• Added snippets from my Google Reader Shared Items to the sidebar, thanks to code from Mike Crute and help from a friend.
• Turned off the rich text editor that was eating my paragraph breaks.
Filed by scriniary at 12:38 pm under Site Changes
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This isn't the book I meant to work on today.
I decided to catch up on the He Wrote, She Wrote writing workshop blog, and Jenny Crusie's post on the Conflict Box struck me as useful. Diplomacy is at a point where I need to take a look at the plot and make sure the conflicts are solid and all the characters are working towards their goals and butting heads.
So I made a Conflict Box, or at least a modified version thereof. Instead of one protagonist and one antagonist, I have two of each. And rather than listing only Goal and Conflict for each character, I listed Goal, Means, and Obstacle. (Which could be rephrased as Desire, Goal, Conflict, I guess.)
Warning: For the at least one person reading this who avoids spoilers, even for unfinished unpublished books you're never going to read, there are spoilers in my diagram.
(Click on it once to enlarge it, and click again to enlarge it again.)
(Yes, it would have been faster to do by hand, but it's easier to edit this way.)
So is it useful? Maybe. Having character goals, and how they plan to achieve their goals, is very useful. But I had those already. I had the obstacles already too, but drawing this did help me consider whether they're useful obstacles. Also, as I begin the rewrite, it gives me something to focus on. In the first draft, Conway doesn't really appear until somewhere in the middle, because I didn't know what the plot was. He ends up kind of important, so I shouldn't ignore him…
I do want to add a Resolution column, because it would be good to know that all the conflicts are resolved. Especially since the details of how is the part I'm stuck on right now. :)
Filed by scriniary at 3:31 am under Writing
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Found a nice tutorial and am starting to learn letters that are off the home row.
Also found this site, which calculates wpm and errors made. I can do the first lesson (eight letters aoeuhtns) at about 45 wpm with 5-9 errors. I did the qwerty version (asdfjkl;) at 46 wpm with 6 errors… (Hey, the qwerty version is a lot harder, ok? And I'd been typing in Dvorak for at least 20 minutes before hand…)
Random online sites tend to put my qwerty typing speed at around 70-80 wpm with a horrendous amount of errors. One problem I have with those tests is that it's so ingrained in my hands to hit backspace and fix typos as I make them (because I make lots of them), and the tests don't like it if you do that. But I learned to type in 7th grade and it's not like I've officially practiced since then.
Filed by scriniary at 5:24 pm under dvorak
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I don't know how I managed to miss Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen when I was a kid, because I would have loved it then even more than I did yesterday, which was a lot: gripping plot, and the girl character isn't a whiny wimp.
She was certainly a lot braver than I'd have been in those sixty pages of mines and tunnels; they'd have had to cut my throat and leave me there because I'd have refused to squeeze through that final section, assuming I'd made it that far. That part of the book might have been more frightening than the fighting at the end.
The one problem I had was that I kept distracting myself by drawing parallels to The Fellowship of the Ring (the Mines of Moria and Lothlorien, in particular), but that wasn't a huge issue.
I bought my copy in Boston, along with a bunch of other used books that have been living in boxes for years, unread. I always wondered why it has Darth Vader on the cover. (My version is shown in the bottom row on this page.) Reading the book only partially helped explain that (that's not how I pictured the character at all); I wonder if the edition's being printed in 1978 might be part of the answer.
Filed by scriniary at 7:09 pm under Books
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• Via anghara, tightropegirl on writing what you love instead of what you think you should write.
• Via fairmer, I think , this essay by Zadie Smith in the Guardian on what makes a good writer: Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self – vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That's why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great. and Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry – we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing – great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street. It rings true and is not encouraging: it is probably easier to learn craftmanship than to learn to express a soul.
• Via someone, Justine Musk on Why writers should read. Musk says she's puzzled at people who say they don't have time to read because they need that time to write. I don't find that statement puzzling at all; just do the math. I don't read nearly as much as I used to (though that's not only because I spend the time writing, and I'm starting to read more again). Having spent 23 years doing a ton of reading and no writing, I figure I can get away with very little reading for a few years. There are a ton of things I'd like to do in my life, but I don't have to do them all at once.
Though when I say I don't read much, I mean fiction, or nonfiction books. I don't count the daily paper or news on the web. Or nonfiction related to my job, like articles about technical writing or journalism. Or books I don't finish (novels that don't hold my interest, nonfiction books of which I only read a chapter or two). Or magazines. Or the short stories I read on the web….
• Mur Lafferty's interview with Nancy Kress is a good one (podcast)
Filed by scriniary at 6:29 pm under Writing
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I was saving this for Sunday's roundup of links, but it keeps getting longer and longer. Links are at the end.
For the approximately two people reading this who haven't heard, there's a discussion going on about fast writers and slow writers. Really not much of a debate since everyone pretty much seems to agree that writing speed doesn't affect the quality of a book.
Do fast writers create worse books than slow writers? It depends on the writer. Since I am a slow writer, I would love for the answer to be “yes, so writers should slow down,” but I just don't believe that's true.
That said, I have a feeling it's easier for people who have lots of examples of people who write slower than they do to say it's ok to write slow than it is for unpublished writers like me who look at their examples of “slow” and laugh.
This used to be a painful issue for me. A few years ago when I was hanging out on Forward Motion, the culture there was really tilited towards fast writers. Marathons, wordcount wars, discussion in the forums all made it seem that fast was the way to go. I really felt that no matter what I did, I would never be fast enough. (I left the community for a long time, and it doesn't seem nearly that bad now.)
Eventually I got over it. I'd still like to write faster, but at least now I have reasons. While I'm relieved to hear that
That's the second reason I want to get faster. The first is that I want to finish more books in my lifetime.
Luckily, my writing speed is gradually improving. Someday I may even become a slow writer rather than a slothlike writer!
Links:
Filed by scriniary at 2:33 am under Writing
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• updated the list of projects on the main page
• updated the writing project timeline
Filed by scriniary at 9:32 pm under Site Changes
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If writing a novel is like taking a cross-country road trip to visit a friend's new home, then I never had a map, lost the very sketchy directions I'd written down, and have forgotten whether my friend moved to California or Washington.
I meant to be writing up to the government's official decision to rebel (or not) against the empire, but the story veered in another direction, and now far far too much stuff has to happen before then. I've got 70k words now and that's too late to start addressing new issues. Things are moving forward at a rapid clip, and the story'll get there eventually, just not in this book.
(Yes, it's a series. This is book 2. If I'm lucky they all stand alone. If I'm unlucky I get a big pile of scratch paper.)
I do have a great climactic scene in mind that, as an ending, would resolve the questions raised in this book very nicely while leaving the larger questions waiting for later in a slightly-more-defined state. Might be too melodramatic though.
I also have, finally, a lame one-sentence summary for the book: Two friends struggle to come to terms with their estranged families while helping their adopted homeland reunite with its parent empire. (Or not.)
magicnoire linked to a joint blog run by Bob Mayer and Jenny Crusie, which is a year-long workshop that looks really interesting. The first two lessons were on the one-sentence summary concept. I find it useful as a way of focusing on what the story's about, but I keep revising it as I write and the focus changes.
Onward.
Filed by scriniary at 7:46 pm under Writing
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Middles are fun.
My WIP has been creaking along very slowly lately. Last night a bit of plot finally went Ping! and fell into place, and everything is moving forward again.
I had wondered if I were slogging because I was trying too hard to have the right events happen rather than just getting to the end. (I rewrite a lot, so in a sense, worrying about everything being correct is pointless. Even if I am sure it is correct now, I will have to rewrite it later anyway.) Or if I had gone off entirely in the wrong direction and was going to have to scrap some unspecified amount of story.
Luckily that isn't the case — there was a bit of plot I'd forgotten about (there are a million things going on at once in this book) and my subconscious was apparently worrying away at it before the rest of me had remembered it was there. So last night the subconscious figured it out and pinged me, and now I've picked up that lost plot thread, answered the question of why Segun is in hiding if no one knows he's guilty, tied some things from early part I into the rest of the plot, and drawn a few bits of part 2 together. Whew. My subconscious deserves some chocolate.
And then it should get back to work, figuring out how the smuggling thing fits into the rest of the book, what Kaite has to do with it, and just what was up with that spell, anyway.
And I get to write the first conversation Wren has with her mother since betraying her. Fun.
Filed by scriniary at 7:45 pm under Writing
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SF unless otherwise noted:
13: Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees
12: His Excellency, Joseph J. Ellis [history]
11: Devlin's Luck, Patricia Bray
10: Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn
9: Vellum, Hal Duncan
8: Tall, Dark, & Dead by Tate Hallaway
7: The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
6: Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
5: American Gods, Neil Gaiman
4: Threads of Malice, Tamara Siler Jones
3: Crystal Rain, Tobias Buckell
2: Make Lemonade, Virginia Euwer Wolff [mainstream YA]
1: A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin
And various other books that I didn't finish for one reason or another (mostly because I didn't like them) and many (but not the whole year's worth) issues of F&SF.
I need more variety in my genres. 2007 will definitely see more history, beginning with Ellis' Founding Brothers, and it'd be nice to throw in some other non-fiction, but *peeks at to-read shelf* I'm unlikely to read any more science fiction. With luck I'll have less urban fantasy.
While I was home last week, I sorted through the books in my closet at my parents' house, and brought back my entire set of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I haven't reread those in years.
Filed by scriniary at 3:38 am under Books
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