Category Archives: Writing

Outlining! One of my least favorite writing topics. JA Konrath, with whom I frequently disagree, posts about why and how he outlines. He’s posted an actual outline for one of his books as an example, which was very interesting to read and impressive in its detail.This part cracked me up:

Once the story is down on paper (in outline form) all you need to do is add the bells and whistles; the action, dscription, and dialog. You don’t need to worry about what happens next because you already know. [his emphasis]

Outlining always sounds so pleasant to me, for exactly that reason. Sit down to write, glance at the outline to check what scene to write, type it out. Get a different idea? Fiddle with the outline to see if it works, rather than writing three chapters that have to be deleted later. Sounds lovely.

Only problem is, I can’t write the darn outline. The only way for me to find out what happens next is to write actual prose. I am ok with that, though the apparent efficiency of outlining appeals to me.

Finally, a couple posts on writing, which you’ve probably all read already:
on writing communities and advice, which is a followup to her post on success and happy writers and advice, which is a response to ‘s post about rules, particularly “write every day”.So. I don’t have anything to add to all the comments people have made already, but I’m not going to let that stop me, because it’s Friday.

For me, “write every day” is good advice. I don’t actually do it. But “write three times a week” or “once a week” just doesn’t work for me, for the same reason that my exercise three times a week plan doesn’t work either. I procrastinate, and then if I don’t feel like doing it on Thursday and Friday and Saturday, or something else vital comes up, I’m stuck. So I set myself several tasks to accomplish by the end of the week or the month, and try to do something every day that will help accomplish them, whether it’s writing a thousand words or two sentences or doing a critique or making a page of notes.

There’s always some writing-related task I can do that doesn’t require feeling like writing. (I’ll note that I’m including *related* things in that sentence.) And often, even if I don’t want to write, I can open the file and get something useful done anyway.

Even if it would be more fun, at any given moment, to see a movie or play on the net, in the long run I’m happier when I’m getting writing done. That means making myself sit down and do it even if I’d rather do something else. It’s like fitness: I feel better when I eat healthy, even if I’d be perfectly happy to eat nothing but dessert for a week.

I think I’m pretty good at ignoring advice that doesn’t work for me. Perhaps too good.

In a discussion on rasfc that started with describing characters, Patricia C. Wrede has posted two examples of layering — writing something with only one component, like dialogue, and then adding everything else, like description, action, internal monologue, as separate steps.

One starts with dialogue and the other starts with setting.

The dialogue one is how I often write anyway, especially when I’m stuck, which I was earlier this evening. Trying to figure out how to say everything at once can be too hard, and breaking it down to think about only one aspect at a time can be the only way for me to make forward progress.

On the other hand, I sometimes end up with nothing but dialogue if I know exactly what happens in a scene and I’m writing really quickly. I’m getting better at making myself slow down.

The whole thread is interesting, but long.

Someone has very helpfully created an index of Miss Snark’s blog.

I think I’m going to synopsize the theater book.

wrote a synopsis, which reminded me of John Braine’s How to Write a Novel. I’ve only read the first chapter, but that’s the one in which he lays out his writing process: no planning, first draft as quick as possible, write a summary, rewrite the summary until it’s right, then write a perfect second draft.

That’s how I meant to do the theater book, except I failed at the last step and am doing a lot of rewriting and revising. My summary was very short, only a paragraph, and didn’t really account for all the changes between drafts 0 and 1 (or 1 and 2, if you prefer). I changed the setting, many secondary characters, and several subplots. I also had to figure out why these events were happening in this place at this time to these people.

(Not that I’m saying I’d have succeeded in writing a draft with no revision needed if I’d written a better summary.)

But, since I have changed so much, my outline is very skimpy, and I’m not really sure what happens in the next chunk of the book. Maybe if I do a longish synopsis I’ll get a better idea of the options.

Recent Readings:

* The other day, I read Miss Snark’s post about blogging, in which she says that having a boring blog is dangerous to writers because people will think the writer is boring. I recently ran across the same sentiment posted somewhere else.

So I’d just like to say, for the record, that my LJ is boring because my creativity goes into my fiction and my dayjob. I created this thing to track my writing progress, not to write profound essays on self indulgence or the purpose of SF. Sorry.

* Via Paperback Writer, this post on writer’s notebooks.

I keep a notebook, sort of. When I have a dream that I think might be a story someday, I write it in the notebook. Sometimes I write down story ideas, the kind that take up a whole page and have actual prose with them, not just a sentence. And then I never look at them again.

But that’s it. I don’t do “freewriting” or “I have a neat sentence! Must write it down and use it someday!” type thing. And I don’t keep a journal, except for this one. Which is not very much about me, at least not the me inside my head.

I’ve been using the same spiral notebook for more than five years and it still has plenty of blank pages. I have nothing against notebooks, but I don’t find the concept useful.

I wrote the other day:

I know there’s a theory that you learn from critiquing, but I haven’t experienced it. Or maybe I just can’t tell.

So it suddenly occured to me that what it actually means, when people say that, is not that you do a lot of critiques and then the words coming out of your pen magically improve. It means that when you go back to revise, you look at your own work like it’s someone else’s that you’re critiquing.

[Edit: Commenters on my LJ disagreed.]