Last round up of 2009. Happy New Year!

So after skipping one for Christmas, I thought I'd sneak one last round up in for 2009. As well as gleaning more tips and advice from the writing blogs, I learned that culture is doomed, I tell you, DOOMED! What with Twitting, and celebrity book-alikes choking up the shelves, and with most of us becoming our own brands it's no wonder that authors are revolting. Oh, and I sneak in a bit of Tintin.

Nail Your Novel review

I've been promising for a while to review Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris. With Christmas here I've actually found some time to catch up on a few of my promises.

This is not a how-to-write book. It sits a step or two above that. If you need to know more about point of view, characterization or story structure you should read this book, but add in some others that examine writing at a lower or more specialized level. If, on the other hand, you're reasonably happy with your progress as a writer and still your attempts to finish a novel founder on problems of organization, control and motivation, this book may be the single missing piece you need to pull everything into place.

Round up from the Grand Canyon

I have been in Las Vegas and at the Grand Canyon this week, so I'm late and sparse once again. Still, I managed to fit in some reading around my travels. Once again I learned that bad TV can improve your writing. But be careful, it seems you shouldn't hate what you write. When you're stuck you might find that the problem doesn't lie with your current issue but with something earlier in your draft. While you're checking back, you might also see if your scenes join up. What else? I fantasized about getting published, and I learned a (yet another) golden rule about writing. Finally, I looked in on Pratchett, discovered that the Romans weren't sure about classics either, and wondered again about the health of comment culture.

The lost post

I'm mourning a lost post. I'm in unlovely Las Vegas amidst the cigarette smoke and dead-eyed slot machine addicts. After an hour looking in vain for a bookshop near the Strip I finally settled for a Starbucks (in yet another casino). I powered up my netbook and pulled up a piece I half-completed a few days ago, only to find it gone. Gone!

And now I barely have the energy to start again on the thing. Isn't that the worst? Losing something you were reasonably pleased with? Oh well. Perhaps it's saved somewhere on my home machine. In the meantime, instead of trying to recreate my work, perhaps I should use this wail of loss as a carrier for anything else that occurs to me.

The round up, revised

This week I go mad for revision. First drafts are so last month! I drop in on Pratchett's process and find him playing with orcs. I check out the 20 best SF novels of the decade (What? No Gaiman?) I navigate the evil of the e-book, and arrive at the worst books of the decade, only to find the idiocracy hasn't turned up.

Some things I try to consider when I write a scene

Last week I admitted my tendency to let the zombie writer in me take over. Embarrassing really since I'm such a fan of locking up the inner editor during a first draft.

So I've been trying out various combinations of control and abandon (which sounds like a party in a dungeon, but we'll move on). I've applied these techniques to the pieces I've been submitting at workshop. I believe I've found an approach that lets me experiment, but keeps me sufficiently on topic that I produce something with approximately the right shape.

before embarking on a scene I answer a series of questions about it (freely adapted from ideas in The Scene Book by Sandra Scofield and Novel Shortcuts by Laura Whitcomb). With a couple of exceptions I don't need to write anything down, but I find it helps at least to think about my answers in order to get a sense of the scene I want to write.

A late round up

With NaNoWriMo just finished and a mountain of catch up still under way, the round up has been a little squeezed. Still, here's a short check in on some of the posts that caught my eye over the last week or so. I take in a TV time traveler who's being novelized by a literary heavyweight. A stoners' cat. I consider what we can learn from bad TV. Then I get serious and turn to the blogs for advice on my ailing manuscript.

Writing for the count, not the story

Yesterday I submitted a chapter to my workshop teacher. It was first draft stuff, so I didn't worry about a micro-edit. We all get a pass on typos and clumsy sentences first time round. But, as I prepared the submission, I noticed that the heft of the thing was pretty daunting. So I hacked it back. Then I hacked it some more. By the time I sent him the chapter, I'd cut out more than half of it.

He turned it round fast, and last night I got his assessment back. “I like the burial scene,” he wrote, “how can we get to it faster?” I reread the chapter, and saw that he was right. The chapter sprawls along where it should zip, even after my cuts. The thing was a bloated mess. I had fallen into the wordcount trap.

Here's how it works.