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What's On Your Mind About Your Writing?

kkbe

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I haven't been writing of late. I've tweeted on that Wednesday thingie. Yesterday, I read one of my early manuscripts. It's not too long so I was able to read it in one sitting. Actually, it's not bad and that gave me a little emotional boost. But I haven't blogged and like I said, no writing to speak of. Nor have I been querying. In my defense...

Suffice to say, life is getting in the way. I miss writing but I just can't seem to get to that place.
 
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indianroads

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I haven't been writing of late. I've tweeted on that Wednesday thingie. Yesterday, I read one of my early manuscripts. It's not too long so I was able to read it in one sitting. Actually, it's not bad and that gave me a little emotional boost. But I haven't blogged and like I said, no writing to speak of. Nor have I been querying. In my defense...

Suffice to say, life is getting in the way. I miss writing but I just can't seem to get to that place.

There are times in life when story telling has to take a back seat to such trivial items as earning money to pay rent and put food on the table. If I may offer a suggestion, it would be to start a blog. This will give you a chance to polish your writing and yet not take an inordinate amount of time away from earning the necessities of life.
 

MadAlice

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Revising my manuscript. Leaving it alone for a while really helped me see the issues in it. I'm one of those who write too little the first go-round, so I'm expanding some things and inserting plot lines. Also gonna kill another person or two.
 

Seven Crowns

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Finished a short piece. I had posted the first three lines of it here and kept going. Maybe having it posted in miniature helped? I'm not sure.
Just over 4000 words and done in 6 days. For me, that is phenomenal. Just have to fill in a dozen or so placeholders and skim it for a word diet.
 

Reservoir Angel

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Ordered a bunch of books about how to write comics. Because writing prose isn't working for me and I have a great fondness for graphic novels and comics so I may as well give it a shot.
 

edutton

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Ordered a bunch of books about how to write comics. Because writing prose isn't working for me and I have a great fondness for graphic novels and comics so I may as well give it a shot.
Was it you I told about the book Words for Pictures? I also love all of Scott McCloud's books, and Jessica Abel & Matt Madden's pair of books, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures and Mastering Comics... and Wil Eisner's technical books... and and and. :D
 

ManInBlack

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Ordered a bunch of books about how to write comics. Because writing prose isn't working for me and I have a great fondness for graphic novels and comics so I may as well give it a shot.
Getting into comics is great. I wrote a comic script once and I decided I definitely had a long way to go. I got a recommendation from a well-known comic writer at last Con I attended, but I could never find the book he actually recommended so I just ordered a few of the cheapest ones as starting-off points. I'm taking a Script Writing class in the Digital and Media Arts department of my university, which I'm hoping at least partially translates over (they're not calling it Screenplay Writing, so I can hope).
 

Reservoir Angel

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Was it you I told about the book Words for Pictures? I also love all of Scott McCloud's books, and Jessica Abel & Matt Madden's pair of books, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures and Mastering Comics... and Wil Eisner's technical books... and and and. :D
I believe it was. And that book is one of the ones I've ordered. I got Words for Pictures by Bendis, along with Writing for Comics by Alan Moore, How to Write Comics by Stan Lee, and two books of a bunch of sample scripts by various comic writers.
 

Mel101

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Revising my manuscript. Leaving it alone for a while really helped me see the issues in it. I'm one of those who write too little the first go-round, so I'm expanding some things and inserting plot lines. Also gonna kill another person or two.

I'm the same way. I refer to myself as an underwriter. The positive is when I share with my critique group the final product, the usual comment is that my writing is tight.
 

Mel101

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Finished a short piece. I had posted the first three lines of it here and kept going. Maybe having it posted in miniature helped? I'm not sure.
Just over 4000 words and done in 6 days. For me, that is phenomenal. Just have to fill in a dozen or so placeholders and skim it for a word diet.

That's awesome!
 

kkbe

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There are times in life when story telling has to take a back seat to such trivial items as earning money to pay rent and put food on the table.
Yep. In my case, it's more insidious, but the impact is the same...

If I may offer a suggestion, it would be to start a blog. This will give you a chance to polish your writing and yet not take an inordinate amount of time away from earning the necessities of life.
Alas... /kk's blog/

Thanks for responding, indianroads. Much appreciated, for sure.
 

Taylor Harbin

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Making decent headway into my newest chapter, but now I'm stalled and not sure why. Just don't know what happens next. It's possible I jumped into this section without a lot of forethought (which I've been known to do in fear of a story growing stale in my mind) or enough research, but I was hoping to get it done before Florida vacation next week (leaving Saturday, technically). Life has been eating up my writing time outside of work, so this is frustrating.
 

Emermouse

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Ordered a bunch of books about how to write comics. Because writing prose isn't working for me and I have a great fondness for graphic novels and comics so I may as well give it a shot.

I've often thought about taking a stab at that genre, myself. But it is a different medium with different rules/formatting. Plus I can't draw worth a shit and pictures are a large part of the experience. You can say so much with images that can't be said with text. This scene after Morpheus has killed his son...No word can match the art's power.
 

Simpson17866

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I've often thought about taking a stab at that genre, myself. But it is a different medium with different rules/formatting. Plus I can't draw worth a shit and pictures are a large part of the experience. You can say so much with images that can't be said with text. This scene after Morpheus has killed his son...No word can match the art's power.
Do you know anybody who's really good at drawing and who loves the same types of stories that you do? What made Marvel so successful was the back-and forth of Stan Lee coming up with plot outlines, Jack Kirby drawing the scenes to turn the outline into a full story (with gaps left behind for speech bubbles and the such), and Stan Lee filling in the empty spaces with dialogue, thoughts, and narration (often with minor adjustments requested for the pictures in the next draft, but unlike with the DC Method of the writer micromanaging the visual artist, Jack Kirby had the primary artistic control over the visuals).

That's the same thing that makes Penny Arcade one of the most successful webcomics today: one person is good at coming up with ideas and another person is really good at drawing them (instead of one person having to be good at both).
 
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Taylor Harbin

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Well, there goes my momentum. Finally got my second day off and I can't get a single word on paper. I hate this.
 

Thekherham

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Damn it, I'm doing it again. I've just put a hold on the novel I was working on, and I'm going to reread (again?) a novel I've completed and thought I had complete. But I always find something new to correct, something stupid that shouldn't be in there.
So I'm going to read it out loud and maybe one of these days I can say it's completely complete (huh?). Then I'll get back to that other book. (Unless something new pops into my head.)
 

Lakey

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What's on my mind about my writing is how the frame of relationships I've set up in the first act begins to grow and twist and crack in the second act. For instance, I've a main character who has kept a secret from another main character all her life, and the secret is about to be revealed. How the secret gets revealed, and how both characters react to its revelation, are of crucial importance.

The reader knows the secret, and will know the revelation is coming. (After all, when you read a book in which a main character has a secret from another character, don't you expect it will be revealed sooner or later?). So, since the revelation itself shall not be a surprise, I'd like it to be interesting in some other way. I'd like the revelation itself to be interesting, the manner of the revelation. And my character's response to learning it, I think, will be both character-defining for her, and hurtful to the person whose secret it is.

As I continue to think about it and talk about it, I can see it just beginning to coalesce. But I have a feeling this is going to be one of those sections I write, scrap, and write and scrap again, before it does what I want it to do.
 

MaeZe

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Chop chop chop, away go all manner of stupid things. Fortunately, they need to go and, I have ~30K words more than I want in the book anyway.

It's so clear to me now, chop chop chop, all that stuff ... and my WIP just keeps getting better.
 

Punk28

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Been putting considerable work in on the story that I started writing in 2015 then stopped to work on editing 3 others that happen before it. As a total, I've removed 6,962 words from it -- surprised I is. The feel from this thing is very good, and I'm looking forward to continue it.
 

Cindyt

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WIP1: add add, chop chop.

So, here in the closing pages of the 7th draft I decided to activate a back scene as Prologue: Watchers and promote the original Prologue to Part I. To do this I went through and trimmed a lot of fat.

I was thinking about back when I was writing the first draft. Most of the parts had 25,000 words and I just could not see cutting them down. But I did. I trimmed and added and trimmed. I have a single part that is 25K+ words. The others have less than 14K.
 

Cindyt

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WIP1: I have 97 chapters and am desperate for an even 100. :roll:

WIP2: Today's the day to work on this one. I didn't do it last week because my allergies were killing me. It's hard to make up lies about a hunk who never lived when you are drowning.
 
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