Writer Senses

Though my blog's primary purpose is updating readers about my novel's progress, I like to deviate from time-to-time with insights from other writers and discussions about the craft. The past (almost three!) years of writing has been enlightening, and since the beginning, one of the most important tools to my growth as a writer has been Scribophile.com . Writing is a solitary pursuit, and for an  ENFJ  like me, particularly difficult in that respect. I enjoy the social aspect of storytelling. Comic and writing conventions featuring popular stories like Star Wars , Lord of the Rings , or, more recently, Avatar , are awesome because they incorporate the celebration of story. What excites me most about my story is the possibility that it will unite people, that people will be so fascinated with it that they want to talk about it, laugh about it,  shake their fists at me over it. To that end, Scribophile has been a laboratory in which to test this aspect of storytelling. I...

Current Word Count: ~146,000. Current Page Count: 655, double-spaced. Listening to: Forest of Illusion: Chrono Cross OST ____ As crazy as it feels for me to type it, my book is 3/4 complete. If learning Hebrew, work, and a possible internship don't kill me this year, I estimate that I will have the first draft of the story finished by Spring 2013. Have I said this is crazy yet? I love what has happened with the story. Plotting a long tale is a daunting prospect. Stephen King says that plotting is like trying to excavate a skeleton with a jackhammer. It might be good for getting big rocks out of the way, but once you get close to those bones, you have pull out your chisel, hammer, and brush. The metaphor is apt. While I always knew of a few big bullet points on the timeline of the story, the rest of it grew organically. Ideas, plot twists, and even characters invented themselves as the need arose. The story has gone directions I never would have anticipated. I consider this fact ver...

Word Count: 116,500 Page Count: 502 Double-Spaced Listening to: The Last Airbender: We are Now the Gods by James Newton Howard ____ Yesterday marks the two year anniversary of the completion of the first draft of the first chapter of ARK. A DIFFICULT YEAR One year ago the manuscript contained 90,000 words, this year, just over 116,000. It is startling to think that in one year I wrote 90,000 words and the next less than a third of that. It’s been a difficult year of writing. I mentioned in a previous blog that it took six months to write the climax (chapters 18-23, respectively) of act (or “book”) one. The events of the climax, while complex, still needed to be believable. As my own biggest critic, I asked myself constantly why something less complex wouldn’t have happened, or why this or that wasn’t present in a certain scene when we could reasonably expect it would have been. When I finished book one, I told myself I was not going to go back and edit...

Current Word Count: 111k altogether, 105k from prologue to interlude. Song I was listening to when the the final period was put on chapter 23: Chrono Cross: Chronopolis ____ After twenty-one months of writing, the first twenty-four chapters of my novel, encompassing the first act, are complete. Part of me is relieved. The climax event is over 110 pages long and stretches across five chapters (18-23; there is a 24, but I'm debting putting it in act II.) I have been writing it for over six months. It's cool to see things I thought of years ago finally put down in a readable format. Connecting dots A to B was a much lengthier process than I had imagined. Another part of me is not so relieved; if my estimates are right (and if history teaches us anything, it's that every estimate I've made so far has been very low ) I am only halfway done. And that is a very daunting prospect. On the other hand, I have multiple scenes--bits of dialogue, some of the stuff is actually good, I...

I was recently discussing a novel-in-progress called The Fisherman of Cat Island, about a Frenchman named Pierre, with the story's author. I raised in my critique of his work the topic of the infamous "info dump." Here are some thoughts about sprinkling that information in a contextually-appropriate manner. ____________ I think every writer has their own method for revealing information. If a story is told from the POV of a certain character, the reader may still be interested in the back story and physical appearance of said character. The problem is, in real life you and I don't sit around day in and day out thinking about how we look, so it doesn't make sense for a character in a story to do so--if we want the character to be real and the story to be true-to-life, that is. Information is contextual in a story like in life. There are times when you muse on your appearance: perhaps when you are getting ready in the morning, shaving, or dressing up for a spe...

Regarding "restraining your research" (the topic of my last update) I began a short dialogue with the author of a blog about exposition. It went a little something like this: Daniel, thanks... I recently gave a seminar about the subject of revealing too much of your valued research via exposition. Many professional authors still to this. I could name a few, particularly in the SF field (it's hard not to go on and on about your cool discovery of (theoretical) particle inter-dimensional plasma dark-matter propulsion that you've researched for months)...  I'll share here what I shared in my seminar:  One way to keep yourself from over-sharing all those "clever bits" (instead of keeping them to yourself) is to purposefully file them away in a backstory scrapbook or dossier or in directories devoted to spin-offs, short stories or even novels set in that same universe, world, time period.  Think of J.K. Rowling's spin off book on Quiddich, the ga...

The following is a response to a question about realism in fiction: I'm basically begging for advice on how to write this so it doesn't seem fantastical or contrived. Any ideas? Realism requires research : books, internet, knowledgable people, personal experiences. As an example, things I have researched for my novel include: British accents, Muay Boran, bo staff fighting (YouTube,) magnetic fields and space travel (a friend who works for NASA,) animal behavior (a friend who studies wildlife,) names and ideas in religious history (school,) human muscles (Wikipedia,) the feeling of a stiff drink going down (I went to a bar and bought a stiff drink; asking a friend did not suffice.) Realism requires familiarity : even if you were to write speculative fiction in which you engaged in full-blown world building, your story would still written by you and would thus be crafted with your experiences and expertises operating behind the scenes. For example, the relationsihp betwee...