bad about writing there. Next time I might go earlier or later to miss the lunch rush. I got most of a first draft done so at least being crowded didn't put me off! The programme for Swanwick Writers' Summer School went up last week. As I do every year, I'm currently trying to decide on the courses to take and changing my mind every time I look. The only course I've decided for definite is the one on forensics for writers. I don't write crime fiction but it sounds interesting anyway. It's an interest left over from when I was a teenager and wanted to be a forensic scientist, although a change of school and a terrible chemistry teacher made me lose interest in that career. For the specialist course I can't decide on whether to do novel writing or poetry. Maybe if I take enough courses on writing novels I'll figure out how they work! What I'll probably do is decide on the day. I usually do! While not strictly abut writing, I'm counting this as a writing post as limiting beliefs affect it in the same way they do everything else. Also because this was something that came up in the Manifesting Your Goals course I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.
Limiting beliefs are exactly what they sound like - beliefs a person has that limit what they can and do achieve. The course tutor said that this is often linked to the idea that we shouldn't have what we want. This is only my opinion, but I'd guess it's probably worse in women and also when what you want goes against the "norm" of cultural values - writing rather than a high-powered career, for example. The beliefs tell you why you shouldn't do something. No good at writing? Why bother? You'll never succeed? Why bother? Don't have time to write? Well I guess there's no point in starting, then. The problem is, when these beliefs take hold it's like a radio playing quietly in the background. They get stuck in your head like an earworm, which only reinforces them and undermines both confidence and motivation. The tutor gave a handy and really simple exercise to help combat them. Take a piece of paper and divide it into two vertically. In the first column, write your limiting belief; in the second, write its opposite and evidence for it. Writing them down makes them real and easier to pin down, and also makes the opposite real. Limiting belief Opposite belief I don't have time to write. I do have time, I've spent four hours this weekend on Minecraft. Writing is a waste of time. Writing is not a waste of time. I enjoy it, and unlike Minecraft it sometimes pays. If another limiting belief pops up in response to the answer, write that in the first column and write its answer in the second. If you keep going long enough, you might even drill down as far as the actual problem. As far as I can tell, this is a similar idea as is taught in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, in that it's trying to break a destructive thought pattern. The last thing in my course notes is a reminder to celebrate successes. Although keeping outcomes in mind is important, so you know where you're going, "How will you know what you've achieved if you're always looking at the next thing?" I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!
Originally posted at Livejournal Oct. 20th, 2011 "Prologues sit on a reader's mental clipboard and some of their attention goes on wondering where it fits." - Emma Darwin In the final session of Emma Darwin's Building the Novel course, we covered hooks and why you need them. A hook is needed in order to pitch the book to agents and publishers, and will tell you who is telling the story - the main character and main problem. This will then lead naturally into writing the blurb, should you be lucky enough to need one. We also covered one of the eternal questions - how do you know where to end/begin a chapter? Sometimes (more common in literary fiction that genre, apparently) one scene equals one chapter. However, Emma's suggestion was to judge it by content, so that a change of theme would indicate a need for a new chapter, or by showing events linked by stages (either parallels across multiple storylines, or by the stages of a single storyline). If ending with a cliffhanger, Emma suggested it should involve a change of p.o.v. or location, to create a true break rather than the irritation "false" cliff-hanger. Discussion of chapters naturally led to discussion of prologues. I've never been a big fan of them myself - I skipped every single prologue in David (and Leigh) Eddings' epic series, and agreed with Emma's opinion that if it's important enough to need a prologue it's important enough to be in the story. The best reason not to have one was, for me, the quote at the top of this entry - "Prologues sit on a reader's mental clipboard and some of their attention goes on wondering where it fits". Time the reader spends worrying about your prologue is time they're not focusing on the story. Finally, drafts and synopses. Emma reiterated what most writers know and spend the whole of NaNoWriMo trying to convince themselves - the first draft is about getting it down. She suggested that the best was to do this is in the way you're most happy brainstorming. In my case this varies every five minutes, because while typing is fast notebooks (the paper sort) are more portable and don’t need recharging. If you get stuck, writing a synopsis can help to expose problems like having no plot or a lack of connections between ideas. I guess that if combined with some sort of notecard/outlining idea it could also make rewriting a lot easier. Short stories are infinitely easier to hold the whole of in your head, at least that’s what I find. Emma’s final thought was that any project has its outer limits, things and problems it won't ask of you. She suggested setting exercises to learn the rest. Myself, I think writing outside of your comfort zone would work quite well. If only it wasn’t so uncomfortable. This was the title of a course during last year's Swanwick Writers' Summer School, which was meant to help me kick-start some momentum. Of course what actually happened was I spent the summer looking after a boyfriend with two broken hands, and by the time he was out of plaster we hit the winter and my chain of colds. So I've dug my notes out to try and make a belated start on Getting Stuff Done.
The first part of the course dealt with how the unconscious mind works. There was a lot of cross-over with the Ways of Seeing course I was also taking, and I need to put the notes from that into action too since that's another thing that got put to one side. Basically, because of the way the brain filters things, we all see the world differently. We "delete" things that aren't important to what we're doing now, "distort" things to have meaning that isn't really there, and "generalise" about pretty much everything. This is all tied into the part of the brain called the reticular activating system, which is the bit that drives automatic functions. It's the reason you can perform an action you do every day (like taking the bus to work) and have little or no memory of it - most of it's done on auto-pilot, and the brain deletes the bits it doesn't need. The problem is this makes it very easy to drop into a mindset where writing isn't and won't get done. Something else has replaced it in importance (Minecraft! The brain prefers instant to delayed gratification) and so the RAS is focussed on that instead. Opportunities just aren't spotted - that spare twenty minutes is time to spend on Candy Crush instead of time to write. You aren't writing so the brain deletes things that might be helpful to writing because it's not important right now. This leads to distorted thoughts like "I never sell any stories" - but this is because they're not being written and sent out, not because they're not any good - and generalisation: "Everyone else is more successful than me." The way to deal with this is to have specific outsomes and goals in mind. This is so the brain knows where it's going and what it should be looking out for. The goal is what you're aiming for ("finish a novel") and the outcome what you get as a result ("buy a house with my whopping advance and royalties"). I know there's a lot of talk in writer circles at the moment about not having goals you can't control ("sell a novel") - because it's demoralising when you can't meet them. This is why having goals you can control as part of this is important - it's no good deciding on what you want but giving no thought to how you'll get there. The outcome is just to give the RAS something to aim at, so it spots the opportunities that will help you in that direction and keep you moving. Otherwise you could stall when you get to an outcome you meet unexpectedly, which is something I found when entering Writers of the Future. Although I wasn't thinking in these terms at the time, the goal was to write and submit to every quarter and the outcome was to win. The winning wasn't the point - my expectation was to build up an inventory of stories I could get rejected by WOTF and submit other places. And then I won first time, and ended up with one story I couldn't send anywhere else, and I stalled. On one hand, you could say that having a goal and outcome had the desired effect. On the other, I hadn't planned beyond the winning. Part of the method for setting up your goals is to have a timeline. Where do you need to be in six, nine, twelve months? During the course I decided I needed to have completed my novel in progress by the end of 2015 so I could have it ready for the 2016 round of open submission periods (if there were any) and start looking into submitting it. However shortly after starting the work I realised I didn't actually want to be writing a novel . So I scribbled out all those plans, and tried to decide what I wanted to do instead. And then stuff happened and here I am nine months later having got no further with anything. I still don't want to write a novel yet, but I've decided I do need to start small to avoid being overwhelmed. So the plan is, blog every Tuesday (twice a month about writing, once about jewellery, and once or twice about whatever), do the Flash Challenge every weekend except the one before late week. Now I've started on those, I'm going to go through the various drafts lying around and start finishing them, and also go through my reprints to see if I can get them out the door. Small steps, but as I get the momentum going I'm confident I can add larger goals. I have novellas to finish, poetry to write. Maybe I'll get to a novel eventually, but for the moment I'm happy to start with baby steps. I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!
Originally posted at Livejournal Oct. 5th, 2011 Who is telling the story and why? This affects the way they tell it. - Emma Darwin Also in Emma Darwin's novel-writing course we went over the choices a writer makes in how to tell the story. The first and most obvious choice is of narrator - are they in 1st or 3rd person (or, god forbid, 2nd)? If the novel is in (or partly in) 3rd person, is the narrator limited to one person's viewpoint or are they omniscient? This of course lead us to head-hopping, the bane of many a writer-reader's life (I know it certainly annoys me). Emma suggested that if you really have to, not to do it more than once a page, and to move to a different psychic distance so as not to confuse the reader. In general, move out to a more remote distance, move across, and zoom back in again. There was one brief piece of advice about minor characters: don't spend ages describing them, or the reader will think they're more important than they are. I suppose it's different if you want them to be a red herring though.... We also had a discussion on tense. As present tense has no sense of time it can lose tension, but is useful for dreams or flashbacks where a sense of disconnection is needed. Sarah Monette used it to great effect in the first book of the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, Melusine, to differentiate between a 1st person narrator, and the same narrator when he's batshit crazy. Tenses can also be combined to keep plot strands or timelines separate, although this can be quite difficult to do well. The story itself doesn't have to be told in chronological order, but Emma cautioned against putting the "zingy stuff" at the beginning of a chapter and going back to explain as it breaks the momentum. Also, if you do this and the thing you're explaining turns out to all be a big misunderstanding the reader can feel cheated (I've come across this and yes, it did annoy me). Whether you're hopping around between timelines or narrators, you should always make sure the reader know where they are. Do something to orient them, preferably within the first sentence. If you're chosing to disorient the reader on purpose, make sure to ground them afterwards - a confused reader can quickly become an irritated reader. The last things I'm going to mention, because this is rapidly looking like it's going to be a four-part post, are subplots, and backstory. Subplots should be linked thematically to the main plot - difficult if, like me, you have no idea what the theme is when you start, but you can always go back and add things. That's where the handy chart comes in, I suppose. Emma also uses it to plot where significant pieces of backstory are revelaed, although she cautions against getting hung up on knowing all the backstory before you start. What will happen is more important than what has happened, as you write forwards the important backstory will rise to the surface. Hearing a published novelist advocating what is essentially pantsing was a relief to me, since this is how I work. Finding out the backstory as you go is half the fun. Anyway, I'm going to leave it there and write up the last few bits and pieces in another post. Not much to update, at the moment. This weekend I missed the Liberty Hall flash challenge because it's my week to work late and I knew I wouldnt want to do the crits. Late week I give myself permission to get nothing done. I've got some ideas on what to do with the previous week's story, too, although it involves a complete rewrite and includes switching it from present day to a futuristic setting. This will obviously impact it in unexpected ways so I'm looking forward to the challenge.
It's nice that LH is still ticking along, although I have to say I miss the days when it was bustling with activity. To be fair, a lot of the drop-off seems to be people moving on to the next stage of their careers - Aliette de Bodard and TL Morganfield are both writers I originally met there, and I know Mary Robinette Kowal was a member before my time. But there doesn't seem to have been an influx of new members to make up the losses, so it's very quiet. While I don't need another lively forum to keep track of, the flash challenge definitely benefits from a larger number of participants. A couple of weeks ago I started a story over at another site, for a contest, but didn't get it finished. I've got a title and a very basic idea, but didn't have enough to get a complete story done by the deadline. So that's on the pile with all the other stories I don't quite know what to do with. Part of the plan is, over the next few weeks, to get all of these half-stories together and printed out so I can start working on them again - some of them are years old now and need either finishing or trunking. None of that will get done this this week. Late week wrecks my brain, so I'll probably spend my evenings playing Minecraft instead. I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!
Originally posted at Livejournal Sep. 14th, 2011 "Write what you want, and make me believe you know it." - Emma Darwin During her novel-writing course and Swanwick Writers' Summer School, Emma Darwin offered the above quote as a remedy to the advice "write what you know" (and has an excellent blog post on it here). It's something I imagine writers of literary and mainstream fiction fall foul of more than speculative fiction writers, since very few of us have actually met a dragon. Emma's alternate advice comes from the fact that the mind doesn't know the difference between a real thing and an imagined thing - if you can imagine it well enough, it seems real, and this is the effect we aim to create in the reader. Observation is important, as is engaing all six senses (the usual five and that sense of weight and presence we get of an object). As a demonstration we did a short exercise where we wrote a description of a real object, then followed it with a description of an imagined one. Emma suggested that in order to better imagine what isn't known, it should be treated as poets often treat their subject matter - with word associations, pursuing odd connections, and reading the work aloud. Another thing Emma brought up, something I'd never heard of before, was the idea of psychic distance. It's something she discovered in John Garner's The Art of Fiction, and basically describes how close in the narration is to the character. She writes about it in her blog post here, and gives the following example (used in Gardner's book):
We moved on to the choice of who is telling the story and why they're telling it, and how this affects the choices the author makes in the way they tell the story - narrator, tense, order of telling.... But I think I'll leave that for another post, as it could fill an entry all on its own. I'm bringing across some old content from Livejournal, that predates the site, because I'd like writing-content in one place. Feel free to skip if you've seen it before!
Originally posted at Livejournal Aug. 31st, 2011 "Drama is character in Action" - Aristotle One of the many writery things I did at Swanwick was attend a four-part course on building a novel, by Emma Darwin. She writes historical literary fiction, so some of what she said was counter to what I understand of writing genre (which is often not character-driven), but it was interesting to see things from a new perspective. The first sessions were about characters and plot. We did a group exercise, and we created a character using a spider diagram. Emma put the name "Jan" in the centre of the board and people shouted out ideas. What we ended up with was a gay, transvestite, Polish, rapping, piano playing body-builder, with a tattoo, a chihuahua, and an unexplained wedding ring. (At this point I started to wonder if some of the more straight-laced attendees were shouting out all the things they didn't dare to put in their own fiction.) When we meet a character in a novel we know nothing of them, just like in real life. We intuit what they're like by what they do, and what they do is driven by their needs - love, security, whatever. (In Jan's case it was to improve his English so he could get a job and feed his chihuahua.) The key to a character is what they do and why, and what they do drives the plot. Of course, it's never as simple as characters getting what they want. The stakes need to be raised - what gets in the way and what's the effect of it? If the character doesn't get what they want things should be different even if they're the same, if they do what's the price and is it worth it? One suggestion Emma made was that if a scene won't work, try writing if from a different point of view, or switch from 3rd to 1st person or vice versa - if it still doesn't work it doesn't belong there. Looking back, I can see dozens of times when doing this would have helped - or I did it but was too stubborn to admit what the scene was trying to tell me. Emma also mentioned "The Thirty Thousand Doldrums". Apparently it's very common, whether you write short novels or long ones, think in chapters or don't, to get stuck at around 30k. She also suggested that this is a good time to stop and produce some kind of outline, whether you're an outliner or not, to give you an overview of what you've got and where it's going. It could be that your novel's no longer doing quite what you thought it was. She provided a handy example of the structure she used when writing The Mathematics of Love to keep everything organised, a grid with the chapters down the side and each element with its own column against them (also useful for keeping track of information you need to know but that doesn't necessarily appear in the book). She goes into more detail in her blog post here, and also how she thinks about novel structure in her post "Building the Bridge". Anyway, this post is getting be quite a bit longer than I expected, so I'll finish it in another sitting. So, I appear to have signed up for the A-Z Blogging Challenge in April. I last did it in 2013 and blogged about British Folklore, so I'm thinking about continuing with the esoteric theme and doing kinds of divination this time. I might as well put my weird-book collection to use! As usual, Q, X, and Y could be a problem...
What with having signed up to Poem a Day as well, it's going to be a busy month! |
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