Tag: writing

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Plot Rehauling!

Posted on by Claire

The first time I threw together the words ‘naturalist’, ‘plant swarms’, ‘secrecy’ and ‘upcoming disaster’ in a notebook is dated June 18th, 2011. I’ve considered The Paradise Swarm my main work in progress since then. Meaning that at this point, I’ve been working on it for over a year.

And I realise that in that year, I haven’t accomplished that much story-wise. I have done a whole lot of planning, spent a lot of time world-building in the vaguest terms and written a lot of words that got thrown out, but I realised there still wasn’t much of a plot. I had cool scene ideas, but not a great grip on characters, nor a strong thread around which to weave the story.

Then last week, @TheJonFoulds and I sat down and poked at the holes in the plot and characters with a stick. I can come up with ideas all right on my own, but there is nothing that works better for me than bouncing ideas off of someone else. Especially someone who has an annoying knack for spotting things I did wrong, and a very good instinct for story structure. He also likes being needlessly cruel to his characters (and sadly, mine), which does raise the stakes.

ChaptersI had to put my foot down at some points, because some of his suggestions simply clashed with who the characters I created fundamentally were, but most of the advice was invaluable. Two hours after we started with ‘So what *does* your main character want most of all?’, we had re-plotted the story from start to finish.

I now know what will happen past Chapter Three, which is a good thing because I’m writing Chapter Three right now. I’ve also been able to put down a whole bunch of new chapters and scenes in my Scrivener file, so that it actually looks like I’m working on something substantial. I love how my Scrivener file looks now: like I’m going somewhere with this!

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Butt in chair = no interwebs

Posted on by Claire

I love the internet. I adore it madly and unashamedly. How could I not?

All the mostly-accurate secondary source knowledge you could ever want, for free at your fingertips; all the fanfic and fanart about all the most obscure fandoms, even that one show from the seventies; all the political discussion you could ever want, and those debates you wish you didn’t have to go into, because c’mon people, it’s 2012; all the most depressing and most inspiring things you can imagine (which is, of course, the first rule).

And when you’ve had one of THOSE days at work, 24 hours video feeds of kittens playing in their pen at a shelter, and the infamous Tumblr of pictures of Tom Selleck with waterfalls and sandwiches. Guys, it has a theme song!

I love the internet like I do chocolate. That is, in a fairly uncontrollable manner. If I want to make sure I don’t eat a bar of chocolate an hour before dinner, I have to not have any in the house, and if I want to write, I have to disable the wifi on my laptop, or go somewhere that has no wifi. I can and I do write at home sometimes, but these sessions are invariably short and end up interrupted by email or twitter. So I go and write at the coffee shop, but I really wish I didn’t have to.

John Scalzi wrote a book on writing titled ‘You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop’. I haven’t read it yet, but I do believe he has a point. Coffee shop writing doesn’t strike me as a way to build a career; though it definitely works for some people (Connie Willis mentioned it). I should be able to write in my house, because I have a story to tell and I want to tell it – but my house is full of shiny things and I have all the willpower of a tadpole.

So I’ll be working on writing at home more often, and I’ll be getting Scalzi’s writing book. I love his fiction as well as the title of this one, and I don’t think I can go wrong with taking advice from the President of the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

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Quaint French festival

Posted on by Claire

For the past thirteen years, which I’ve just realised is half my life, my older brother has organised a theatre festival in a tiny village in Southern France.

It is a quaint, adorable little place, so tiny that the only businesses are a small cafe-restaurant and a bakery with a corner-shop type room at the back that sells mostly local wines. I kid you not, it is one of the Frenchest places I know.

Seriously Frenchest thing ever – I was working on my prologue, and then all of the sudden, let there be dudes dressed as horses…

And during the festival, the village transforms into a temple of hipsteriness – all the decorations are made from recycled materials, you have to pay for your plastic cup and there are dry toilets. Seriously, it’s as if the whole place were already Instagrammed – of course, I still instagrammed the pictures.

Going out there to watch outdoors theatre, lounge under the trees by the second-hand book seller’s stall, and drink local, organic beer while I write was a seriously good way to spend a week-end – I’ll never again leave my netbook at home when I go. I got so much work done!

And I think the fact that I had no one to speak English to for the whole holiday was more than a contributing factor. I love playing with the English language, it rarely ever stops being tons of fun. And I think the fact that I couldn’t indulge my English addiction with speaking meant I was all the more keen to indulge it with writing.

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Writing Group

Posted on by Claire

I’ve recently started going to a fortnightly Critique Group which meets a short walk from my office and a short bus ride from my house. It’s a very friendly group of regulars, now including two of my close friends, who give honest and supportive critique and advice.

Having attended a couple times before I brought anything to read, I knew there would be no gratuitous tearing into my work. Still I was shaking when I brought my first piece of flash fiction to read. Some of the people is that group are very talented, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself.

I got very positive feedback on the flash fiction, so I brought in the first bit of the prologue for my work in progress. This got mostly positive feedback too, as well as some useful nitpicking. I was happy that there was nitpicking because the group operates on the basis that they only nitpick if they don’t think there is anything majorly wrong with the story.

The feedback I received gave me drive and confidence, so much so that the week-end that followed I did some of the most pleasant, least anxiety-ridden writing I’d done in a while. I carried on with the unfinished prologue I’d shared at the writing group, and got it done while I was on holiday with my family in France. I also had no internet and gorgeous weather, of course, but I know the positive feedback was a great part of how successful that week-end was.

Now, I’m trying to channel the drive and energy I had during that week-end into pushing forward with the novel so I have something decent to read next time.

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Writing every day: Pros & Cons

Posted on by Claire

The number one piece of advice I’ve heard professional writers gives to aspiring writers is simple enough: WRITE.

Put your butt in the chair, your hands on the keyboard and just write your story instead of fretting about it. Then when you’re done, write another one, and then another one.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

A lot of people also say that the best way of achieving this is to write every day. Write about your day, follow a writing prompt, write your novel, every day. Even if it’s only a few hundred words, it doesn’t matter, Neil Gaiman said when he explained that he wrote Coraline by two-hundred words increments every night before going to bed.

So, a couple of months ago, I started the experiment of writing a bit of my novel every day, with a fairly low daily goal, but the hope that the regular additions would plump up my Scrivener file nice and quick. It worked, in terms of adding words regularly, but because it was always only a few hundred words at a time, the text ended up being fairly disjointed.

I found it difficult to maintain writing every day more than a couple of weeks, because after a while I got really depressed about the state of the story. I couldn’t manage to get the tone and action consistent from where I’d left off, and ended up having to delete a lot of words.

The two to three thousand words I wrote during those two weeks are now the chapter in need of the most revisions, and it’s so broken up that it’s not even ready for me to read at writing group.

I could try and write quicker, that’s true – three NaNoWriMo wins have taught me I can write fast, but I don’t really want to, in all honesty. I don’t write quickly, and I haven’t found that my writing improved when I made myself write very quickly all the time. I now consider the wonderful Write or Die a November-only luxury. I’m now trying to write things that make sense and sound nice the first time around, rather than having to re-draft my whole book before it makes any kind of sense.

The good thing about my Writing Every Day experiment is that it’s shown me again and again that once I got in the groove, after maybe ten or fifteen minutes, writing wasn’t as difficult as all that, and I produced decent stuff. What I’m taking from these few weeks is that I need to find a way of writing regularly that works for me.

My assessment so far is: I need to write often, but in longer stretches of time. I can’t just grab ten or twenty minutes here and there (again, that’s a November thing) – I have to set aside an hour at the very least, two at best and knuckle down properly, giving myself time to think. The good news is that I have that time, the bad news is that I don’t know how much I trust myself to put it to good use.