Have you ever met a person who wants nothing more to be a writer, yet doesn’t put in the effort, all excuses and no action? It makes me frustrated. Not because these folks are lazy or incapable or anything like that, but because I know they can do it and there might something in their head that I’d like to know. A story I’d like to hear. To those folks, I’m asking, put your pen to paper and make it known. Should you not write because you’re not good? Because it’ll never get published? Because you’re embarrassed by your attempts at expressing your own creativity? I say piss on all that! Write whatever it is in your head, dammit someone will find it worth reading.
Tag Archives: writing
Progress report
I was going to post something last night, but I was just stupid tired. Whatever topic I was all fired up about in the morning just seemed to go out of me (still gone actually, though I do want to get to it … at some point). I don’t know if it’s all of the things at work I’m trying to get to (I have to write something suspiciously like a college term paper by the end of the month, which means it has to be done early next week for various reviews to take place), or if it’s the intense focus on holiday preparations, or possibly the fact that there’s about 45 minutes of daylight right now, I’m feeling pretty exhausted at the moment.
In spite of that though, I’m feeling fairly proud of myself. While I may have spent a few too many hours of my week whining about not having time for anything but blogging and running errands, I managed to finish a comb-through and revision of the first 11 chapters (~50K) of my story. The last of these 11 chapters was essentially re-written because it was just weak. Much stronger now. Still needs work, I think, but it’s close enough to move on to the next 4 or 5 chapters before revisiting. One of the reasons I’m proud of myself though is because as I went through and made various edits I actually came to the point where the entirety of the 11 chapters seem consistent and feel as though every action and reaction has a justification that makes sense in the context of the story, back-story, and overall plan. There isn’t anything left where I’m having to tell myself I’ll figure out the reason for that later. It’s making the next 3 or 4 chapters in the queue for revision / re-writing / writing seem a lot clearer in my mind. Once I actually get some time to really dig in, I should be able to make a significant amount of progress.
Ripples in the space time continuum
So, I got all my stuff together reasonably early this morning, so I got to go to the coffee shop and spend a few quality hours getting all jittered up and and writing. Except for the fact that I can hardly sit still just now, I feel good about the progress I’ve made so far. Tonight looks good to make quite a bit more progress as well. Of course, I haven’t checked my work e-mail, so all that could change.
Sometime this past week, I was thinking hard about one of my main characters, and realized the voice I’d tried to give him wasn’t working. It didn’t make for consistent reactions through different parts of the story. It took a bit more character history writing to figure out what voice would work, but I think I got there. So, my task today was to go back through and revise three or four chapters, hitting all of the spots where one of these characters appears, in order to work on giving him that new voice.
After bopping around for a while, updating dialogue, and feeling super good about myself, I hit a point where one of the characters had been written to react in exactly the opposite manner than he had done in an earlier chapter. I wouldn’t have even thought about it except that I was reviewing all of the conversations for consistency of voice, and this one was obvious. It wasn’t a major problem, I don’t think, I just went back and added a few sentences to explain the change his position on the matter, the circumstances already set it up for him to change his position anyhow. Unfortunately, this edit brought my attention to other issues of consistency. Mostly stuff about who said what and when.
Needless to say, this became an exercise in flipping around through all of the chapters to make sure everyone was reacting to situations in a consistent manner, as I progressed through the dialogue re-writing. For the most part, I was looking for instances where new information was being presented as known, or known information was being presented as new. Nothing seemed to require major changes, just a few well-placed sentences, and in a couple instances a paragraph or two. A lot of the inconsistencies appear to have come from earlier revisions where I was smoothing out dialogue so it felt more natural, and less like an information dump. Based on the issues, it appears that I had moved a bit of explanation, then removed it later because I think I thought it had been addressed somewhere else. I’m nearly to the point where I’m back to working on new material, and so it should be easier to prevent those inconsistencies.
I don’t know what the point of this post is, except that I’m making progress. I suppose this is also a note to be careful when you’re revising, even small details, because they can have a way of rippling outward in your story from the point the change was made, even if it’s a tiny change. The longer you let those go, the bigger they’re going to seem to the reader.
On Writing Dragons 