Would That I Might

My word count for the twenty minutes today broke 1000 by a full 9 words.  I feel like I am obsessing on just getting the word count, but that's a big thing.  Tomorrow, though, I am intending to begin working for one hour a day on a new piece.  One part of me wants to dictate it in a way, but another is prepared to just go with what comes out.  I am not sure which will prevail, but it will all go down tomorrow.  I am excited about it, really, and a part of me thinks that I may be able to crank out novels with speed.  Maybe they will be in need of severe work, but that is still a lot farther than not having it written at all. I also recognized something else, as well, about my writing today, as well as last night, which is that it can be a truly positive mood enhancer for me.  Feeling that I have accomplished something, by writing, makes many other things that might trouble me feel far less important. I don't mean the major stuff, but the small things ...

Before I move on to the next section in Wonderbook , I wanted to return to the idea of leading a reader in their understanding of a character.  The concept, described previously, is that causing a reader to recognize something about the character as true before it is overtly presented can help bring them to life.  For a reader, the experience is as if they are seeing the character, and the detail that they had only imagined being true creates a magical moment.  It is as though that character is real in some way, and they have an experience of them that is beyond the book alone.  However, that explanation is a bit loose, so it felt appropriate to provide some further clarification.  For one thing, it should be understood that this is not about a character or any other aspect of a book being predictable.  Predictability is about the actions of a character.  While, certainly, a character must act in ways that are cohesive and stem from an internal prese...

I mentioned, yesterday, a fear that I had jinxed myself by my comments about my word count, so I was somewhat conscious as I wrote for my twenty minutes.  In that time, I felt that I was writing quite rapidly, to be honest.  So, when I reached the end, I was shocked.  I had written down my initial word count, and compared it to the new one.  I was saddened to think that I had only written 600  odd words.  I could not believe it, to be honest, for I had felt myself to be on a bit of a hot streak, really.  That was when I realized, I had misread a five as an eight and messed the entire calculation.  My actually total for today, then, is a shocking number: 948.  That is still in just twenty minutes, and what is more, I feel that I am doing better with this than I had been in days prior.  While it is not a truly coherent and structured work at present, it is filling with real event and a lot more character.  As well, I have number of ...

Their are a great many ways of perceiving the function of character within fiction.  For some writers, the work is an expression of the character or characters at the center.  For others, it can be more useful to consider the characters as servants of the plot in some sense.  This latter is not always something that is manipulative, though it certainly can be used in ways that do not allow for characters to be fully alive.  However, it is possible to craft a character that is in service of the narrative and still unique and alive in a genuine sense.  As well, a writer may think of character in even more expansive ways, considering the narrator as a character, or the environment, or other concepts.  It is possible, for example, to personify an emotion and allow it be a character in a story.  Consider the concept of anger following an abusive father about the house, or of love perched on the roof above a teenage girls window. Even an event may be turned ...

The other day I read on twitter that Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials series, lost the pen with which he had composed The Golden Compass .  In response, a number of other writers were expressing sympathy, and discussing pens that hold similar significance in their own lives.  Subsequent to this, I was reading a writing book and in it's first chapter, it discussed the need to have a special and personal pen for writing. I understand this desire.  As a writer, I love pens and journals.  I have driven my fiance mad, I am sure, as I buy journals or an expensive pen, and then I do not use them.  I wish I could, much of the time, but , as someone with dysgraphia, I really cannot do any extensive writing by hand, and even if I could manage to do so, it would likely be illegible to even myself.  Beyond this, when I write by hand, the quality of the material itself suffers as a result of physical discomfort and fatigue. So, I am fairly bound to wr...

So, first, I apologize for any who might be waiting on the next Wonderbook installment, but I left the book at my mother's house and have not gotten back to pick it up yet.  I hope to do so in the morning, though. I hope that the substitute entry today was interesting and worth reading, even if it was a bit different.  I had a rather busy day, to be honest, though I didn't get to working on my writing until fairly late.  I wrote a bit for the Bimble story this morning, and then was just busy for the most part.  After dinner, I set to work, and after my previous post, I actually wrote an opinion piece that I sent out to see if I could get it published.  If so, I will be sure to announce it.  I am not going to jinx it by talking about the specifics, though. After that, while my fiance was editing for me (she was a newspaper editor for most of her adult life), I set to work writing about Captain Carlisle.  I was actually tempted to put J. A. Carlisle ...

As I have mentioned, I am spending some time at present with the works of the recently deceased writer, Harlan Ellison.  As a part of this, I have been watching some of his videos on youtube, of which there are many.  For one, Ellison was a popular television guest for a long period of his career, and many talk show clips featuring him are there.  As well, in the past few years, Ellison himself had taken to youtube directly, with his own vlog channel.  Now, it is worth noting that my first recollections of Harlan Ellison are actually from television and not print.  As a boy, I did read science fiction, fantasy and all variety of alternate reality works, but mostly these were those on the shelves of my family's home, and represented the works my father had collected.  Works that were mainly from Heinlein and Asimov were common, and a few by Bradbury were present, though far fewer.  My father had a certain type of book he enjoyed, and Ellison was not q...

I managed to write 819 words in my twenty minutes tonight, which I am quite happy about.  First, it suggest that I am getting more used to this work and not wasting as much of the time while writing, and that I am learning to let the ideas roll out the way that they should.  I don't honestly think the story is good at this point, but I never intended it to be anything but background for something else, so I don't worry about it right now.  I'll see, as well, what happens as I keep at it, because at some point, I expect that things will shift if I keep on with this. I was originally going to actually increaes the time I spend on the story tonight, but it is too much for me today.  It has been a crazy one, and I won't get into it, but to say that tomorrow will be better as I will be back at home after a few nights stuck away due to unexpected troubles with my home.  That I wrote so quickly today, though, might suggest that I can do more when I am less in the way...

Today is a bit of a hectic day, and I, alas, don't have my copy of Wonderbook at the ready, so I thought that I would just present a little writing exercise that I did earlier today.  The prompt was "A man (or woman) walks out of a house", with the intent being to pick either a man or a woman as the character.  I, however, decided, however, to ignore that choice: A man or a woman walks out of a house.  If a man, he walks to the left; if  a woman, she just stops on the porch.  If it is a man, his name is short, one of those names that is a loud thud, like Red or Frank, and he is reading the paper.  If it is the woman, her name is two sylables and ends in a vowel: Rosie, Jenna.  Of course, not every man has that kind of name, and not every woman has this kind, but the person who walked out of the house is one of them. It would have to be one of them, if they walked out from that house.  The man reads the paper as he walks along the sidewalk, a...

I need to keep things short tonight, as it has been a really long and stressful day that came after a whole series of long and stressful days.  I am glad to report, though, that I have done my writing, even though things seemed to have conspired to keep me from my work. I did work on the Bimble story this morning, but beyond that, I had no opportunity to get anything completed until tonight.  I did, however, manage to get in my twenty minutes, and I 604 words to the story, which is good to me.  If I am honest,  I am still not sure about what I am writing yet, but it is the commitment to that consistent pace of work that I am most focused upon right now. I am certain, if I am honest, that just producing the work will create the results in the end.  I have to hold on to that, as it is what I can currently control.  For the first time in my life, really, I am acting with that dedication to the act of being a writer, and I can feel how it has changed me alrea...

Yesterday's post concerned itself with how a writer can change the meaning of a work through playing with the progression of events through time.  This is, really, the more superficial aspect of manipulating time within a text, though that does not make it insignificant.  Rather, it is merely that the sequencing of events does not concern itself with how time actually functions in the scenes of a story.  Even in the most extreme examples, as with Robbe-Grillet, the changes do not impact time on the most fundamental intrinsic levels, relying on chronology to do the work. Yet, time can alter in ways that are far more interesting and valuable.  The order of events is not a quality of time itself, at least not in same sense that the pace of time is, or the direction of it.  In a story, events can be warped and twisted in ways that have nothing to do with the sequencing, but are entirely related to time. For me, the first book I think of in this capacity is Virgi...

So, I got to exactly 499 words today, which I find humorously exact, as if some part of my mind were joking with me.  I don't know that I think that is really the truth, it just feels like an intentional number, seeing as it is one number from the 500 word minimum.  But I am not that harsh on myself, and I had not officially set a true minimum.  As well, I want to note that, unlike yesterday, when I had a slight amount of hesitancy and erased to start again, I didn't restart the timer.  This was not an intentional thing, just that I actually started writing pretty rapidly after and without much consideration.  Indeed, I don't think I even remembered the timer until I was almost done.  So, I am willing to say that I would likely have matched yesterday if I had started the timer again. As well, I worked on the Bimble story.  That is also moving along, and I feel still that I am over a bit of a hump. Of course, I know I have felt that way previously and...

The chapter ends with a discussion of time's role in fiction.  To my thinking, it is worth discussing this in terms of two different qualities.  The first is, of course, the arrangement of events as depicted in the story versus their actual chronology; the second is the rate of time being depicted.  These two elements are each significant, of course, and can combine in many exciting and interesting ways. Before we begin looking more closely at those specifics, I do want to think about the question of what it means when we speak about time in a story.  Certainly, a story generally depicts events through time, but that must be an illusion.  A five minute scene could be described in such detail it would take even the fastest reader an hour, while a century might be made to pass in a single sentence.  This juxtaposition is a result of the reality that a story does not contain time, but instead describes it to the reader.  A writer can have complete contr...

One of the most significant ways that stories come together for me is through collision and merger of ideas.  This can, of course, be a purposeful act, say taking two genres or concepts and shoving them together, but I am speaking about something different and more organic.  There are times when I will be working on a story, and then, somewhere in the back of my mind, an idea for a different story will somehow come to mind, and I will see a connection.  These are often ideas that would seem utterly incompatible, but something tells me that they fit together. To offer an example, many years ago I had an idea for a story that would be a modern take on the notion of being lost in a labyrinth.  I had a fairly clear notion of that story in my mind but hadn't written it yet.  At one point, I had thought I was going to incorporate it into my novel, but that hadn't happened.  It was an idea in the back of my mind and I knew that one day it would come out. T...

As planned, I began working on a timed writing block today.  It was not particularly easy to get myself started, and I had a few times that I began and stopped, even erasing the work and going back to the beginning (I restarted the timer a few times to accommodate this), but once I got myself going, I was able to writer 649 words in twenty minutes, which I feel is quite respectable.  Of course, that is not the only criteria, as it does not take into account the quality of the work, but I trust that I know how to craft a sentence, even when I do so at speed. I did not feel fully comfortable starting today, but once I was going, it become a lot easier to keep at it, and I expect that it will become even easier with repetition.  I am quite hopeful that I can get my word count even higher in that time period, with some practice, as I was not prepared for the task.  I could feel how out of shape I was, just as one might if returning to physical exercise after a time....

The concept of contamination in fiction can be difficult to pin down, as it is a term that can apply to many different specifics.  What, then, does define a contamination?  It is when a subtle element begins to invade the narrative and slowly changes it.  That might mean, for example, a pattern of images, or it might be a tone in the narration, or a focus on new elements in the narrative, or any number of other possibilities.  The key is that these elements bring something new to the story or scene, changing it in some way, and that they emerge slowly. To use the example of imagery, suppose that a first person narrator describes a person as "the devil."  In the context of the story, this image is odd, but not so odd that a single usage would be out of place.  But, as the scene continues, more images of hell, demons, infernos, devilishness, etc, are used in reference to this character.  The image takes over the scene, altering it.  Now, this is ...

I am in a strange space right now, as far as my writing goes.  For one thing, I have to acknowledge that I am doing far more work than I had in a long while, especially if I include the writing I am doing on this blog.  On the other hand, I also recognize that I am not producing the work that I want to be producing, at least not with the kind of regularity that I would like.  It seems to me that, if  I can get the work I am doing on this blog done, I can also get other writing done, it is merely a matter of making it happen. Part of the advantage I have writing on this blog is the public nature of it, which keeps me accountable.  Knowing that a reader could be waiting for my next post, and recognizing that I have stated to the world that I am going to post daily are powerful motivators.  So, I need to start doing something more.  I think that I should start pushing my daily word count, forcing myself to get it done.  There is an argument about ...