I’m back from my travels, and it’s my turn to trawl the net for writing links. I’ve thrown in a couple of silly videos as well, in case your attention wanders. It’s the article equivalent of that cafe in the middle of Ikea. No meatballs for you though, I’m afraid.
Read on after the jump.
At the Book View Cafe Blog Gerald M Weinberg was hunting and killing filler words this week.
Understanding where your story starts can be tricker than it sounds. The Query Shark argued quite forcefully (and she is usually so reticent) that one submitter’s end should have been his beginning.
Darcy Pattison argued you should start in innocence. That is, not foreshadow the end at the start. That may be true, but I enjoy the how-we-got-here plot. You often see this in TV shows and movies. The protagonist starts out narrating over his or her supposed death. The story then shows us how the character collided with this final incident. Often, of course, the incident is not so final, and we discover that fate has a twist or two to run yet.
One distinguishing characteristic of a beginning is the crisis or decision that propels the protagonist into a transformed world. At Mystery Writing is Murder Elizabeth Spann Craig tackled the Inciting Incident.
While we’re being all structured, it might be worth going back to one of the planning bibles. At Let the Words Flow, Julie Eshbaugh provided a nice overview of the Hero’s Journey as described by Joseph Campbell, and later applied more explicitly to the writing process by Christopher Vogler.
At edittorrent Theresa wrote about the relationship between character and plot.
I’m pretty new to this book trailer business, though everyone is suddenly very excited about it. If book trailers make me slightly nervous, the [Famous Historical Book/Person] and [Zombies/Androids/Sea Monsters/Whatever] bandwagon that’s clogging up the SF section shelves right now positively scares me, and not in good way. I’m not much of a Star Trek fan either. Still io9, Fantasy and SF Lovin’ News and Reviews, and many others featured this trailer for Night of the Living Trekkies which is all kinds of wonderful.
Odd thing is, it makes me want to watch the movie, which clearly doesn’t exist, and not read the book, which does.
At Magical Words Mindy Klasky posted under the title Throbbing Loins. I have no idea whether the post is interesting.. my attention tends to wander whenever I see the heading. It’s taken me 45 minutes just to write this paragraph.
If you do head over to Magical Words for a fix of the throb, though, you might look in on Gina Covello’s post. She wrote about the care and feeding of minions, this week. It seems taking over the world, and plotting the doom of your nemesis is not all it’s cracked up to be. What with pension plans, labor relations and disciplinary procedures to consider. It’s not been the same since orcs discovered trades unions. What do we want? Equitable distribution of man flesh! When do we want it? Preferably within the current tax year!
I’m revising a short story right now (hah! short! If only it were short). So I was interested in __Anna Staniszewski’s pithy three point revision checklist. If you want some more depth, you could do a lot worse than Alexandra Sokolov’s recent pieces on rewriting.
Anyone who writes, works a day job and aspires to a social or family life knows all about time management. Or at least how frustrating it can be to fail at it. I’ve discussed tricks you can play to fit writing into smaller chunks of time. At Men with Pens James reviewed 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam. The idea here is that you carefully audit your week, and then address what you learn. Not sure it takes an entire book to get this across, but I like the idea. There’s a spreadsheet too, apparently.
Oh, yes, I featured in a post this week. I won a place in the new LiteraryLab compilation. I’m delighted! Of course now I have to write something for it. I’m glad it will be published, because according to the Query Shark contests are not publication credits. If it’s true that agents will discount placements in contests, that’s pretty depressing news.. and rather sinks my current strategy. Oh well.
Perhaps I should buy myself something to cheer me up. InkyGirl updated her iPad writers’ software roundup this week. Trouble is, I have a laptop and a perfectly serviceable netbook, both of which run Linux and can therefore do pretty much anything I want them to. Can anyone give me the clinching reason to go out and buy the toy I so very much want to need?
Thought not. I still need a boost then. How about this? Is it writing related? No. But it’s Friday, and Dude, you have no Quran
AL Kennedy posted from a writers retreat this week. She was dry and funny as usual, and as usual I got a peculiar pleasure from being one of her ‘best beloveds’. I imagine myself a school mistress’s cat. Purrr.
In the Guardian Books Blog Alison Flood was disappointed by romantic writing. I’d agree. Not enough sex, on the whole, and almost never a spaceship.
Speaking of not enough sex, in Hey There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room, Jeff Cohen provided an interesting insight into all the exciting things characters never do in cozies (that’s the crime sub-genre in which posh people get poisoned at vicarages, and antiques dealers solve murders). Apparently his characters are getting a tad frustrated. After all that abstinence it’s a wonder they don’t rebel in an orgy of vicar-rogering, and go on the rampage yelling out the C-word with liberated glee, while mowing down woodland animals in stolen Range Rovers.
In The London Review of Books, Elif Batuman reviewed The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl. Although the book offers a sympathetic perspective on academic fiction programmes, Ms Batuman begged to differ. In fact she was…
disappointed to find in The Programme Era traces of the quality I find most exasperating about programme writing itself: oversophistication combined with an air of autodidacticism, creating the impression of some hyperliterate author who has been tragically and systematically deprived of access to the masterpieces of Western literature, or any other sustained literary tradition.
It’s a very long piece, whose conclusions are pretty much identical to that extract. If you choose to work though it, I suggest you stop by here occasionally and watch a silly video. I won’t tell anyone. Then we can reconvene in a week or two when everyone gets good and cross with one another. You can see the conflagration begin at The Millions in the comment section.
Wit too dry? Prose too erudite? Let’s end in the comforting middlebrow realm of Wikipedia. Newly Hugo’d author Charles Stross reminded us that an obvious inaccuracy can destroy a reader’s nicely suspended disbelief and all but kill your story. So keep a somewhat trusted information source handy, and fact check, people, fact check.
