January 13, 2011 by amanda
While I’m really all about beautiful words and poetry this month, I couldn’t help but realise that a post from The Blood-Red Pencil (great blog title!) was screaming at me. The post is from half-way through last year but came to my attention through Twitter this week and it’s called, simply and accurately, 10 Steps to a Better Story. Feel free to go away and read it now (as long as you promise to come back).
It is not a bang-you-over-the-head lecture, nor is it something unique and new that will amaze the socks off a writer, but it’s a list of things that I, for one, need reminding of pretty much constantly when I’m writing either a novel or short story. That your main character should want something AND do something – obvious, yes, but I sometimes don’t let the reader know what these wants are and then there’s not much motivation to keep reading, is there?! Also, the importance of introducing conflict early on is something I’ve often missed in my meandering opening chapters. I’m always at risk of spending too much time getting the characters and setting in there without giving the reader a reason to turn to the next page. And I excuse all that by saying perhaps I’m writing literary fiction, but surely there’s no real difference.
The final point on the list is for me, the most important, so I’m going to reproduce it entirely in case you didn’t go over and read it yourself:
The components of a novel that readers (and publishers) care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, setting. If you have to sacrifice something, start at the end of list. Never sacrifice the story for anything else.
So, story is everything. I so often forget that. But I will keep trying to remember!
What’s your writing weakness from this list? And how do you remember to get around it?
(Thanks to kodomut for the great storytelling picture!)
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January 4, 2011 by amanda
I’m four days in to my Poem A Day challenge, and so far I have figured out four important things:
- Writing poetry does indeed, as I’d hoped, really make me focus on word choice and considering how to make my writing sound “beautiful”.
- Writing poetry has the extra (somewhat related) bonus of making me edit and revise a lot more than I do with straight fiction writing, and the act of editing and revision is something I feel I need to improve.
- Having the impetus to write every day because other people are expecting you to is highly motivating for me (something I’d learnt from my NaNoWriMo experience, but forgotten recently).
- I’m pretty certain I have no talent as a poet.
At the end of my month of poeming I may just let some of my better works out into the wild, but for now I’m not sending them too far beyond the electronic classroom I’m sharing over at the Path of Possibility. Even that is daunting enough as I’m amongst a dozen other writers, all of whom are considerably better at writing poetry than I am. Some of them are even published poets! Yes, this is freaking me out but I’m quietly adding my poems and secretly hoping nobody will read them. It’s like being a completely newbie writer all over again.
Despite these anxieties I’m having a heap of fun getting into my “beautiful words” with this poetry thing and it’s certainly making sure my 2011 writing year gets off to a positive start.
Permalink | Posted in Goals and Motivation, Writing Fiction | 4 Comments »
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December 22, 2010 by amanda
It’s all about synchronicity. Let me explain the chain of events:
- I gave the world a Christmas present then decided I should also give myself something. Yep, I’m greedy!
- It’s nearly the end of the year, the time when I always go all contemplative and dream up some new goals for the new year, especially when it comes to my writing, which by this time of the year has usually become a little neglected.
- Kristan Hoffman, my loyal commenter and a writer who inspires and motivates me, blogged about writing with beautiful words versus telling a compelling story, and I was reminded that I really want to work on my ability to use beautiful words.
- Sage Cohen – you might remember I reviewed her new book The Productive Writer recently – launched her new site, The Path of Possibility (in Writing and Life), and I felt like it could have been put together just for me and my needs!
- I decided that in 2011 I will focus on one thing each month (for example, submitting my existing novels; rewriting one of them; plotting my third novel which I’m itching to get going with, etc), because I’m normally reasonably successful at focusing on a task for a few weeks at a time, if I know it’s an intensive time to do just that one thing and not all the other writing kind of things at once.
And therefore … yes all this is leading somewhere … I’m going to start with working on “beautiful words” and to that end, I have signed up for Sage Cohen’s Poem-A-Day Challenge, which runs from January 1st to 31st, 2011. I definitely do not aim to be a poet. But poetry is where I have often been inspired by “beautiful” writing, and I have dabbled in writing poems before, and having some guidance and encouragement to write them regularly for a month will, I hope, give my writing a bit of a literary boost.
I’m also busily brainstorming what the other months of the year will focus on, but that’s a story for another day.
(Just for the record, I’ve even published my poetry before. Look! Here on my Not A Ballerina blog, I published this poem which I wrote when I was ten years old. I hope I have improved since …)
Tags: beautiful writing, Path to Productivity, Sage Cohen, writing poetry
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Headline, Inspiration for Writers, Writing Fiction | 4 Comments »
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November 25, 2010 by amanda
Every since I reviewed The Thinker’s Thesaurus a few months back, I’ve been wondering if my working vocabulary of English is actually sufficient to be a good writer. I know, that sounds a bit dramatic, but at the very least, I wonder if I might have actually stopped learning new English words (with the exception, of course, of things like “to google” or “to tweet”!). My writing style, both here on my blog and in my fiction writing itself, tends to be fairly “everyday” – I use the kind of vocabulary that most people with a reasonable basic education would know. I’m not sure if this is just how I write, or if it’s a consequence of spending many years teaching and living with speakers of English as a second language, something that requires you to select vocabulary more likely to be understood.
When I was a kid, I was a vocabulary monster. I wanted more and more! I distinctly remember my parents had set up a system for me (no doubt to stop me calling out to them constantly) that when I was reading a book, I should write down any words I didn’t know in a little notebook and then later on one of them would explain them to me. Did this teach me all the words I need to know? Or is my English vocabulary knowledge falling behind?
To test this, I’ve recently been paying extra attention to books as I’m reading them to notice whether or not there are actually words I don’t understand. I’m sure I’ve been skipping over them in the past, or at least guessing the meaning from the context and then thinking nothing more of them. I’ve just finished reading Jana Wendt’s (creative non-fiction) book Nice Work (For non-Australian readers, Jana Wendt is a Czech-born Australian journalist who was my absolute idol as a teenager; I had the change to meet her a few months ago at an event related to her new book. Very cool.) – and anyway, I’ve kept a running list of the words I didn’t know. They are:
- saturnine
- roiling
- fervid
- suasion
- sclerotic
- argot
I’ve dutifully looked them up in the dictionary now, and their meanings were along the lines of what I’d guessed from the context, but I don’t see that I would ever use them in my own writing.
So what have I learnt from this exercise? First of all, I don’t think my vocabulary is too shocking. Second, I wonder if there’s a stage in life (at least the life of a writer) where you’re unlikely to add any words to the vocabulary you use to write (technology and new phenomena excluded, of course). And third, I noticed that words I didn’t know being present in a book I was reading, at least at this rate – about six in the whole book – certainly didn’t disturb my understanding or enjoyment of the book.
Would you try to actively increase your vocabulary, either as a writer or just for your own benefit? Let me know in the comments, I’m curious.
Permalink | Posted in Writing Fiction | 5 Comments »
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October 20, 2010 by amanda
A discussion at Amazon on the ABNA contest forum, back when I was wondering if my novel would make its way in that competition, asked about how many authors have cats. This discussion (to date) runs for SEVEN pages. Yes, apparently there ARE a lot of writers who have cats. And lo and behold, I’m one of them. Well, I’m two of them. That is to say, I have two cats. Does that make me a better writer?
Despite the seemingly frivolous topic, there were some interesting insights in the discussion on what I call the cat-owning and fiction writing correlation. Someone pointed out that writers tend to be a little on the solitary side, and use their cats for company; preferring cats, of course, because cats also tend to be loners and don’t get too offended if you don’t pay attention to them 24 hours a day (the way people or dogs might!). But even the solitary thing is something of a stereotype, right? I mean, I’m very happy with just my own company and never get bored or necessarily crave company, but when other people are around, then I’m just as much in my element and of course, I’m curious (nosey?) enough to be thoroughly interested in all kinds of people, something which is surely essential for a writer.
However, I must say that my cats do more to hinder my writing than help it. One of them in particular loves to walk around on my desk and has a nasty habit of hitting the “back” key, which, if she did it right now, would have the effect of erasing this entire post. Lucy (pictured above) thinks that the best seat in the house is the chair at my desk, and it has happened more than once that I’ve turned away from a plan to sit down and write because I can’t bear to kick her off my chair when she looks so peaceful and comfortable. And around three o’clock in the afternoon the two of them start nibbling at my toes because they’re hungry, and it’s very difficult to write serious or good fiction when your toes are being tickled by feline teeth.
Do your pets help you with your writing? Or are they just the hindrance that mine are?
Tags: Amazon ABNA forum, pets and writers, writers and cats
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Writing Fiction | 4 Comments »
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October 12, 2010 by amanda
A friend of mine is making a career change at the moment, and I was pleased to hear she’s decided she wants to write. One of her justifications was that now she’s a mother of two gorgeous girls, rather than going back to her old job – which didn’t excite her too much – she wants to work at something which is at least almost as rewarding as spending time with her daughters.
When we were chatting about how she might get into more writing work (and she’s largely talking non-fiction work, but don’t worry, I’m getting to the fiction writing part) I promised her I would look through my regular writing emails and RSS feed and send her some links that might be helpful. Then I decided they might be helpful to others too, so if you’re reading this, just starting out with writing and want to know my favourite places on the web for information and inspiration, then here they are!
Hope Clark’s Funds for Writers
I’ve blogged about Hope before … in fact I’ve just looked it up and it was almost four years ago! Well, what I said then still stands and Hope’s Funds for Writers newsletters are the only ones I always read without deleting. She sums up the writing life and the various dilemmas writers face so accurately that I always feel like I’m not alone. Obviously she’s successful at what she does, yet seems so absolutely normal – and readers know all about her chickens and her garden – which gives you hope (oops, no pun intended) that you, too, can make a living out of writing. Her newsletters have some great leads on writing opportunities but these days I don’t look at them much – it’s the editorial that makes me read every one that lands in my in-box.
Paula B’s The Writing Show
Another inspiring resource for writers is Paula’s Writing Show podcasts and website. Turns out I have blogged about her podcasts before, too! Fiction and non-fiction writers alike can learn a lot from Paula herself as well as from the various guests she interviews for the podcasts and there is now a busy Writing Show forum that I’d love to get more involved in (I think I posted once when it started up but, you know, arrival of small boy and all …).
Christina Katz and the Prosperous Writer
Christina has a whole lot of info, courses, resources, you name it on her site, but it’s her Prosperous Writer newsletters which I’ve found most helpful and inspiring recently. I also follow her goings-on on Facebook and it’s another case of seeing a real live writer leading a normal (busy) life, which really helps too!
Angela Hoy’s Writers Weekly
This newsletter has been popping into my inbox for years too, and I regularly enter their 24 hour short story contest. (Still waiting to win something though – I must be unlucky because they even have heaps of “door prizes” and I’ve never been a winner!!). And while I don’t find it quite as inspirational as the others, there is a whole heap of useful practical information and writing job leads to follow.
So, I hope these help out my friend as well as some random strangers out there who come across this post. As for the more accomplished writers among my readers, I’d love to hear which writing websites or newsletters you can’t live without – do let me know in the comments.
Tags: Christina Katz, Funds for Writers, The Writing Show, Writers Weekly, writing websites
Permalink | Posted in Fiction Tips, Inspiration for Writers, Writing Fiction | 2 Comments »
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July 15, 2010 by amanda
So as you know I’ve now got a baby, and it probably won’t surprise you at all to hear that this means finding time to write is trickier than ever. I seem to be getting a few windows of opportunity at the end of the day but these windows seem to be quickly filled with doing the writing that pays the bills (necessary) and feeling extraordinarily tired (unavoidable). But rather than waiting until my little boy has grown up – although that sometimes seems the easiest solution to the “when to write” dilemma – I would really like to get a new writing routine going.
I’ve been trying to come up with some good times to get going on my third novel. You may recall I mentioned plotting out a novella and I’m thinking that in fact, it’s probably big enough to become a proper novel instead. Of course, I’m thinking that without even going back and reading all the notes I’ve written because I just don’t have time, but that’s the current thinking. And I’m excited about the ideas within it. For short, let’s just refer to it as my Trans-Siberian novel, but that’s really leaving out a whole lot of important ideas – you’ll just have to wait though, dear reader!
For thinking, plotting and brainstorming, I think there are quite enough moments in the day, as long as I don’t need to write anything down at the time. Out walking while I’m pushing the pram, for example, is quite a relaxing time and probably ideal for brainstorming. Surprisingly, when I’m trying to calm down a crying baby, I also sometimes feel like I’m in a bit of a trance and thinking about something quite removed from the actual crying – sometimes I suddenly notice that my little boy is almost asleep in my arms and I kind of missed what happened in between, being so deep in thought about something else! So why not make this something else my next novel, I figure.
But for actual writing, that’s a bit trickier. Night time is not my creative time, so I really don’t think I can make that work, even if it is the easiest time of the day to find a few spare minutes. I’m thinking cafes. That’s why there’s the very cute hot chocolate picture at the top of this post, although my friend had a latte with a fish on top which was even more impressive. (All at the John Street Cafe, if you’re interested). My plan would go like this: get a parking spot quite far away from one of my favourite cafes. Walk my baby all the way there in the pram so he falls asleep. In the noise of the cafe (curiously, and apparently many babies are like this), he’ll probably stay asleep. I can get a hot chocolate and some writing time. Some very civilised writing time.
This is my current plan, and I just need to schedule a moment to actually do this. I’m surprised how busy life is when you’re not going to some kind of face-to-face employment – I still have a hard time fitting in appointments. But I feel I just need to treat writing like an appointment and then get the momentum going. Otherwise I really won’t get to my next novel draft until my boy is off at school. What do you think? Do you write in cafes or other public places, and how does it go? I’ve never really tried.
And don’t think I’ve forgotten the first two novel drafts, and the need to revise them finally and get them off to agents. I haven’t, but I just haven’t come up with a good plan for that yet. I think half the problem is my usual procrastination, and the other half is probably fear. Don’t worry, I’ll get to it. Baby steps. Get it?!
Tags: Trans-Siberian novel, writing in cafes
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Goals and Motivation, Headline, Writing Fiction, Writing Novels | 3 Comments »
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July 15, 2010 by amanda
If you’re a writer, you’ve probably been directed towards the I Write Like website recently, it seems to be doing the rounds. It’s an interesting gimmick – you take a chunk of your writing, paste it into a box, and the site figures out which famous writer your style is most similar too.
I thought I’d try it out with my Bratislava novel draft. Given that I’ve tried really hard to have three different voices there, with alternating chapters narrated by three different characters (three very different characters, I had hoped), what I wanted to see is that each of the chapters “sounded like” a different writer.
So did they? Yes and no. Being a bit of a research-head, I didn’t just try one extract in the “I Write Like” analysis, but several, from different parts of the book. For each character I sometimes got a different writer: James Joyce, Bram Stoker and Dan Brown (! Oh no! I think I probably have it on public record that I think Dan Brown is a terrible writer!!). But for each of the characters, and then also with the synopsis I wrote, one name kept coming up: Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut? Really?? Didn’t he write weird science fiction stuff? Um, I actually have to admit I don’t remember reading any of his novels although I have a feeling I was meant to read Slaughterhouse Five at uni. Well, I’m intrigued now and must go away and read some of his stuff and try to figure out why this odd little bit of software would say I write in his style. Eek.
Having said that, I did Wikipedia him (has Wikipedia become a verb yet, like Google? It has for me!) and found something good. Vonnegut has created eight rules for writing a short story that may help me when I head back to that form at some stage:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Sounds like mostly good advice, and I love the idea of cockroaches eating the final pages, even if I’m not sure I agree with that final point. And now I’m off to track down some Vonnegut books at the local library. Once I pay my overdue fines, that is.
Tags: Bratislava novel, I Write Like, Kurt Vonnegut
Permalink | Posted in Short Stories, Writing Fiction | 5 Comments »
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July 5, 2010 by amanda
Ha ha. Tricked myself. I’ve been hunting around on this site for my May book of the month post, taking quite some time to realise there wasn’t one because I didn’t finish any books in May. Oh, how depressing. I did, however, finish a book in June. So I’m combining those months, and giving you an update on my writing progress during that time, all in one (probably pretty brief) post.
The good news is that my beautiful time-drainer has just hit three months of age and is sleeping a lot more consistently, to the point where in these first couple of days of July I’ve read half a book already! So things are looking up on the fiction front.
Without further ado, the book of the month for May and June is … After the Fall
by Kylie Ladd. Granted, there was no competition, but it was nonetheless a great book. Kylie Ladd is an Australian author (remember, I love Aussie writers) and I “met” her on Twitter somehow recently, which inspired me to get her book out of the library (sorry Kylie, I know I should have bought it, but I have post-birth-of-baby budget issues!).
After the Fall was particularly interesting to me because it uses chapters written from the point of view of different characters, much like my Bratislava novel draft but with even more characters and no systematic rotation of them. I have to admit to being a little confused at first, because I couldn’t get the names of the characters straight in my head, but that’s probably because I only had a chance to read just a short chapter or two at a time. By the end, that was no problem. I enjoyed seeing how different characters interpreted the same situation differently, a technique I’ve tried to use in Bratislava as well.
And to complete the monthly update, yes, I did actually do some writing in June. And a tiny bit in May too. I finished up this round of edits on Bratislava and submitted it to the Allen & Unwin/Vogel award. Yay! I was desperate to enter this year as I’ll sadly be too old next year. Oh and you may note I say “this round of edits” because even during that process I had some new ideas of some more tinkering I could do. I really hope some publisher will take pity on me someday and just publish all my draft novels so I’m not continually tempted to “fix” them, as I’m sure not all the changes are for the better!
Stay tuned for the July update which I hope will be more a productive month. Fingers crossed.
Tags: Bratislava novel, Kylie Ladd, Twitter, Vogel award
Permalink | Posted in Goals and Motivation, Reading Fiction, Writing Fiction | 1 Comment »
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June 17, 2010 by amanda
Now and again I’m asked to review a book on this site; sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t (because sometimes the books sound really bad. Even if I don’t like them, I still have to read them!). When I was asked to review Peter Meltzer’s second edition of The Thinker’s Thesaurus
I agreed immediately because it sounded interesting, but also because I was a little bit skeptical, a combination which normally makes for a balanced review, right?
I remember as a child having a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus that my mother or father had handed down to me. When I’d got it, I’d been excited about how I could use a lot of different words when I wrote a story. I think I opened it about twice. That experience, along with advice I received from teachers along the way, made me the kind of writer that only uses a word that I would use in a conversation. Well, sometimes I guess I write using slightly more complicated words than the vocabulary I reserve for general conversation, but not much.
And that’s why, upon receiving my hefty copy of Meltzer’s Thinker’s Thesaurus, my immediate reaction was that while the concept – “sophisticated alternatives to common words” – was a nice enough one, and it might be good for people attempting to complete crosswords, it was something I would never use for my own writing. Delving in at random to find alternatives for words I sometimes struggle to replace: for “nice”, the suggestions are “sympathique” or “prepossessing”. As in that’s a sympathique dress? Prepossessing weather today?
Okay, I’m being facetious, but I’m just trying to illustrate my feeling at the start. The fact is, 90% of the words suggested as alternatives are words that are beyond my vocabulary. Now, I’m pretty well-read, and pretty highly educated, so I don’t think my vocabulary is particularly bad. That means if I used these words in my writing, the vast majority of my readers wouldn’t understand them, and to me that didn’t sound like a very desirable state of affairs. But then I read more of the blurb at the front of The Thinker’s Thesaurus and well, it got me thinking. Is it necessarily a bad thing to sparingly use some words that few people know – as long as the context makes it clear? Now and again I do come across words I don’t know in books I read, and it doesn’t get me down. It actually interests me. Of course, if such words came along every sentence I’d stop reading the book, but discretely used when they offer a suitable alternative to the word you would otherwise be overusing? I’m still not sure but I am at least open to the possibility of using “sophisticated alternatives”. And if I ever get into writing poetry this book would be the first thing I’d pick up. So while I’m not yet a 100% convert to the use of The Thinker’s Thesaurus by fiction writers, I’m open to change – and if nothing else it’s truly an interesting book to thumb through.
We’ll feature a guest post by Thinker’s Thesaurus authoer Peter Meltzer shortly – in which he gives us another good reason why the world needs a few more difficult words to be in use.
Tags: book reviews, Peter Meltzer, thesaurus, vocabulary
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Writing Fiction | 2 Comments »
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