What's On Your Mind About Your Writing?

Today was great. Wrote five new pages without going off of a hand-written first draft! Veeery close to the end of this section and that means only two to go until the book is done! Glad I decided to stick with it instead of quitting.

If I thought motivating myself to write was difficult, motivating myself to actually sit down and read/research specific history of specific places upon which I wish to loosely base stuff in my WIP is like being tortured.

I love research.

WIP1 the historical: Draft 8, line by line. It's walking and talking.

WIP2 the crime thriller: I've been going back over the first few chapters, polishing this and that.

WIP3 the autobiography: I have neglected it, but will get back on track Sunday.

Reservoir Angel said:

If I thought motivating myself to write was difficult, motivating myself to actually sit down and read/research specific history of specific places upon which I wish to loosely base stuff in my WIP is like being tortured.

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Is it somewhere you could go, rather than read about? Just pretend the year is different?

Research is great, if I haven't got booze and need an excuse to not write, other than avoiding housework, I research.

WriterDude said:

Is it somewhere you could go, rather than read about? Just pretend the year is different?

Research is great, if I haven't got booze and need an excuse to not write, other than avoiding housework, I research.

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Moscow and Saint Petersburg during the modernising enlightenment periods of tsarist Russia under Peter the Great and later Catherine the Great.

For the sake of one theoretical possibility of how this potential story will end up looking, going to Russia in person seems a touch excessive and well beyond what my current circumstances allow.

Managed to get past draft 1 of chapters 20 and 21 and am now about to tackle 22, where my two principle characters find themselves as coming down with the plague and start trying to cure themselves with honey and oatmeal. I know I'll have to add in some more details in the two chapters that I've written, but they'll do for now (Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is a story).

I had a good writing day today despite my depression. I made it over 2,000 words. It probably would have been a lot better if I'd been in a better mood, but that's still pretty good. Maybe I'm finally learning how to power through my depression and still get words down.

rwm4768 said:

I had a good writing day today despite my depression. I made it over 2,000 words. It probably would have been a lot better if I'd been in a better mood, but that's still pretty good. Maybe I'm finally learning how to power through my depression and still get words down.

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I'm lucky to write A word when I'm depressed, let alone 2000. Good job!

I realized recently that I need to tone down the references (pop culture and otherwise) in my WIP. Every other story I've written, the references are quick Easter Eggs that flow naturally in the narrative, but my WIP spells all of them out over the course of entire paragraphs.

I will need to spend a bit more words on making my combination of "Richmond is a Hard Road to Travel" and The Dresden Files plot-relevant, but even that one can be trimmed a bit, and none of the others need to be anywhere near as long as they are now.

Hey Simpson, I was wondering about that recently. I always get confused whether we can reference things like Coke and Pepsi without infringing on copyright?

After my struggles last week, I am happy to report that I finished the first draft of my romance novella. The first draft word count ended at just below 23k. I'm excited to hand it off my beta and get some direction for the first round of editing! Has anyone else achieved any recent successes?

While going back to one of my completed stories for a paragraph that I need for my current one, I noticed I have the middle names wrong on two of my characters. Now trying to decide which of the middle names is better -- leaning more towards the ones that they have in the one that I'm currently writing, because the other ones seem very hard to say/read. Guess I will need to do edit #13 on the story that I busted my buns on for 2 years.

Still struggling with my MC's personality and motives. Its not that they aren't there. They just seem flat.

Will Collins said:

Hey Simpson, I was wondering about that recently. I always get confused whether we can reference things like Coke and Pepsi without infringing on copyright?

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And if you come up with an answer, I hope you'll let me know

WriterDude said:

Still struggling with my MC's personality and motives. Its not that they aren't there. They just seem flat.

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What's your process for coming up with all of that for your other characters?

Simpson17866 said:

And if you come up with an answer, I hope you'll let me know

What's your process for coming up with all of that for your other characters?

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I was always under the impression that it's perfectly legal to reference them. Stephen King is a prime example.

Simpson17866 said:

What's your process for coming up with all of that for your other characters?

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My process is largely organic. I usually begin without thinking about the plot, but a person on the street or TV will say or doing something interesting, and I'll extrapolate that out in to a long daydream that may or may not be worthy of a story. The personality grows from that along with other characters that pop up during what I call the skinny draft (like an outline, but with scenes and dialogue).

Most of my characters are based on real people, not that they'd know, so I have no trouble visualising their mannerisms.

I think the issue with this MC is that he was conceived at the point I spotted the story potential for another character, so the story isn't about them, and because the original observer was me, that character is intertwined with me.

I can change the hair, give them soccer skills and super strength, sexual disfunction, a traumatic childhood and a personal quest for vengeance, but they keep reverting to plain me, passively watching the remarkable characters carry the plot.

It is a silly problem, but it is a problem nonetheless.

Will Collins said:

Hey Simpson, I was wondering about that recently. I always get confused whether we can reference things like Coke and Pepsi without infringing on copyright?

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It's not really usually an issue of copyright, rather, it's an issue of trademarks. Generally it's probably ok if you're not making a negative connection (i.e. a character buys and drinks coke and then goes on a killing spree) but it pays to be very cautious because corporations have attorneys (multiple) on retainer, and do have to defend their trademarks. They can do it rather cheaply, and you can't.

• Don't be negative
• Be very cautious about film trademarks; Disney and the Tolkien Estate sue pretty easily.
• Keep a list so you can easily inform an editor when you publish, since publishers have very firm ideas of what's ok, and it can vary. Some will use a disclaimer; some won't.

WriterDude said:

My process is largely organic. I usually begin without thinking about the plot, but a person on the street or TV will say or doing something interesting, and I'll extrapolate that out in to a long daydream that may or may not be worthy of a story. The personality grows from that along with other characters that pop up during what I call the skinny draft (like an outline, but with scenes and dialogue).

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Nice.

Mine is a lot more of a brute-force approach: I do the really long and only tangentially-related daydreaming too, but I try to come up with as many ideas as possible and see which ones work the best and which ones don't. And constantly change my mind from beginning to end.

Most of my characters are based on real people, not that they'd know, so I have no trouble visualising their mannerisms.

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OK, you lost me there I've tried to base my characters on other people, and it rarely if ever goes anywhere.

I think the issue with this MC is that he was conceived at the point I spotted the story potential for another character, so the story isn't about them, and because the original observer was me, that character is intertwined with me.

I can change the hair, give them soccer skills and super strength, sexual disfunction, a traumatic childhood and a personal quest for vengeance, but they keep reverting to plain me, passively watching the remarkable characters carry the plot.

It is a silly problem, but it is a problem nonetheless.

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Maybe instead of doing that by accident, have you considered maybe doing that on purpose? I believe the word that you're looking for is First-Person Peripheral Narrator – the POV character is not the Main character – and I'm actually doing that too (albeit with Villain Protagonists and a side of SJW trolling) : my first-person narrator is a straight white guy, and for the first two chapters, he looks like the main character because he's the only protagonist we see doing anything. Then his black lesbian friend shows up at the end of chapter 2, and it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that she's the one driving the action against the antagonists.

He's just the Decoy Protagonist, she's the evil Sherlock Holmes to his evil John Watson. She's the evil Ahab to his evil Ishmael. She's the evil Jay Gatsby to his... Nick Carraway

Lately, trying to plot a work of any length makes me feel like a rat who has to construct his own maze and hope there's a cookie at the end of it.

Decided a title for future book four, a roman a clef: Black Border for the Daffodil Devil. It will be the second Billy Star novel, and is based on the life and death of Brandon Lee. Have a honking big info website about him so the research is done. I just need to put it together in fictional form. Of course, some of it is tabloid already because my research came from what I could find on the net and two books.

Future book five is a history of my hometown, titled Our Town. Again, I have a big website with all the research done.

Future book six the third Billy Star crime thriller. The title will have Pink in it, and that's all I know about that. But it's about a mass murder in a Miami Villa.

Other planned books:

1. A spinoff of A Deadly Spill of Scarlet. One of the characters in that book runs off to the North Georgia Mountains to live with her identical Monochorionic twin sister's ghost. Old idea.

2. A historical set in the 1840 - 1876, titled White Wolf, about a half-blood Cheyenne gunslinger. He's been in my head for ages and ages.

Thanks AW admin. Yeah, I've heard before not to trash trademarks. I didn't know Disney and Tolkien sue easy though, I'll make sure never to reference them.

Okay, dumb question here: If I were to be writing something that, while being a fantasy setting, had a larger plot going on around the central characters that was about the interlocking political situations and conflicts of various developing or developed nation states, would it be as massively beneficial to me as I think it would to really research into the history of Europe or some such, as a decent way of gaining insight into how such situations would work in pre-industrial nations?

Because the main kingdom at play is leaning towards being modelled largely on the Russian Empire in the 1700s and even basic research into that has gotten me interested in stuff like the history of nations like Prussia, or in France during the revolutionary period and later the Napoleonic Wars.

Basically, give me a writing-based excuse to binge-read about European history so I can pretend it's in aid of something and not just out of random sudden obsession.

Reservoir Angel said:

Okay, dumb question here: If I were to be writing something that, while being a fantasy setting, had a larger plot going on around the central characters that was about the interlocking political situations and conflicts of various developing or developed nation states, would it be as massively beneficial to me as I think it would to really research into the history of Europe or some such, as a decent way of gaining insight into how such situations would work in pre-industrial nations?

Because the main kingdom at play is leaning towards being modelled largely on the Russian Empire in the 1700s and even basic research into that has gotten me interested in stuff like the history of nations like Prussia, or in France during the revolutionary period and later the Napoleonic Wars.

Basically, give me a writing-based excuse to binge-read about European history so I can pretend it's in aid of something and not just out of random sudden obsession.

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Of course that kind of reading will serve you well. However, as Brandon Sanderson once said, you want to show the reader that there is a larger world out there, but not necessarily turn over every rock. Which part of political intrigue is most appealing to you? Cloak-and-dagger espionage? Trade wars? Court gossip? Read widely and keep an eye out for the things you already know you want to incorporate.

Hit the 40,000 word mark in my novel today...and I think it's time to stop. I've gotten most of what I want to say on paper and need time away to reassess and reevaluate. One weakness I've already identified is that the story isn't very exciting. Maybe I'll change my mind after re-reading it, but something feels very non-urgent. I've spent so much time obsessing over the technical, science-fictiony details that I might have neglected the human element. The manuscript is much shorter than I anticipated, but right now I think my brain needs a break. Worse comes to worse I can try selling to Analog or similar magazine that serializes longer works (and that's a very​ long shot indeed).