Posted by admin on Jun 21, 2010 in
finding inspiration Ok, well, as you know, I lost 100 pages of edits to “Commoner Days”, my fantasy YA WIP, and Chris located the file on the laptop. Now we just need the budget to restore it. This is great news, because I’m simply having a terrible time getting off the ground with anything new, and this sense of “unfinished but maybe marketable and definitely good” is killing me.
SO I decided to return to my Holly Lisle course and go from there. Good. So I’m looking for an assignment and found a bunch of notebooks I hadn’t utilized. Also good, because I just committed to start journaling.
Well, in one of these notebooks, I had done a series of 1-3 page vignettes. Some of them were related to WIP ideas, and some were stand alone. I got to 2 of these stories, which were based off of a later sequel to “Commoner Days”.
My God, it was good. Firstly, there was a romance that the princess began that was forbidden to her that makes a great opening. (Let’s just say it involves her highness’s boobs.) Secondly, there was a part from later in life where she is raising a child with a genetic condition, let’s just say it resembles autism. I had *completely* forgotten that I had put that into this character! In fact, Nareezia (sound it out) is amazing, and I adore her. She’s a lot NOT like me, but all my protagonists are me in some sense, she’s just the furthest distance from me.
The caveat is that you’re not supposed to write your sequel after you write the original, just in case. However, in this case the sequel is a generation later, and while my CD protagonist Jonni shows up, it’s her grown granddaughter’s very different story, start to finish.
Hm, not sure what to do with this. I’ve given up on the romance right now, the time travel plot is boring the snot out of me and no, I can’t figure out how to combine them as mentioned the other day. And, I’m no further along in my paranormal story.
I said I was going to start journaling, but maybe fleshing out some writing of anything is the way to do.
On the upside, I did find a bunch of notebooks that are empty, so I can start exercises and “journaling” there.
Tags: work in progress
Posted by admin on Jun 21, 2010 in
writing Working through my Holly Lisle course, and it reminded me of a writing term I used to know, “MacGuffin“. It is an item or device that usually the protagonist and possibly antagonist want, perhaps even fight over, that has no intrinsic or thematic value of its own, but moves the story and the characters to action.
As in, “Every single prop, invention, and even the island of the TV show ‘Lost’ were all just MacGuffin’s.”
Hitchcock named it, he’s the bomb.
In case you can’t tell, MacGuffins piss me off.
Posted by admin on Jun 11, 2010 in
writing lessons You may wonder why I’m belatedly writing about a TV show on a writing blog. The reason is simple: “Lost” was good fiction. Damn good fiction. I was at a writer meeting once, and one of the participants said he became a fan because it opened up his eyes to what a writer can accomplish. It was an intelligent, well-crafted, provocative, unexpected story with fine character development and deep back story. It revolutionized television and it was fun, really a helluva ride. In fact, I have little hope or expectations for the few remaining shows that I still follow or for future shows. Thanks to “Lost”, the bar has been set very high.
It was 6 years that had fans, particularly those of us delighted by scifi and time travel, hanging by a thread, waiting for the next page to turn. As a work of fiction, “Lost” has lots of valuable lessons for writers, and that includes what not to do, like it’s finale.
If “Lost” had been a book, I would have flung it across the room when I got to the end.
If you know the story, you know that the ending left many questions unanswered. I don’t have an issue with that. There are many stories with open endings that have moved me, but there are also many that have annoyed me.
With “Lost”, there was an expectation that some key elements would be answered. We wanted to know why all these particular things happened to this group. An experiment? A hole in the space time continuum? A test from some divine power? Aliens?
We didn’t get it and people are pissed. I am disappointed. While the ending was touching and sweet, the sheer lack of completion didn’t fulfill me. I was satisfied by seeing the characters unite at the end, true, but too many things were unresolved.
I heard a theory on The Odi that writers had meant the island to be purgatory and that they’d dropped so many clues, that by the time they were renewed past Season 2, all the fans had figured it out. The writers couldn’t do 4 more seasons if the mystery was blown this quickly so they had to do something else. I completely believe that, and here is where I think the writers made their mistake.
At that point, they could have (should have?) written a new plotline and ending. From the stone soup of story they had thus far, couldn’t they conceptualize something new? They did not. Now, I understand that they have talked about writing an ending that “respected” the fans. I take this to mean that they did not select an ending so no one could win the “who’s theory is right” war.
In fact, just about everyone was wrong because the ending insinuated that there was nothing behind the island, it just was.
Which, as a writer, sounds to me like a cop out.
This really sucks because I know they could have written something amazing. I’ve seen the skill and craft and care they poured into the show, episode after episode, a few bombs, yes, but quite a number of rare gems in there. The payoff did not, in my opinion, meet the promise. That is a crying shame, they took the Battlestar Galactica “it’s about the characters” approach to the final season, and left those of us who love story, plot, and rich world building in the cold.
Lesson from “Lost”? Characters are important, true, and I write very character-driven stories. The narrator and protagonist have to be people (or aliens) I can relate to or else I don’t care. But if you’re stuck for plot, don’t rely solely on the characters to pull you through. Work out the damn plot. Plan, plan, plan…and that’s advice from a pantser…
Tags: lost tv show
I’ve had a hard time recently coming up with an idea for a novel that I really feel passionate about. If I have to jump in and recreate a “don’t look down draft“, then it has to be something that, at this point in the game, I’m fired up about, right? There’s plenty of time to lose my inspiration in the editing phase…
I’ve been stumped for a way to jump start the process and had been considering an artist date (not really something I can schedule at present), working through some courses, and doing loads of freewriting. Then during a long drive on Sunday, I got the idea to combine some of the recent ideas I’ve had (time travel idea, dark immortal idea, woman looking for God idea). The idea started looking like a Piers Anthony book I read once,
so I knew I was not quite on the right track but it did fire me up a bit.
Then last night we watched last year’s “Wolfman” with Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. It is a seriously flawed film but the lighting set decoration and period costumes really set the tone of the film and made me forgive a whole lot of things. In fact, it fired up something inside, because it’s a period I’m a bit fascinated with.
Then I went to bed, opened my notebook and with a pen I started writing. I took my character from 2 of the above stories and a modern day scientist inside a 16th century castle in a massive, ornate bed several hundred years old (the movie’s influence) and…
It was like magic in a bottle. I didn’t even write a page, and i have no sense of where it’s going, but I for sure have a don’t look draft. Even left it on a cliff hanger!
ok, now to write…
Posted by admin on Jun 8, 2010 in
writing Well I was hoping to be able to import my prior posts, but it’s not worth it. I’ve got bugs in this deployment as well (can’t use preview for some reason) and I have a great idea for design but for now, welcome to my new writing blog! I’ll be posting here about my struggles as a fiction writer, and maybe other kinds of writing as well. Maybe I’ll even write for pay again one day.
One can certainly dream…
Posted by admin on Jun 7, 2010 in
writing …deal with it
Posted by admin on May 29, 2009 in
book reviews 
As some readers here might know, I wrapped up round two of editing my novel in April. I actually just started Round 3 this week, which is going better than expected. (Wish I”d started it sooner!) Round 2 was around January 1, 2009. It took longer than expected, but much of the editing was actually rewriting and reworking things. (Which means that Round 3 should be interesting!)
What you may not know is that before writing this, I purchased a copy of Holly Lisle”s How To Write Page-Turning Scenes. Holly Lisle is a writer who”s made a living at it for 20 years…a put-food-on-the-table type of living. Sure we all dream of getting that Stephanie Meyer phone call, but most of us won”t. Once you come to accept that, you begin to rethink this whole “writing fiction” business. But once you get past that, it”s time to check out Holly”s rock steady advice.
Because I”m a just-do-it writer, I had no notion of scenes (or chapters) while writing a novel. I”ve taken lots of workshops over the years, online and off, and I can remember a single teacher discussing either of those elements. I”d never even considered scenes in a novel, which is odd because back when I wanted to be a filmmaker I took screen writing, which is all scene writiing.
Enter How To Write Page-Turning Scenes. Holly breaks down exactly what a scene is and why it”s a useful to think in terms of scenes when writing or revising your novel. She gives some clear cut exercises that really break down how to determine if a scene forwards your story or not, how to know which scenes to add, delete, or revise, and what to watch out for along the way. She gives clear cut examples of the different kinds of conflict and how and when to use them.
Strictly speaking, How To Write Page-Turning Scenes is really a book that gives you tools for step-by-step scene creation if you haven”t written a word, but only have an idea. However, I found this extremely useful to help me get organized with my first round of revisions. I didn”t do a strict scene-by-scene revision because I had too much story still to create, but this gem of a guide did give me tools I needed to get revising. I highly recommend this book for novices, first-time revisionists, and anyone who need to better structure their scenes.
Tags: Holly Lisle
