A making time to write two-fer:
JA Konrath on relaxing activities to give up and Shadawyn on getting mental work done throughout the day.
I don’t think Mr. Konrath is actually suggesting to never do any of those activities, considering one of them is posting to blogs. Also, I think reading books and exercising are two things writers ought to do.
Filed by scriniary at 6:18 am under Life, Writing
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In a discussion on rasfc that started with describing characters, Patricia C. Wrede has posted two examples of layering — writing something with only one component, like dialogue, and then adding everything else, like description, action, internal monologue, as separate steps.
One starts with dialogue and the other starts with setting.
The dialogue one is how I often write anyway, especially when I’m stuck, which I was earlier this evening. Trying to figure out how to say everything at once can be too hard, and breaking it down to think about only one aspect at a time can be the only way for me to make forward progress.
On the other hand, I sometimes end up with nothing but dialogue if I know exactly what happens in a scene and I’m writing really quickly. I’m getting better at making myself slow down.
The whole thread is interesting, but long.
Filed by scriniary at 6:19 am under Writing
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I really, really want to like OpenOffice, which I downloaded and installed today.
But. It doesn't wrap text the way I want it to. MSWord has three options: print layout (obvious), web layout (wraps text to the window size) and “normal”. Normal is what I always use. It wraps the text at the page width, like print layout, but does not show the top and bottom margins of the page, so there are no big gaps in text where the page breaks are.
OpenOffice Writer, as far as I can tell, won't do that. (If it will and I'm missing it, please tell me!) One of the things I look at when I write is whitespace – if my paragraphs are too short, often I need more non-dialogue stuff. (Usually.) So in web layout, all my paragraphs look “too short” and it's driving me nuts. And in print layout, I get those huge distracting gaps at the page breaks.
I can get used to web layout, I suppose, and switch to print layout to check paragraphs. Or make the window narrower (which loses stuff on the toolbars, and means I can see the distracting things on my desktop).
This is minor complaint, I suppose, but it seems like a simple thing for them to have included.
Filed by scriniary at 1:47 am under Uncategorized
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Someone has very helpfully created an index of Miss Snark’s blog.
Filed by scriniary at 8:37 pm under Writing
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Shadawyn has a post on headspace (focus) and linked to a related article by Jennifer Crusie.
Keeping my mind on my work is one of my biggest problems; my current solution is to go to a coffee shop on the weekends and to write at work (during lunch and by staying a bit late).
Elsewhere in livejournal, Anghara writes about being a writer and making the decision to be a writer.
I always feel like an imposter when reading those sorts of posts (not that that bothers me). I don’t think of myself as *being* a writer. I write, I want to sell novels, but it’s not some inherent part of my existence the way it seems to be part of other people’s. I never wanted to tell stories, or create worlds or discover people or whatever. I just had these daydreams about made-up people and I wanted to know what happened, but the stories kept morphing and I thought if I wrote them down I could get to the end. I didn’t try to write until I was in college, and I gave up in disgust several times before it occurred to me, at 25, to write really badly and revise later.
Filed by scriniary at 6:59 am under Life, Writing
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I think I’m going to synopsize the theater book.
wrote a synopsis, which reminded me of John Braine’s How to Write a Novel. I’ve only read the first chapter, but that’s the one in which he lays out his writing process: no planning, first draft as quick as possible, write a summary, rewrite the summary until it’s right, then write a perfect second draft.
That’s how I meant to do the theater book, except I failed at the last step and am doing a lot of rewriting and revising. My summary was very short, only a paragraph, and didn’t really account for all the changes between drafts 0 and 1 (or 1 and 2, if you prefer). I changed the setting, many secondary characters, and several subplots. I also had to figure out why these events were happening in this place at this time to these people.
(Not that I’m saying I’d have succeeded in writing a draft with no revision needed if I’d written a better summary.)
But, since I have changed so much, my outline is very skimpy, and I’m not really sure what happens in the next chunk of the book. Maybe if I do a longish synopsis I’ll get a better idea of the options.
Filed by scriniary at 3:39 am under Writing
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Skating club! Broken zamboni; took half an hour to get the spare and make ice badly. Dances again. Progress on progressives? THREE GOOD SPINS. For “good” = “several rotations” = “good for me, not objectively good”.
Filed by scriniary at 7:28 am under Skating
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Recent Readings:
* The other day, I read Miss Snark’s post about blogging, in which she says that having a boring blog is dangerous to writers because people will think the writer is boring. I recently ran across the same sentiment posted somewhere else.
So I’d just like to say, for the record, that my LJ is boring because my creativity goes into my fiction and my dayjob. I created this thing to track my writing progress, not to write profound essays on self indulgence or the purpose of SF. Sorry.
* Via Paperback Writer, this post on writer’s notebooks.
I keep a notebook, sort of. When I have a dream that I think might be a story someday, I write it in the notebook. Sometimes I write down story ideas, the kind that take up a whole page and have actual prose with them, not just a sentence. And then I never look at them again.
But that’s it. I don’t do “freewriting” or “I have a neat sentence! Must write it down and use it someday!” type thing. And I don’t keep a journal, except for this one. Which is not very much about me, at least not the me inside my head.
I’ve been using the same spiral notebook for more than five years and it still has plenty of blank pages. I have nothing against notebooks, but I don’t find the concept useful.
Filed by scriniary at 7:01 am under Writing
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I wrote the other day:
I know there’s a theory that you learn from critiquing, but I haven’t experienced it. Or maybe I just can’t tell.
So it suddenly occured to me that what it actually means, when people say that, is not that you do a lot of critiques and then the words coming out of your pen magically improve. It means that when you go back to revise, you look at your own work like it’s someone else’s that you’re critiquing.
[Edit: Commenters on my LJ disagreed.]
Filed by scriniary at 4:55 pm under Writing
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Skating Club:
Dance again – the Blues. Mostly ok except for a forward cross-behind, where you skate on your left foot and cross the right behind it and pick up the left foot. I can’t do it (I get stuck with both feet on the ice, crossed) but was making good progress. Practiced my alternating FI 3 turns and backwards outside 3s. Tried not to envy the advanced class’s spins and jumps.
Filed by scriniary at 9:05 am under Skating
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