Getting Drastic

- by ria, on Friday, 11th February 2011, 11:24am

In case any one is interested, I just cut the first 5 chapters from book 1. It doesn’t get exciting until then. Now I need to come up with 15,000 words of a more exciting start for this book.

Why are beginnings so hard? I guess it’s because so much has to be introduced, and at the same time it has to be well written and engaging.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and working on my query has really made me see how dull the first five chapter were. Now to come up with something better.

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category: writing

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Dealing with Mistakes

- by ria, on Wednesday, 1st December 2010, 8:05pm

Everyone makes mistakes. I make mistakes every other sentence when I’m typing. It’s big no big deal. I hit backspace and continue on. I don’t even think of it as a mistake, really.

Mistakes in writing are a somewhat more subtle creature. If I make a mistake in the plot of chapter 1, I may not realise it was a mistake until chapter 10. By then it is a big deal to correct it. Some mistakes slip by unnoticed. I don’t notice the mistake until well into editing and I’m staring at this one scene wondering why I can’t get it to shape up properly.

I can be pretty slow to realise that I made a mistake. No one wants to admit that they are flawed. Since writing is a part of me, I find it had to see when I’ve made a mistake, or when something isn’t working. But I’ve figured out a marker or waypost that can help me find and deal with mistakes.

Spotting the Elusive Mistake

I find it very hard to spot mistakes in plot /character / conflict while I am in the middle of a draft. Editing is usually when I start to notice them. Spotting mistakes starts with a small feeling of something not being quite right. I’ve been over this scene 3 or 4 times and it’s still not working. Now, it usually takes my brain a few days to realise why this scene isn’t working out. It was a mistake, things should never have gone this way.

If you find yourself stuck or don’t know what to do next, maybe you need to ask yourself if your story is sound. You need to check for mistakes back down the plot, or maybe the mistake is in the scene you are on at the moment. Finding the mistake is the hard part. Forcing yourself to admit that something is wrong is not easy, but you’ll feel more in control of your writing and less frustrated at whatever scene isn’t working once you do.

Erase that mistake

So, you know something’s wrong. What to do now? When I make a mistake typing I don’t even think about deleting it and typing it right. It should be the exact same with writing. Delete it. Don’t think about the time you spent writing it in the first place. Accept that it is flawed and cut it out. That’s the hard part.

Now all you have to do is go again, with something that actually works. For me, this part usually goes very smoothly. I know what’s wrong and I know what I have to do to fix it. I usually spend a lot more time agonising over the mistake than I do rewriting it.

The next time you get stuck and have no idea why, think of this post. I hope it helps.

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category: writing

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A Bit About My Writing

- by ria, on Wednesday, 20th October 2010, 11:46am

I’ve mentioned the things I’m working on in other posts, but I figured I should dedicate an entry to getting everything straight. Let’s start with what I’m working on right now.

For the last few years, I’ve been writing a fantasy that centres around Zachery and his attempts to save the world from itself. It’s rather magic-heavy, and I like to think it’s a pretty fast paced adventure.

Artificer

I started writing it the summer I finished college (2006). I used the snowflake method to draw up progressively longer outlines. The outline I ended up working from was 23 pages, and included headings like POV Character, Characters Present, emotional angle, description, chapter number. It was divided into 80 scenes, or so. November of that year I started writing draft 1 and by the end of the month I had 55,000 words. (Thank you NaNoWriMo.) It took me a full two years to write the other 70,000 words. (One year of that involved travelling around the world.)

April of 2008, I started editing the horrid mess that was the first draft of my book. It was called The Fall back then. The Fall is a horribly cliché title, so you can imagine what the story was like. Not wanting to face a rewrite (and not really understanding that I needed to rewrite) I messed around with it a bit, tweaking paragraphs, changing a few things here and there.

By September of 2009, I had made very little progress. I sat down one day and made a schedule for the next 6 months. I wanted a good story by March 2010. One that was unique, exciting, infinitely better than what I had. Even though it had taken me a year and a half to face the fact that I needed to rewrite most of the book, it was the best decision I made. March came around and I had something better. Not amazing yet, but good. The feedback I got made me face the problems that still existed. So, I took another 3 months and came out with draft 3.

I’m now on draft 3.2 and have a query letter that I’m still not happy with. I haven’t sent it out to any agents yet, because it makes the book sound boring. So, that’s my current situation.

Familiar

When I was still in college, I had this idea for a short story. Two girls whose lives get really strange when a demon shows up at their door. I imagined it would be about 3 or 4 pages. I wrote it by hand in a yellow page notebook. 188 pages later it was finished. It took me the whole college year to write, September 2005 to May 2006. I originally wanted to write this story as a graphic novel, but I don’t have the same persistence to stick with a bit of art that I do for a bit of writing. Zachery was the bad guy in this story. I liked him so much, I gave him his own trilogy. This story is book 2 of the trilogy. At the moment it is only 32,000 words, so it needs quite a bit of work.

Fiendling

Book 3. I wrote this for NaNoWriMo 2008. Like my first NaNo attempt, I got to 50,000 words and just stopped. I stopped in the middle of a sentence, no less. This book is half written, and it is terrible. It is probably the worst 50,000 words I have ever written. I imagine I’ll be tearing it to pieces and rewriting 95% of it. The good thing is that rewriting Artificer has given me loads of ideas for this book. So I’m actually enthusiastic about getting to it – after I’ve done some serious work with Familiar.

2000 and Beyond (Before?)

I’ve also been working on a thief/magic adventure since I was about 12. I’d written about 10,000 words when I lost the file and had to start again. I did start again, and wrote 4,000 new, better words. I imagine I’ll be rewriting the whole thing again, though. I actually think it needs a whole new re-imagining. It think it’s a bit too straight-forward as it is at the moment. I’ve come to be wary of ‘quest-type’ fantasies (it’s easy to fall into clichés with them), and this was ‘quest’ at it’s most unimaginative.

So there you have it. My writing life all neat and summed up.

I’m not sure if there will be a post next week. I’m going away and can’t guarantee I’ll be at a computer / have the inspiration to write.

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category: thoughts, writing

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Rewrites

- by ria, on Wednesday, 25th August 2010, 9:55pm

Rewrites are funny. When you are writing… Wait, let me start again. When I am writing, I think ahead to the editing stage and I ask myself how I am going to be able to do it. While I’m writing, that’s all that’s in my head. I’m not thinking about editing, and so, I get to thinking it’s the hardest thing in the world.

Now, when I’m editing, I wonder how I ever wrote all the words that I did. I’m editing and writing seems like the most difficult thing ever.

Enter rewrites. They are the writing during the edits. I wonder how I ever rewrite anything, but my brain actually switches between writing and editing quite easily. I cut whatever I’m not happy with and write the scene again from scratch. And usually it all turns out well, better than the original version.

This very short post was brought to you at 10pm after a long day spent proofreading and copyediting (what is the difference between those two?) 10 chapters.

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category: random, writing

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