Tag: Scenes

Works in Progress

Notebooks and Process Notes: March 2019

One of the side-effects of doing my Quarterly Checkpoint this week is the realisation that I’m going to have very little time for high level strategic thinking on the writing front. With that in mind, I’ve shifted my drafting process back to handwriting in notebooks–a tactic that’s served me well in terms of keeping forward momentum during highly stressful periods. Since it’s been a while since I did an update about the state of the notebook wodge I carry with me, I figured I’d take a quick look at what I’m carrying and how I’m using it right now. Fortunately, it’s a pretty slimeline wodege of notebooks for me—there’s currently four notebooks in my kit, and I’m only usually carrying two or three of them at any given moment: The notebook on the bottom is a large, dark green JS Burrows Journal from my local office supply store–essentially, their name-brand knock-off of the moleskine design. It’s a remarkably nice piece

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Jim Butcher on Scenes and Sequels

So I’ve been doing this writing thing for a while now. Eighteen years, more or less, once you factor in the time spent working on poetry, scripts, gaming stuff, an unfinished thesis, and stories as a collective whole. I still go out and learn to do stuff. And I still read stuff where I am thoroughly fucking schooled and have the way I think about writing turned on its head. Case in point: this one-two combination from 2006 or so where Jim Butcher talks about Scenes (which is stuff I know) and Sequels to Scenes (which blew my writer-brain in no uncertain terms). The sequel stuff feels like someone just sat down and wrote a short essay that basically says, “hey, you, short story writer, this is why you struggle with novels.” Go forth and read it.