Round Up the Usual Suspects

More on editing and unediting the dead this week. How to maintain tension even when your cell phone makes everything too easy. A man gets his hair cut and chats to a shopkeeper. A royal biography is panned, and treason is in the air. The masses are getting uppity in the comment sections too, and they're out to get the intellectuals. Pah! Too clever by half! Can Nathan Bransford rein in the beast he has created before it's too late? Speaking of plots, how evil is NaNoWriMo really? Finally an ancient rebel turns fifty, by Toutatis.

NaNoReMo

There has been much excited gushing in the blogs recently about NanoWriMo. I did not realize until recently the extent to which NaNo has become a kind of international writers' holiday. And its timing is very clever in that respect, I now see. Nor did I realize that there is a small but vociferous backlash underway. Literary scrooges, I suppose. Though I believe that some critics make serious and useful points.

One problem, it seems, is the name itself. Not the cute elision, which is fun to say and write and to look at too, and has that lovely sing song quality. Not to mention the internal rhyme. No, the critics argue that the name is misleading. The issue is with the word 'novel', or No, as the kids almost certainly don't say.

Editing Big then Small

When I'm editing, I often get caught up in the nasty details of my writing.

I'll be reading through a paragraph and I'll notice that I have fallen repeatedly into the passive voice. And that I have reused the word somehow four times. And how many adverbs does 'she said' need? How about none? So I clean that all up. But hang on. This version throws up a new set of issues. Not only that, but with the edit I've also changed the sense of the paragraph before it. So I tinker with both paragraphs. And then I tinker with them some more.

And that's alright, isn't it? The Editor is in, after all.

It's not Revision. It's Prevision

So after the writing mania of the last month of so, and before the forced march of NaNoWriMo it may be time to focus again on the editing process. Although I extolled the virtues of zombie writing a while back, this approach will only work if you then take time whack the zombie's drivel into shape.

Deja Review

I may not have posted anything else since my last round up, but that didn't stop me grazing the literary ruminations the internet has to offer. Which I guess makes me a ruminant.

This week it's all about TV, rejection, cruelty, and cult SF. Which describes many of my weeks come to think about it.

A very long round up

I've been keeping an eye on bookish and writer-oriented sites for a while with a view to a weekly round up. This week, I'm kicking off with a bumper post, covering just a few of the posts and articles that caught my eye over the last few weeks.

If you need a reason to read on past the jump know now that I use the phrase assassinations and breasts not once but three times. And that's not including this introduction.

Discipline and publish

I try to use most of the practices I have been researching and writing about here, at least until they hit the 'it's not for me' pile. So it makes sense to describe how they're working out. To that end, I'll check in with a more personal progress report every now and again.

So it's Sunday, and inevitably I have that Sunday feeling. In fact these days I get That Sunday Feeling on Friday night. It drives me crazy that I can't relax and enjoy a weekend because I spend most of it feeling bad that it is going to end. I have plans and plots that might change the shape of my life with regard to work, though, so things could be worse.

Theme and Foreshadowing

I attended a workshop last night. Every two weeks this group gets together to analyse two or three chapters submitted by members of the group. As usual the work was bulging with ideas. And as usual I was sent back to my books to research some of the examples of craft the work revealed.

One chapter developed a theme with such subtlety that I barely noticed it at first. It reminded me that I should examine my own work and look to build in such resonance.

Ideas cannot be copyrighted. This is a thoroughly good thing for writers since otherwise we'd have run out of plots, character archetypes and tension devices years ago. Still, I don't feel comfortable laying out another writer's plot before her novel is complete. So I'm going to invent a scenario that has parallels, but which differs in the particulars.

Embrace your Inner Zombie

At a workshop recently the discussion turned, as it does, to our productivity. One participant bemoaned her own output. She needed to be in the right mood. And the work needed to be good. She didn't want to be just zombie writing, she said.

Zombie writing.

That was such a fine phrase that several other people used it. It has a hook, doesn't it? And of course it packs an emotional punch too. It tells us that such writing is bad. It is writing with the brain turned off. It's a moronic outpouring. A dull moaning, disconnected from any meaning (except perhaps a desire to eat living human flesh, but let's not get too literal here).