Browsing the archives for the writing tag
As a writer, I try to find the strange and make it believable in fiction. After all, reading is about escape from the outside world. Plunging into the adventure of a novel for an afternoon shouldn’t be jarred with thoughts of “Wait a minute, would that really work?” or “Why would he believe her?” or [...]
The first step in revising my novel (and here’s where I admit that the revising has gone untouched for several days–oops) is analyzing each scene and its place in my novel. For me, this involves writing down each scene and the major action on an index card. Let’s look at the last scene I copied [...]
Lots of writers just sit there and wait for the perfect story to write. As many of us know, this is a huge mistake, as inspiration doesn’t like whacking us on the head on a regular basis with ideas. I’m guilty of it; it’s why I quit the first draft of my very first novel [...]
I finished my first NaNoWriMo 2009 novel on the 14th. Even without rereading it, I knew that what was there was definitely not perfect, but salvageable. The basic story is there. That’s what matters. The prose is definitely far from perfect (those of you who have been reading Adventures in Wrimonia now know what one [...]
I’ll get back to the 20 things I need for survival list tomorrow. Today is special, though. I finished my NaNoWriMo novel at 73,006 words, and in honor of that occasion, I opened Microsoft Word. I don’t particularly enjoy using Microsoft Word (or most Microsoft applications for that matter). In fact, one of the few [...]
Writing is hard. As much as I love it, and as seemingly sane as writing keeps me, it’s hard some days. Writing wasn’t hard today because of the content I was writing. I actually had some idea of where I was going with the story, or as much of an idea as someone without an [...]
I’m still awake. Therefore this counts as the November first post.
NaNoWriMo has begun. My region has a dare to include a peach in our novels. (Your challenge: guess my region. It shouldn’t be hard.) Here’s my excerpt.
He poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, grabbed a peach, and sat down at the kitchen table. He fished [...]
I finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini a few days ago. For me, the book is typically better than the movie, and despite the excellence of the movie, The Kite Runner is no exception. As a writer, I’ve trained myself to look for the points in a novel that we all learned [...]
Despite the rise of computers, I still can’t edit anything on a computer screen. Yes, I can catch most typos and even rewrite paragraphs, but rewriting anything more substantial requires that I have a paper copy in front of me. This copy can be marked, just as all my teachers did to my essays, [...]
I’m getting into the habit of writing something down every day just to force myself into doing so. Writing is a fickle thing. You can’t just wait for the muse to come, as I’ve been so wont to do in the past. You have to grab the muse by its horns and steer it like [...]