I have been in Las Vegas and at the Grand Canyon this week, so I’m late and sparse once again. Still, I managed to fit in some reading around my travels. Once again I learned that bad TV can improve your writing. But be careful, it seems you shouldn’t hate what you write. When you’re stuck you might find that the problem doesn’t lie with your current issue but with something earlier in your draft. While you’re checking back, you might also see if your scenes join up. What else? I fantasized about getting published, and I learned a (yet another) golden rule about writing. Finally, I looked in on Pratchett, discovered that the Romans weren’t sure about classics either, and wondered again about the health of comment culture.
Charlie Jane Anders gleaned some seemingly simple advice from a statement by fantasy author SC Butler. That is: write what you love, not what you think will sell, or what you think you should be writing. Too obvious to include in a round up? Well it stopped me short. I applied it to my work in progress, and came back with a green light. Yes. I’m still writing something I’d pick up off the shelf (if the execution is right). But the test wasn’t an easy one. You can get so deep into the work of a novel that you lose sight of thing itself. Do you still love your work in progress? I think its worth checking in on that every few weeks or so.
While we’re going back to basics, Jessica Digiacinto at Lit Drift suggested that tabloid TV holds the key to better writing. No matter how sterile you find reality TV stations, you have to agree that they know what people want, and communicate their offering in such a way as to hook their viewers. Unless you’re keen to improve your readers to death, there’s surely a lesson to be learned there.
Darcy Pattison at Fiction Notes posted on an interesting revision technique. She suggested that you separate out your POV chapters so that you can read each thread as a narrative in itself. This strikes me as an excellent way of getting a feel for a character’s arc, and for spotting problems of continuity. You can also spot which characters are hogging the limelight and which are lurking in the shadows.
Laurie Halse Anderson of Mad Woman in the Forest is still producing her series of revision tips. I liked tip 14, which reminds us that you can’t always fix a problem within the scope of the chapter that frames it. Perhaps you haven’t set things up earlier in the novel as you should have. Fix the set up and you might have an answer to the problem at hand.
Laura Cross from About a Screenplay counted off six characteristics of an effective scene six characteristics of an effective scene. Although aimed at screen writers I think this is good advice for fiction writers in general. In particular: provide conflict, make it matter, have something change, fashion a hook to drive the reader on.
Cross included a traditional piece of screen writing advice: ‘get in late, get out early’ in her list. If you do that, you may do well to heed Jason Black’s advice in his Plot to Punctuation blog. Black argues that you can lose a lot in the gaps between scenes if you don’t bridge the transition effectively.
It’s the holiday season. Reason enough to treat yourself to a detailed daydream. Mandy Hubbard of Let the Words Flow flow provided some raw materials in her post on the process of making a book. She described the steps from acceptance to publication. Now all we need is a film rights auction, and then some yacht and Italian villa selection, and we have the ingredients for the perfect unpublished fiction writer’s fantasy.
Anna Staniszewski discussed creating sidekick characters using Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel as her starting point.
Eric Cummings, guest posting at Write To Done, provided some nice high level writing advice, which boiled down this: make sure your words mean what you want them to say. I’ve been caught out by this before myself, falling in love with the sound of a phrase even though I know it really doesn’t convey what it should.
A few non-craft pieces caught my eye this week. Unseen academicals is by no means Terry Pratchett’s best book, but even on a slow day he’s ahead of the pack. This review by Sam Jordison gives some idea why that is.
I’m increasingly preoccupied by classics, albeit at a casual level. I’m even learning Latin at the moment, though I’d be hard pressed to explain why. So pounced on a piece by Classics academic Mary Beard in the New York Review of Books Blog. She wrote about the Roman view of the classic. It turns out that even the romans argued about the definition of a classic.
While I was at the NYRBlog, and pondering the classicus and the proletarius writer I haappened upon Sue Halpern’s piece on online comment culture. Halpern argues that the wisdom of the crowd applies far better to products with objectively measurable attributes (like cameras or coffee machines) than to products which can only be judged subjectively (like books and records). I’m not sure where we take the discussion from there, but it was an interesting starting point.
