Untangling Tales

There’s a lovely list of advice making the Twitter circuit now.  Here are my favorites– not all are original, but all I want to be able to return to.

Diana Athill

• You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)

Margaret Atwood

• Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
• Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
• Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

Roddy Doyle

• Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph
• Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
• Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.

(more…)

Bluestocking has held Wishful Wednesday for a while now, but I have so many books on my shelves I never participated. I never had an Oh-my-goodness-popular-book-available-soon hunger, but I recently found something that is so *me* that I’m chomping at the bit.

But I just bought a collection of resources for my WIP, so now I have to wait *GAH* till next month for these.

A Christian world-view retelling of various fairy tales in a modern context.

If I may judge from the first chapter(s) (available on-line)– and I usually do– this writer knows her craft, and speaks naturally of “unatural” teenage conversation, including homeschooling, poetry, and reading choices.

Primarily it is hints from the first chapter and the words of the many “testimonials” both on her site and Amazon that have me intrigued.  It looks to be a delicious series where faith and relationship with God is compatible with teenage storytelling– and that is my deepest desire as a writer.

There, I said it.  It’s official.

This time I plan (at least at first) to do things completely differently.

Whereas last time I did NaNoWriMo, and wrote pretty much “by the seat of my pants” (though, to be honest I had the structure of the original tale to keep me on track), this time I’m attempting to plan before I write.

Jay bought me the Snowflake software when it was $20, so I’m experimenting with that.  I’m finding it’s hard for me to flesh out my characters before I’ve seen them in action, but I’m chipping away at it, wanting to give this method an honest go.

Seeing the issues I’m having with the Lindorm novel that’s currently wrapping up, I want to learn if I have fewer of those with more rigorous planning.  I’m also riding a bit closer to the original model (the folktale) than I thought I might.

Mainly because it’s easier to identify conflict and motivation when it’s less subtle.  Those girls, at least as far as I’ve painted/pegged them so far, are beyond my ken.

And I hope this story will be less complex then Lindorm.  But we’ll see.

I have the three brothers pegged in a very traditional manner, and I hope they will still be interesting for all that.

The princess is not your witty She-Ra that populate so many fantasies.  I suppose I am prosaic enough that I don’t trust the portrayal of women who are set forth as anomalies despite the fact that that world produced them.

*pah*  Foolishness.

This is not the popular heroine, if I may use my own awareness of popular heroines as a guide. I thoroughly dislike “strong” women who are strong primarily in contrariness, rather than in contribution. But I suppose this will come out in anything I write, whether my heroine is contrary or not.

What a writer is intellectually, morally, spiritually, emotionally will radiate through the work, like light on an overcast day in which there is no visible sun, so that all things appear illuminated equally.

–Joyce Carol Oates, from her essay Reading as a Writer

At this moment this feels like a very comforting surety.

I’m not sure if this is a true quote or something from my own mind, but If we must be hanged, let us be hanged for the truth is how I feel now. I don’t know how it will be taken, this Water novel, or the Lindorm one. But they will be true, as a story can be true, and I feel quietly comfortable in that.

Stepping off the cliff again.

It really is quite exciting to me, and I welcome your prayers.

I hope this is a one-shot deal…

But today I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out things like TwitterFeed, Bit.ly, Tweeting in general, and fun stuffs like Acsii art and HTML specialties.

I resisted setting up a second Twitter or Facebook account for specific “networking” or “marketing” (barely trusting myself to keep up with the new elements I am trying to understand now).

We are currently on day 10 of 21 of our scripted eating, and I think the lack of variety, along with excessive focus on the details, is messing with my thinking processes. i.e., I think I’m even more obsessed than usual with the little things over general reality.

Also discovered #YAlitchat on ning, and signed up because one of the blogs I visited today said they have online critique groups– but I haven’t found them yet, and my patience for on-line time is just about frayed out, so I’ve accepted not figuring this out today.

~ ~ ~

I started reading On Becoming a Novelist yesterday, and quickly decided I want my own copy.  He begins with an entirely different approach than most writing books I’ve read– that is, in attempting to answer the niggling question, “Am I really cut out for this?“

Well, instead of actually answering it, he paints a variety of portrait possibilities, and since I can see bits of myself in them, I feel affirmed and encouraged that my tendency is both natural and reasonable.

This is much easier to swallow than the idea that I am irreparably messed up, so I’m thankful to roll with it for now.

As for the novel: it is decidedly on hold until this special eating project is over.  I am at the stage where I need to think of the details in relation to the whole– and I am personally at the place where I will “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.”

Which I’m beginning to fear I’ve done already.  But those 30,000 words really did need to be cut!