Category Archives: Writing

Some recent discussions about how to fix specific writing problems brought a few things to mind that have helped me in the past, which I am throwing out here in case someone who needs them runs across them.

* Ask critiquers to be very specific. (Without driving them away.)

For a long time I relied on the kindness of, not strangers, but critters who were patient enough to point out specific things (places to describe, characters they didn’t understand) or specific places in the text where I had to add stuff. This is probably obvious, but most people, including me, will say something vaguer like “Show me more about what the village looks like”. Which is fine but I’d go through each paragraph looking for things to add, and say to myself, see, right there it says the houses are on stilts. I needed someone to tell me what specific things they wanted to know about the village (how big are the houses? Are they in good repair?) before I could paint the scene.

If you’re just starting to look at one particular aspect of writing, it could be useful to ask people to give you specifics. Or even if you’re not just starting out. I got an anvil dropped on my head this weekend, a very enlightening and useful anvil, and I owe the dropper a drink or three (and a gallon of red ink pixels).

Important corollary: Fix the things the critiquers point out!

* Print out someone else’s work that you like (such as the sample chapters authors have online) in MS format and marking it up with a highlighter.

I forget who suggested this to me, but it was great advice. I remember using something of Bujold’s that must have been up on her site. I made all the dialogue yellow, description green, and emotion maybe pink. Just to slow myself down and look at the words other people used and the proportions of things. And then I highlighted a chapter of my own and a lightbulb flickered on. My manuscript looked like a screenplay by comparison.

Anyone else tried these, or think they’re horrible ideas?

I develop a lot of story ideas while jogging with my iPod. I’ve heard a lot of writers say similar things, so I was wondering what kind of music works best for the rest of you.

Most pop songs seem to be about romantic relationships, and those don’t do much for me, idea-wise. Maybe if I were a romance writer. The ones that aren’t obviously about romance, or where I can interpret the words as something where she’s actually mad not because he’s got another girl but because he’s gone off and betrayed her to the dark lord or whatever, those work. What also works well are show tunes, especially if I don’t know the show. The good ones have story built into them and if I don’t know the plot, I’m free to spin my own. [1] On the other hand, opera doesn’t work, maybe because I don’t know the words, but classical music without words does–I just build on the feelings.

[1] I did most of my show-tune listening in the car, from tapes I recorded in Boston of Standing Room Only (not actually that long ago, despite the use of cassette tapes). Now I can get their stream, and I bet there’s a way I could record that. Though they aren’t particularly great for jogging, especially as I’m trying to get my running speed up.

Helen posted a link to an article about why avoiding “was” isn’t always the best idea. I agree that it isn’t – “to be” in all its forms is kinda an important verb in our language – but I have to say I often do a search to try to get rid of it.

This helps me avoid two problems:

• I have a tendency to use the “She was standing by the door” pattern a lot, and it gets way too repetitive. And sing-songy. And repetitive.
• The boring “she was sad”s, “the ship was red”, the blah was blah. I still have to work hard to remember to put description (both physical and emotional) in, and phrases like that are a good clue that I’m being lazy. Sometimes I do want to use them, but I always want to think about it first.

That said, “was” is only #6 on my list of overused words that I should search for and consider killing. (“Looked” and “glanced” are at the top.)

Do you guys try to avoid “was”?

This evening it occurred to me that writing has some things in common with weeding a garden. If you do just a little bit a couple times a day most days, at the end of a week you’ve made an enormous amount of progress. And if you do nothing for two weeks, you pick up your draft and discover it’s been overrun by violets.

Ok, maybe you just have to spend some extra time to reorient yourself to what was going on in your short story WIP, your novel-in-revision, and your novel-in-planning. And send out a stack of submissions that were waiting for May. Hypothetically. The violets could be all lurking on the next page.

I’m not sure I could find a better way to make a mess of a draft than by renaming all the characters–and messing up search and replace.

First, in my haste, I forgot to check “whole words only” and “keep case”. For most names that wasn’t a big deal–but Aster and Owl, among others, caused some trouble. Spilling your bGeral of soup isn’t exactly a disMeima, but it is a pain to clean up.

I fixed that by scanning the draft for misspelled words and then searching for every new one I found. I think I got most of them. It’s taken me until chapter 5 to find a disMeima that I missed.

But I just found a new problem: This scene *used* to star Marsh and Wolf. Now it stars Rimon, Geros, and Hel. Uh-oh. I’d changed Marsh to Hel, then decided I didn’t like it and changed Hel to Rimon. Anyone want to guess why that went slightly wrong?

(I know you can’t stand the suspense.)

Remembering to check “whole words only” meant I missed the possessives. At least that was an easy fix. Their poor son doesn’t need three parents.

Funny, just last week I was working on a whole bunch of projects and now it’s down to two. This is why I redo my writing schedule frequently.

I declared the first draft of Current Book done. I’m not going to let it sit for long (I already started reworking the beginning), but I want to make a push on revising Previous Book so I can get farther ahead of what my crit group is seeing. 

There are still scenes to write near the end, but I also want to rejigger the end of the outline, and the writing was getting fragmented and hypothetical (as in, “if I have this scene here’s what it will be”, or “can’t write this until I decide whether it’s before or after that other scene”) so it seemed better to just stop and write the rest in the second draft. 

This is only the second book I’ve outlined before writing, and I had similar problems with the end of the previous one. Those of you who outline, do you manage to get the end right in the outline?

A little while ago I was discussing writing schedules with a former crit partner. Right now I am juggling a crazy number of projects. At least it’s a crazy number for me. I really like the “work on one thing until it’s done” philosophy, but then I start thinking that novels take a long time, so I should intersperse short stories with them. And the next novel really wants attention, so I might as well start poking at ideas because they’ll take a long time to incubate. And I really didn’t mean to to let the previous novel sit this long before being revised…

So right now I’ve got the main book, which is being written at lunch and in the evenings and sometimes on the weekends.  Most weekend writing time is for revising the previous book, unless it’s a weekend set aside for writing or revising a short story (approx. one weekend a month, kind of like the national guard). My incredibly short morning writing session is when I’m planning the next book, except for this week, because I need to think about the next short story…

It feels like I’m juggling a lot of projects, but the current book is almost drafted, and so far revisions on the previous book are going quickly (I haven’t gotten to the part where I have to retrofit a new plot yet). I’m looking forward to late summer, when I plan to be juggling just one novel.

Meanwhile, assigning projects to dedicated slots keeps them all moving.

Alas, I ran across this post from Writer Beware too late–the auction has ended. Some guy put his story idea up on ebay, saying “It can be compared to stories like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Indiana Jones and other titles in those categories. ” Sigh. I’ve missed my chance! But since the starting bid was $3,000,000 I couldn’t have afforded it anyway. Guess I’ll have to come up with my own ideas.

I wonder if it was a joke or if he really meant it. For those of you reading this who aren’t writers–ideas are cheap. Most of us have more than we can use in a lifetime. It’s turning them into good stories that’s the hard part, but that’s not something you can buy on ebay.

(Unless you hire a ghostwriter and give them a very detailed outline, I suppose. But you’d still have to develop the outline.)

A little while ago there was an interview with Jim Hines on Booklife in which he talks a bit about writing on his lunch break at work. This caught my eye because I’ve recently rejiggered my lunch schedule.

For a long time I’ve tried to write 3 days a week at lunch, and spend the other two discussing politics and religion with my husband and coworkers. But…I also refuse to spend my lunch writing time anywhere except in the one breakroom with windows. My office doesn’t have a window, and I insist on seeing the outside world for at least a little bit during the day (this was more important in the winter when it was the only sun I saw). Besides, if I’m in my office, I will be interrupted, and I will probably be disturbing one coworker or the other with my eating. They already have to put up with me eating breakfast at my desk every morning.

So, to the breakroom with windows I go. Unfortunately, it has become incredibly popular recently. It’s like people like windows or something. Who knew? So I have to share a table with people and then ignore them. This makes me feel like a jerk, and I figure if I want to be a jerk at work, I should be doing something work-related, so as not to squander my allotment of jerkiness on my personal time.

So for the past two weeks I’ve moved my lunch hour back by 45 minutes to an hour. One pm is not nearly as popular a time to eat lunch. Bonus: no line for the microwave. On the downside I eat my lunch a lot faster because I’m so hungry. But I’ve been getting a lot of work done on the lunch and evening book.

I’m currently writing one novel (3-4 chapters to go) and revising another (a lot of chapters to go). So which project is hammering at my brain? A third entirely unrelated novel, of course. Which I have been ignoring for nearly a year; it must have been getting impatient.

I keep wanting to do writing exercises (this is not a non sequitur). The problem with exercises, for me, is that although I get things out of them, they’re pointless disconnected random snippets of characters and settings I’ll never see again.

So I put those two issues together and decided to do one exercise a week, with the aim of using them to develop short stories and this future novel. And that was working for a while.

And then Donald Maass started tweeting daily prompts. It’s like he knew I was starting to seriously look at planning this novel and decided to help me out. Very kind.

For any writers reading this, check out his prompts–they will make you think. And I will get back to the weekly exercise plan after he’s done.