Category Archives: Writing

Common neo-pro mistakes
#70, Sat. 4 pm
Mary Anne Mohanraj, Joan Vinge, Forrest John Aguirre, Theodora Goss, Schelly Renee Steelman

The panel’s topic was how to move on and get better after that first sale or two: what lifts someone up above the level of competent. (I went for future reference.)

This was a somewhat disappointing panel. I suspect that actual neopros trying to figure out how to turn a sale or two into a career might have been frustrated (and I suspect there is no such advice, anyway). Much of the advice seemed more basic: I’m a beginner, and I’d heard some of it before.

That said, there were many useful tidbits. And the idea of striving for richness and complexity in every aspect of a book, including plot, world, and emotion, is one that I’ve been thinking about ever since.

Continue reading →

truepenny has a wonderful metaphor for beta readers.

Meme answers: Continue reading →

Also, from the AP, the secret of novel-writing success.

“Mitchard’s success as a novelist seems to stem from the fact that her books are about families, with which readers, particularly women, can identify.”

So there you go. Write about families. Gosh.

On rasfc, llygoden pointed out the useful MSWord field code “includetext” via an old post. It copies the contents of small files into one big files and vice versa. Nice for merging chapters into one manuscript file. I wish I’d known to look for this before; it seems like an obvious feature for the thing to have, and would have been very useful for all the search-and-replacing I’ve been doing. Was useful for the last five chapters, anyway.

lists Thirty-Two Statements About Writing, which are thought-provoking. (via )

This one:

14. Language is more important than you think. It is not a tool, it is, in the end, the sum of literature. Language has a taste, a texture, a smell. If a painter used only beige, white, and grey, the viewer’s eye would slide off the canvas and start examining the wall. Strive for eggplant, oxblood, and burnt sienna.

is something I still need to work on quite a bit. I don’t believe language is “the sum of literature” (I’m in this gig for the stories), but I want to write pretty. Not McKillip-pretty, but prettier than my natural black-and-white literalism.

I do disagree with her on revision and workshops. I need both. A lot. But really, numbers 31 and 32 are the most important (esp. 31), and I can’t argue with those.

Writer angst:1. Thriller writer with huge first advance ends up in death spiral of sales (via )
2. Holly Lisle is in trouble again, after more than 20 published novels.

I don’t know their sales numbers, obviously. The bit that worries me is this: Not only does a book have to be “good enough”, it has to be Spectacular.

Limyaael’s rant on distinctive minor characters:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/limyaael/383016.html

One of the things I am doing in this revision is getting rid of or reducing the roles of many of the minor characters.

The snowflake method for novel writing has generated some discussion on rec.arts.sf.composition. It definitely does’t work for me (I can’t plan much at all), but parts of it work nicely for organizing revisions between drafts.

Basically, the idea is to start with a one-sentence overview of the book, and gradually expand it into a scene by scene outline, generating synopses of various lengths along the way. Eventually you write the book. If that sounds appealing to any of you, have a look. If it sounds completely alien, avoid it. (I’m avoiding it – it’s not possible for me to get past step 2.)

If anyone has not read ‘s post on sentence-level crafting, do so. That’s one of the big things I’m working on now, getting rid of the scaffolding and weasel words and using non-literal techniques.

Karen Traviss on the tough life of a full-time writer: I’m sitting here with a pot of tea reading Dark Horse comics for homework. Honestly, isn’t there a trade union I can join to stop this kind of brutal exploitation?