Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Characters, Couples, and Trios

I have, for the last few hours, been musing about two movies I watched over the weekend. For those doing the maths: yes, that means I get up obscenely early. Yes, I wish it were otherwise. Screw the goddamn apnea. Anyway, the movies.The first, Comet, is a small movie that charts the relationship between two characters over a six-year period, with numerous cuts back-and-forth in time. The second, 28 Hotel Rooms, is a small movie that charts the relationship between a man and a woman having an affair in a succession of hotel rooms, never seeing them outside of that context. I picked them both for the actors involved and because the synopsis sounded vaguely interesting. And they were both…odd. Is odd the right word? I’m not sure. They’re not necessarily movies I enjoyed, but movies I enjoyed watching. Movies where I appreciated the attempt and found the performances engaging, but found myself distracted by other stuff they were doing. This is

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

unday. The day of rest. The day of having a sleep in and getting the laundry done. The day of The Sunday Circle, where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, Throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in week two (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week?

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

2016 Project: A Year of Data About My Writing Practice

2016 is looming, as new years tend to do. I’ve been sorting through the options of big, writing-adjacent goal-setting projects I’d be interested in doing to replace the mad dash of the 600k year. Doing nothing was pretty high on the list, but that’s not in my nature. I like having big meta-projects to focus on that are writing-adjacent, even if they’re basically insane and designed to fail. So I went through the list of things I really enjoyed and found useful in 2015 and came up with three words: word count data. I tracked daily word-count pretty obsessively over the last twelve months. And, when I didn’t track words, I tracked daily pages in a notebook, faithfully switching back-and-forth between different coloured pens so I’d be able to see what was written on which day. I’m still tracking my word-count now, updating my excel file after every writing session. First, because it’s become a habit. Second, because I like data. Data

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Let’s Be Clear, There Is Privilege Behind My Process

It’s early. My eyes hurt. I have to go to the day-job today, when all I really want is to stay home and tinker with the opening scenes of the novel in progress. Maybe write the ending to one of the hundreds of unfinished short-stories on my hard-drive, that are waiting for me to figure out the endings. In short, welcome to cranky town. Population: me. I have it pretty good. There is a trend, among writers, to ignore the essential privilege of how they do what they do and how they came to do what they do as a semi-regular thing. This frequently means that readers will do the same, since they’re only seeing the process from the outside and filtering it through public statements. And since most writers are also readers, we can get some bat-shit crazy assumptions about the job. Case in point: a writer I know recently posted about his yearly word-count on Facebook. When someone pointed out

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Putting On My Red Shoes and Dancing the Blues

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, last week was pants. Nothing went seriously wrong. Nothing went seriously right. It was just the kind of awful, no-good week that doesn’t really deserve that designation. The kind of week where you huddle up in your house, utterly certain that everything you do is wrong, that your body is falling apart and your mind is no good for anything and you indulge in the dream of no longer having to cope. The kind of week where lack of sleep kills your fine motor skills, and every attempt to rub your weary eyes is accompanied by a small vision of accidentally pressing your eyeball into the back of your skull, even if you know that’s relatively insane. The kind of week where you desperately try to hide the fact that you are a twitchy mess from the world. The kind of week where your focus is utter crap and you feel yourself getting

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working on This Week?

I’m off to teach a course on characters in a few hours, so I’ll refer people back to last week’s post if they need a whole bunch of context about the how and why of The Sunday Circle. Short version: I am interested in what people are working on, what people are reading, and in providing a weekly check-in on creative projects for accountability purposes. If you’d like to be involved: Post your answers to the three questions above in the comments or on your own blog (with a link back here, so the rest of us can find you). Throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in week two (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog,

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Lego Movie, Opening Scenes, and What That Means for Fantasy Writers

I watched The Lego Movie last week. This puts me considerably behind the curve, given my circle of friends. The vast majority of the people I know seem to have watched this film ages ago, pitched themselves head-first into its charms, and come out the other end with Everything is Awesome stuck in their head as a kind of perpetual ear-worm. This is what happens when your friends are geeky types. Still, I’m caught up now. And, curiously, I liked the film a lot less than I expected. I got about five minutes in before I realised I wasn’t the target audience. I found myself mildly irritated, rather than enraptured, because I couldn’t let go of the idea that these were toys. Except…no. It wasn’t that. I liked Toy Story. I liked other Lego-themed animation. It wasn’t a toy thing. No, I kept getting distracted by my inability to figure out if was in a secondary world where Lego was, for lack of

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Surprise, Delight, Pizza, and Writing

As a writer, one of your chief weapons is surprise. Surprise and delight. Surprise and delight and properly crafted reader expectations. Surprise, delight, properly crafted reader expectations, and…well, in my case, incredibly long blog posts where I blather on about things.. Surprise, delight, properly crafted reader expectations, incredibly long blog posts, and…Well, I could go on. You have lots of weapons. You are a veritable weapons master as a writer.When the battle-axe doesn’t get the job done, you swap it out for shiruken. Or a trebuchet. Or a fighter jet. You are basically like one of those RPG characters you get in computer games that doesn’t give two figs for encumbrance;  load up on all the weapons and use whatever you’re going to use. But today I wanted to talk about surprise, delight, and properly crafted reader expectations, because for my money they’re among the three most useful tools in a writer’s arsenal. First, though, an anecdote: A TALE OF

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The End of the Notebook Experiment

Last week I set aside my first draft notebooks and fired up my writing computer for the first time in two months, kicking off the first chapter of a project that’s living in my head as Untitled Space-Bro! Space-Marine Novel for about two years now. I’ll be honest: this surprised me. I was pretty sure I’d given my heart to notebooks, promised myself to them for the foreseeable future. There was something innately pleasurable about the process of opening up a blank page and scribbling in it with pen. I adored the portability of the notebooks, the fact that I could head off and write while tramping around the streets of Brisbane. Instead, I’m sitting them aside. Because I am fickle and heartless. And because a few things changed my mind. ONE: I CRUNCHED SOME DATA I often get irritated when writers use the word experiment to describe their approach to an aspect of the craft/business of writing. Too often

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Holy Crap Balls, This Is Incredible

INCREDIBLE THING 1: ANGELA SLATTER WON A MOTHER-FUCKING WORLD FANTASY AWARD Technically not incredible, by the strictest of definitions, as anyone who is surprised by Angela Slatter winning major awards hasn’t been paying attention for the last few years. But she’s also one of the hardest working writers I know, hustles like a champion, and writes brilliant books. One of them, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, just took home the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. I am, officially, as disappointed as it is possible to be that I wasn’t able to make it to World Fantasy this year. It’s a weird thing when friends get news this good and you’re not able to immediate communicate the feeling of holy fuck, you’re awesome, congratulations. INCREDIBLE THING 2: DAVID WITTEVEEN’S GENRECON RECAP I know, I know, I said I was done with GenreCon posts. But David Witteveen put together the STORIFY OF DOOM tracking his tweets over the GenreCon weekend and it is brilliant. He’s got great

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Resolving the Word Count Conundrum

So I got caught up in an interesting debate on twitter on the other night, largely revolving around the question of whether or not 50K actually constituted a novel-length work and the difference between answering yes to that question, answering yes, but it may be extraordinarily hard to sell, depending on your genre, and answering no, it’s a goddamn novella. If that sounds like a waste of time…yes. If it sounds like something you have passionate feelings about…yes, it’s that too. Writers get passionate about wordcounts. We get passionate about what they mean and where the arbitrary lines between form may be, and occasionally we spew some truly stupid shit in the name of trying to unravel its mystery. It gets even weirder when you start considering the importance of genre on the discussion. For example, I used to think short stories were around 3,000 words long, largely because that was usually the upper word-count on any short stories we submitted during my

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

600k Year: A Conclusion, More or Less

Warning: word-count neepery associated with the 600k challenge follows. You can skip today’s post if that’s not your thing. Right. So yesterday, at Write Club, I did this Which means I’ve now written nine of the ten chapters I had planned for the novel I’m working on and there’s just one more to go. Probably about 65,000 to 72,000 words, depending on how accurate my words-per-page assumptions are, with another eight to ten thousand words left to chase down before I hit the end. It…may not be done by GenreCon. Which hurts to admit, since I was confident I’d get able to do so until about Monday, but we’re starting to hit the point where the conference stops having things that need to be done and starts to have minor disasters that will eat hours of your time as you fix them. Since I’m the only person whose disappointed if this book doesn’t get done in time, and there’s about 180