What a lot of NaNo advice there is to be had this week! Would anyone–anyone other than the advice-givers that is–mind so very much if I ignore most of it and just link to the two posts I found interesting?
Thought not.
Alexandra Sokoloff jumped in there with the one question nobody seems to ask: what kind of story are you writing? Hallelujah! This, I think, is why I struggle with the prescriptive 3-Act, 8-Sequence Structure and friends. When I tried out Alexandra’s idea of listing works that match my NaNo project’s structure, I ended up with The Company of Wolves (a film based on a short story by Angela Carter) and Ted Hughes’ Crow (poetry). I’m just a sucker for all that post-modernist dreamlike segueing. But enough about me.
And eek! I so much didn’t want to mention Ted Hughes, this week of all weeks. I’m fairly sure Matt wouldn’t appreciate a Hughes/Plath showdown on his blogspace.
Um, OK, so whose side do you take?
Jodi Cleghorn and Natalie Whipple seemed to be on a mutual wavelength in their posts earlier this week, just Natalie didn’t tag hers as a NaNo piece. Both writers suggested that time spent in thought—AKA daydreaming–can be good for your writing as well as for your soul. If that sounds dangerously like pantser propaganda, think again; neither author is known for that kind of thing.
Another way to get the mental pistons firing is to engage in research. Jody Hedlund spends a full two months doing just that before putting pen to paper; but then, as she says, historical fiction truly demands it. She also made the important point that a precisely-maintained bibliography proves immensely useful once the novel reaches a publishing house. Greg Rucka has a very different approach (and presumably writes a very different kind of fiction); he advocates research as lifestyle. Let the Words Flow writer Biljana Likic is with Greg on this, kinda. She evolved an interesting technique when she needed to understand the sensation of fear, whereas Greg would’ve just jumped off a cliff or something. Either way, your mileage may vary. Kristen Lamb offered more reliable notes about how to send shivers down your readers’ spines, including the perennial “less is more” and the marginally less useful “be a great psychologist”.
You may have noticed this is a relatively short round-up. We have a couple of bloggers MIA at present; both Janice Hardy and Laurie Halse Anderson, regular linkees from my round-up posts, are up to the eyeballs in book promotion tours at present. Janice Hardy seems to have a particularly gruelling schedule on her hands. It’s enough to put anyone off the whole idea of publication!
Some people are off the idea of literary competitions, too. Edward Collier wrote in the aftermath of the Man Booker Prize that he couldn’t see any point in it, other than to massage already-successful authors’ egos. He’ll have been pleased, then, to see crime fiction prize the Golden Dagger going to a debut novelist, Belinda Bauer. Go, girl!
Another award in the news; the Literary Review Bad Sex Award, which celebrates “poorly written, redundant or crude passages of a sexual nature”. Tony Blair’s The Journey has become the first non-fiction book ever to be nominated for this dubious honour.
What next? Oh, e-books. Don’t get me onto e-books, I only caved in and got myself a mobile phone this year. Nothing I read about the e-book revolution does anything to convince me of the need for a Kindle, or anything else along those lines. I like books. Dusty, smelly, read-a-hundred-times books. So this week we have the Orange Fiction Prize going down the Swanee to be replaced by–guess what–year-round e-publishing. Nice. Then we have Amazon trying to force the hand of publishers over e-book prices. As if that’s not enough, Lynn Viehl posted about an iniquitous attempt to force e-books upon her when trying to buy the genuine paper-and-ink article. Geez, what’s the hurry? We all know the current e-readers will be superseded in a decade anyway!
To finish off, here are a couple of random posts I really liked from this week’s collection. One from Joanna Young on what to do when everything has already been said, and one from Vahini Naidoo on Let the Words Flow, on the magic of secrets. Neither of these were filed under a NaNo header, surprisingly.
And this one’s for Matt. He’ll know why.
