“You’ll never guess what I found carved inside this log!”I’ve been known to plot overly complicated puzzles for my roleplaying group. I’ve been known to plot stories with intricate interrelationships between characters and groups of characters. I worry, while writing some stories, that I have put in too many characters, or too many subplots, or hidden clues too subtly for the reader to follow.
But nothing I have every concocted is one-billionth as elaborate or labyrinthine as the puzzles supposedly concocted by various historical figures in order to hide treasures, warn future generations of impending doom, explain to allies how to defeat evil forces, and so forth as chronicled in the typical suspense/thriller/historical mystery: A strange epitaph carved onto an old tombstone leads to a cryptic phrase engraved on the wall of an old building, which points to the hiding place of an old family Bible, which has more cryptic phrases hidden in invisible ink on certain pages, which leads to the map that can only be seen by finding six antique objects and arranging them in a specific formation, which shows the location of a hidden crypt, which is accessed by recognizing an obscure symbol on a brick, which leads to another hidden map, which points the way to another part of the old family Bible where another cryptic clue is hidden in almost random looking dots on the edge of a page, which shows the location of a hidden room under an old church…Continue reading Everyone likes a puzzle, but…→
“Just let me finish this scene…”My friend, Barb, who can write circles around me, more than occasionally writes about the process of writing. She’s doing a meme this month answering questions from her followers, and she recently posted a combined answer to a question from me and one from Lyrstzha. Her explanations are great, as always, but as I read her response to the question, “The difference in process between writing a stand-alone fic and writing a whole universe?” I realized that my answer would be a lot different.
For me, there is no difference between how I write a stand-alone story or a long series of stories set in a single universe. That’s because in one sense, I never see any story as a stand-alone, even if I never write any sequels, prequels, or stories otherwise set in the same universe…
“Where’s the delete key?”I’ve been trying to wrap up the end of my novel, the one I worked on finishing during NaNoWriMo. I got 58,000 words added to the novel during November, and was well into the epic battle at the end, but I didn’t quite reach the denouement by the end of the month. And then, of course, I had to change gears and work on a Christmas ghost story before the party.
So, I’ve been struggling with the ending, and it occurred to me it was fitting that I was doing so as the last days of the year were ticking down. So when I hit another snag last night, I started writing a blog post about writing endings in fiction, and how difficult that can be.
When I got up this morning for my morning writing time, I figured I could finish the blog post and schedule it to publish later today. A blog post on composing the final scenes on stories to post on the final day of the year. Perfect, right?
Well, I instead spent my hour of morning writing time re-reading the last three completed chapters and correcting the rather prodigious number of typos and writing a bit more of that stalled denouement.
And now I spent five minutes writing a post about why I haven’t finished the post about writing endings.
And maybe a post about writing something different than I planned is a better way to cap the year.
Sometimes there’s a lot more staring at the screen than pressing of the keys.For the last 19 Christmas seasons I have written a new Christmas ghost story to read to friends at our Christmas party. It started out simple enough. The holiday party was scheduled for the third Saturday of December because we usually got together on the third Saturday of every month for a writers’ night—an event where several people bring a story or a partial story we are working on, we read it, and everyone gives a critique. The December meeting wound up having a Christmas Party feel no matter what, because we were all friends and it was an extremely convenient time to exchange gifts. Continue reading Conjuring the proper ghosts→
The Alternate NaNoWriMo, as proposed by Cafe Aphra (cafeaphrapilot.blogspot.com)So, this year, inspired by the fabulous people at Cafe Aphra, I decided to do an Alternate NaNoWriMo.
The Alternate NaNoWriMo, as proposed by Cafe Aphra (http://cafeaphrapilot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-alternative-nanowrimo.html)We’re a bit past halfway through National Novel Writing Month and my word count is 28,550. Since I’m participating in Cafe Aphra’s Alternate NaNoWriMo (or just being a NaNo Rebel, depending on how you look at it), I did not start with a blank page and begin writing a new novel at 12:01 am on November 1. Instead, my goal is to finish my novel, The Trickster Entanglement (which is a sequel to my novel The Trickster Apocalypse) by the end of the month.
Because of my past experiences of trying to tie a personal story-finishing goal into the creative energy of the NaNoWriMo experience, I also set myself a goal of writing t least 1000 words a day, updating my word count regularly on the NaNoWriMo website (where I am Fontfolly—if you’re participating in and have an account, feel free to add me as a Writing Buddy). I have also tried to be racing with a few of my friends as an additional incentive.
This weekend was not very productive. I knew it would be a challenge, because we were hosting the monthly Writers’ Night at our house and I was scheduled to gamemaster a SteamPunk game on Sunday. Hosting Writers’ Night meant cleaning the house and cooking for a bunch of people, in addition to the time of the actual event. Running the game meant doing some research and cooking food to bring to the potluck in addition to the time of the actual event.
Plus, as if that wasn’t enough, on Friday afternoon, while I was working from home, and specifically when I was getting ready to run out for a doctor’s appointment, the toilet decided to overflow! That created an unexpected amount of work that day, as you can imagine.
I had about 75,000 words of the novel written before I started. Those words were arranged into 14 and a couple half-chapters, the chapters consisting generally of 3 to 5 scenes each. One of the reasons for the two half-chapters has been that for some months I’ve been mucking about trying to re-organize what was there. The reasons for the re-org were two-fold. About half the attendees of the monthly writer’s meeting had raised the issue a few times that the story either had two many characters for people to keep track of, or too many sub-plots to follow. The other half of the group seemed to think that the characters and subplots were okay (and they could see how subplots were converging), but admitted it was difficult for them to say how it held together with so much going on, and gaps of a month in-between reading what came next.
Thus, I’d been spinning my wheels engaged in a lot of re-considering and re-arranging as I tried to figure out which parts were truly vital to the main plot.
Since starting NaNoWriMo, I’ve written 37 complete new scenes. I have advanced several of the subplots fairly well. I’m more or less organizing the scenes into chapters, though at the moment some of those chapters are a lot longer than I had previously been letting them go. At the moment I have 21 chapters, I think (it’s a little weird because I have three chapter 13s and three chapter 17s for reasons that are a bit long to explain at this juncture; but cleaning all of that up is something to do after NaNoWriMo, right?).
As a consequence of taking the NaNoWriMo philosophy to heart—keep writing, just keep writing, don’t stop to edit and revise—one thing that has been different about the new chapters is that I’m sticking with one set of characters for several scenes in a row. Based on comments at the Writers’ meeting this last weekend, I think one of the main problems in the earlier chapters was that I was grouping scenes into chapters such that the reader was constantly jumping from one set of characters to another. There are some points in the plot where that really is necessary, but I think with the complicated plot I have (the word “entanglement” is in the title for more than one reason!), that allowing the reader to focus on few characters at a time will work out better in the end.
One wonders how I hit 105 wpm with those paws.So, while this last weekend wasn’t productive, I have made a lot of good progress. Even with a workday that had a doctor appointment and a plumbing accident, I still managed to write 1574 words on Friday. Saturday was quite a bit less at about 512, and Sunday with 849. I suspect I’ll be able to go back to regularly beating my 1000 word minimum. I also feel quite strongly that I am going to finish the first draft by the end of November.
The Alternate NaNoWriMo, as proposed by Cafe Aphra (http://cafeaphrapilot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-alternative-nanowrimo.html)Yesterday was day six of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). On Wednesday I only wrote 1258 words of new content on my novel in progress. I lost a bit more time than usual researching some stuff for the book, as well as researching something because of a comment from a friend about another blog post. My total word count at the end of day six is 9789.
This isn’t my first year to do something NaNoWriMo-related, but it is the first year that I’ve actually set up an account at the site, and the first year that the alternative I’ve crafted for myself is so close to the spirit of NaNoWriMo.
I’m writing every day on one novel.
I have a daily word count target I’m aiming for.
I have the long-term goal of finishing the novel at the end of the month.
The only thing I’m doing that breaks the “rules” is that I didn’t start a new book from scratch on November 1.
Besides having several friends participating with whom I am checking periodically, this year I have recruited my mom to give it a try. She aspired to be a writer before I was born, and had a particularly traumatic experience when her new mother-in-law found mom’s unfinished first person romance novel and accused mom of having an affair. My paternal grandmother told anyone and everyone she had proof mom was having an affair, and she even coerced my dad into meeting with a divorce lawyer, among other things.
I only learned about that particular incident recently. Growing up, I knew my mom loved books, and she was quite supportive of my early interest in both reading and writing.
Anyway, for some years now I’ve been trying to encourage her to write, with only moderate success. Until I told her about NaNoWriMo. “Can anyone do it?” As soon as she said that, I knew she was hooked.
The first two days she did everything long hand. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve showed her how to use the word processor program on her Mac. For some reason it has just never sunk in that you can do something other than write a short note in those things.
So I walked her through it. I thought, given how she’s always talking about how much she likes having a laptop and how portable it is, that she’d want to write on it. Turns out that what seems to work best for her is typing on her iPhone. Yep, she now has not one but two Word Processors on her iPhone. I showed her how to set up the Dropbox synching with that, so she can work on the stories easily on either her computer or her iPhone.
And she’s writing away and so far having a ball.
The only pep talk I’ve had to give her was when she found herself worrying about some scenes she thought that maybe she should go back and edit. But she already knows that she has a tendency to get caught in unending revision loops on a single scene, so she knew it was a bad idea. I suggested that when the voice in her head started worrying about mistakes that needed fixing, that she just tell the voice that December is for revising.
One wonders how I hit 105 wpm with those paws.Word count at the end of the third day: 5848. Average per day is not high enough to hit 50,000 by the end of the month, but my word count per day is ramping up. And so far I’ve exceeded my minimal goal each day.
Since I’m doing The Alternate NaNoWriMo this month, my blog posts are either going to be shorter and less meaty, or simply less frequent.
I will try to write about something else at least occasionally, since I know that simply reporting my word count and occasionally commenting on what I’m working on is probably not going to be that interesting.
So far (and I realize it’s only been three days), I’ve been finding it works better than my previous attempts to do an alternative version of the exercise. Previously I didn’t set a daily word minimum, so while I did try to keep track of how many words I wrote, I wasn’t focused on that. It was also a little difficult since I had given myself an open-ended assignment to finish “some stories that have been stalled.” Since I was jumping back and forth between tales, figuring out the word count was a little tricky (not impossible, just a multistep tedious process).
It also gave me a great way to procrastinate by doing something I could rationalize as “productive.” If I wasn’t making progress on one story, I could just open one of the other files, and waste time by re-reading what was there in order to orient myself. Some nights I opened and re-read a half dozen or more unfinished tales and got no writing done at all.
Limiting myself to this book in progress, and not any of the many short stories, et al, hanging out there (and not allowing myself to count anything I write in them toward my total) seems, so far, to be doing a good job of keeping me focused.
The Alternate NaNoWriMo, as proposed by Cafe Aphra.I frequently encourage people to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and occasionally get asked why I don’t participate myself.
Several years ago, I explained it this way: “…because I do more writing than that every month already. Examples: a few years ago I had a month, at work, to produce a 75,000 word installation manual, most of it completely new material. And I didn’t actually have the whole month, because half my work time for the month was allocated for designing covers, disc art, etc, editing all of the other documentation for the product (including the 150,000 word administration guide), updating a document in another project, and doing all the pre-press work on all the docs being written by the entire department for all the products going to press for that month. And I didn’t get most of the information I needed for the main guide until four days before the deadline. I wrote about 45,000 words in four of those days.”
Plus I’ve participated many times in Writers’ Round Robins where we work on old manual typewriters, where erasing and revising is very difficult, and you just have to keep going, keep the story moving until it reaches an end.
I have several times used the month as an excuse to do something I called GeneStoFinMo (Gene’s Story Finishing Month) instead, and was only moderately successful. This year I’m participating in The Alternate NaNoWriMo as proposed by the bloggers at Cafe Aphra. Each writer participating is setting their own goal and going for it.
My goal is to write a minimum of 1000 words every day on my current novel in progress, The Trickster Entanglement, and finish the first draft by the end of the month! I had 35,000 words done before November. If I only do 1000 words a day this month, and actually reach the end in that time, it will be only 2/3 the length of the novel to which it is a sequel. If it is to come in at the same word count as the previous book, I’ll need to write 60,000 words this month, or twice the total if I only meet my daily goal each day.
So I am going to try to exceed my daily goal as often as possible.
As of midnight of November 1, the first day of Alternate NaNoWriMo, I had completed 1305 words. Not a bad start.
Sometimes evil is attractive and enticing. (Cover image for “Evil” by Matt Goss.)Most stories involve a conflict. At the beginning of the story the protagonist is confronted with a problem, an obstacle, or a riddle, which will be resolved by the protagonist’s own actions at the end, and which is the thread that connects everything that happens in between together. Resolving that problem usually involves a struggle with other characters or forces, and some sort of inner conflict.
Protagonist is another word for hero. Because we often think of the main character of the story as a hero, and because stories usually involve the hero in some kind of conflict, it is tempting to think that every story needs a villain, too…
Font Folly 