Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

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James D. Macdonald

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black wing -- just write. Figuring out which parts are lovely and which parts are trash is hard to do close-up.

Nichole -- we don't have dates for Viable Paradise 10 yet (except autumn, 2006). It will have a ten-year alumni reunion with an extra mini-workshop over the final weekend, though.
 

black winged fighter

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Actually, after posting that and getting it out in the open, it was easier just to type. And I think it was - if not good - then at least type-worthy.

Letting it flow is much more enjoyable than analysing and dissecting every turn of phrase - though I'm sure that is to come.
 

NicoleJLeBoeuf

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James D. Macdonald said:
Nichole -- we don't have dates for Viable Paradise 10 yet (except autumn, 2006).
I'll try to remember to ask again by October, before my husband and I jump on a reservation for the 2006 sailing of The Rock Boat. TRB05 is the culprit, y'see. Darn that Columbus Day Weekend. Magnet for all the Labor Day Weekend overflow or something.

It will have a ten-year alumni reunion with an extra mini-workshop over the final weekend, though.
Sounds like a blast!
 

alaskamatt17

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Starting a New Project

Black winged fighter, that's cool that you started a new project. I started one recently, too. It's the second in my dinosaur adventure series, and I'm in love with this story. I've always heard people say that their characters and their stories take on lives of their own, and I've always thought it was hogwash. That never happened in any of my other stories over the past six years, but this one really is coming to life. even when I look back over it, the writing doesn't seem lackluster as my writing usually does by the time I get to the second draft. All signs indicate that it will turn out much better than the first (which I need to send out again since I got a rejection today).

I feel like I'm starting to be a success even though I'm still not published. I have five short stories out in the mail, I've finished my first REAL novel (well, not finished, but seven drafts are behind me, and the book feels ready to publish. I'm sure if I find any editors who want it they'll tell me what still needs to be revised). I'm so excited over just starting the work; I can't imagine what it'll feel like when I actually get something accepted.
 

Galoot

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Today I hate you.
icon8.gif


Tomorrow...who knows?
 

zornhau

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Galoot said:
Today I hate you.
icon8.gif


Tomorrow...who knows?

Tomorrow? You will post
Galoot said:
That's my 1st chapter revised. It feels great. Wonder what it feels like to have revised the entire novel? :Headbang:

To which I'll reply
Zornhau said:
It feels fantastic.
And you will still hate me :Cheers:
 

jdparadise

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reph said:
Page 147

...

Slowly it dawned on him. I must be nearing the end of the corridor.

I'm so glad I took the shortcut.

Wait.

Page 1, he's taking a shortcut.

Page 147, he's -still- taking the shortcut?

That, my friends, is one hell of a shortcut. And some awful good-burning kindling, once the cover's stripped.
 

reph

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jdparadise said:
Wait.

Page 1, he's taking a shortcut.

Page 147, he's -still- taking the shortcut?

That, my friends, is one hell of a shortcut. And some awful good-burning kindling, once the cover's stripped.
Well, you see, it's Volume 1 in a trilogy.
 

jdparadise

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black winged fighter said:
I suffer, however, from fear of writing trash. I know many writers say they don't expect to write very beautifully on the first go, at least all the time. It's what I've always tried to do, and pushing ahead so quickly with this WIP is leaving some rough patches I don't like.

Any thoughts on that, from the writing gods?


Not hardly a writing god (I may just be the God of Furry Goldfishes, but that comes with not so many perks as one might assume), but I'll offer a thought.

I like to outline. Well, no, I hate to outline, but I do it anyway. That lets me get the whole story out in the open--spying and getting rid of plot holes ahead of time, figuring out motivations, etc. I outline not by chapter, but by scene--and, in preliminary outlines, I sometimes outline by timeline-event, which is not necessarily the order the scenes will be presented in.

My current method of scene-outlining I'm really fond of--I start by stating the setting, characters present, the scene's relation to the story-goal, the viewpoint character's primary goal going into the scene... I've already done extensive character-figuring-out, so I usually know how my people will react.



...and then I break it down even further, to minigoals and the attempts to resolve them, e.g.:
Minigoal:

Get the princess to talk to him.

Implementation:
First, try to make eye contact. That fails, miserably. She is Not Interested in talking--she's depressed over loss of her stuffed monkey. He clowns, to try to get her to at least look his way. She does, but only to spit on the ground near his feet. He wonders why he's bothering. Grows silent, withdrawn, angry. After a time, she looks up, apologizes. Alas, he screws it up--he's still angry (I'm just trying to be friends, and you're going to make me work for it? Over something as dumb as a stuffed monkey? (Our Hero doesn't get the mystical attachment of princesses to stuffed monkeys, no sir))--and he snaps at her.

Now she thinks he's a weasel-turd.

Ultimately he realizes his mistake.

Minigoal: get her to accept his apology for rejecting her apology.

First, he ...

Etc.


This format is so detailed, it serves as a compact version of the story--it lets me get into the characters and their motivations; effectively saving me time on rewrites. Then, when I go into the for-real version, since I've figured everything out ahead of time, it's just a matter of determining how to present it (not that that's easy, but it's easier, anyway).

For what that's worth. :)
 
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alaskamatt17

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Galoot said:
It feels great to be in the flow, doesn't it?

I wonder if it feels even better to be in the flow after the first 50 pages. -sigh-
Galoot, it feels even better. I knew I was "in the flow" on my last book when I finished the sixty page climactic battle in two days. There was significant revision required, but the foundation was there, and it felt great to have just finished the longest thing I'd ever written.

But if you're getting stuck in the first fifty pages, don't worry. Just write yourself out of it. Even if you don't like what you write, it's better than a blank page.
 

Christine N.

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James D. Macdonald said:
Don't worry. When you come to the climax, you'll know. How will you know? Because suddenly the characters who had been acting purposefuly start wandering around and one of them says, "Hey, why don't we order out for pizza?"

Hey, that's kinda funny. My current WIP, I had no idea that the end was coming. I was going along, wrapping everything up, and just all of a sudden it was time to leave the room and go to breakfast. The end. there was nothing left to say. Totally snuck up on me.

Of course this was the first draft, and I'll probably change it. But it's a good variation of the pizza thing. Maybe I'll leave it.
 

Christine N.

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black winged fighter said:
Well...it's official. I've started yet another WIP. Difference is, this time I know for certain where I want to go with it.

I suffer, however, from fear of writing trash. I know many writers say they don't expect to write very beautifully on the first go, at least all the time. It's what I've always tried to do, and pushing ahead so quickly with this WIP is leaving some rough patches I don't like. I know it can be fixed in a rewrite, but I feel that sometimes I lose the 'mood' of that section when I go back....

Any thoughts on that, from the writing gods?

Someone said this to me, although I might be paraphrasing.

- Give yourself permission to write trash.
- If you recognize what you are writing is trash, you're ahead of the game. Some people never do.
- Realize that everyone, at some point, writes trash. That's why pencils have erasers.

My first book, I handwrote and transcribed. I crossed out, rewrote and agonized before putting stuff on the computer. Still had to fix stuff.

This book, I just wrote. I didn't like parts of it when I finished, and I had notes for the rewrite by the time I got to the end of the first draft. I'm rewriting. I'll rewrite again. And one more time to clean up all the pencil lines, before anyone reads it. then I'll change more stuff once I hear crits from beta readers and/or my publisher. Then my editor will get a hold of it, and more stuff will get changed.

The point? Fuggetaboutit, and just write it all out.

I write like I draw - with a light outline, then darker outline, then fill in the detail, then color and shade. The picture doesn't really come into focus after the rough stuff is done!
 

black winged fighter

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Great tips, all.

With this new project, I did actually outline before setting fingers to keyboard, and now when I lose heart, I just have to look at a big box at the end of the rough time line that says THE END. That fixes me right up and gets the words flowing.

I know change is inevitable, so I'll guess I'll just follow your advice, Christine, and "Fuggetaboutit, and just write it all out." *Grins*
 
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alaskamatt17

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Outlining

I outline a little bit differently from the way Uncle Jim does.

I just think up cool scenes, come up with a catchy title for each scene. For example: "The King of Glass and Sands," "Haven at Skimmer-port," "Shardwinds." Each of the names is short, could be used as a chapter name, and has some cue that gives me an idea of what the chapter's overall mood and content is going to be. Then I arrange all of the titles in order and write how many pages I think each scene should be (this has little bearing on what they actually end up being, it's just an approximation). Then I assign POV characters to each scene, and just start writing from the beginning.
 

Julian Black

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jdparadise said:
I like to outline. Well, no, I hate to outline, but I do it anyway.
Interesting post, JD!

Ithe past, I never used outlines--which is probably why it took me decades to actually finish a novel after a lot of false starts.

My problem has been that I'm very good at writing individual scenes or episodes, but I wasn't able to link them into a larger story. What finally tuned me around was going back to school, majoring in history, and figuring out how to write 20-35 page research papers for the first time in my life.

I kept ending up with unruly stacks of paper I couldn't keep track of, and long, meandering first drafts that took forever to wrestle into shape. Finally, in frustration, I took a pair of scissors and cut apart the first draft of a 25-page paper that had been giving me nightmares. I cut it into paragraphs, and then laid the resulting slips of paper out on a table, shuffling them around until I had an order that made sense. I had to re-write a few of those paragraphs, and break some of them in two; I also realized what I was missing and thus needed to write from scratch so I could fill in the holes.

A paper that had taken me six weeks of agony just to get to an ugly, crippled monster of a first draft ended up going together very quickly after I hacked it up--I was finally able to see how the pieces would go together. I had the second draft done in a week.

So the next time I had to write a big paper, I decided to work with it as separate pieces, rather than one big monster, from the very beginning. I wrote rough paragraphs on blank index cards, getting down the general idea I was trying to convey in each paragraph, and a few supporting notes (with references). Since the cats kept knocking the cards off the dining-room table, I made a big (4x8') bulletin board, and began sticking cards up on it, trying to find the best order for them. It took me three weeks of fiddling with it, adding more cards, making more elaborate notes on others, and then standing back and staring at the whole thing before I sat down and started typing it out. I had a decent first draft done in five days, with much less pain. (The footnotes were, as always, the biggest headache. One of the things that made me happiest about quitting academia to write fiction is that I no longer have to cite references.)

I'm taking the same approach with a novel right now. I'm doing research for a historical fantasy, but at the same time I have a contemporary urban fantasy in mind and I'm using the note card method to try and figure it out. Every time I think of a scene, I write the bare bones of it on a 3x5 card, in very direct "this is what happens" language. Sometimes there will be a line of dialogue or two, if I think of a joke or something clever that really works, but most of it is pure Joe-Friday-just-the-facts-m'am.

I keep sticking cards with different scenes up on the bulletin board. This story is missing a major plot component right now because as much as I know about the villain, I still don't really know what he's trying to dominate or why (all of my options so far have just seemed cheesy and cliched). But I keep writing scenes and adding cards, and as I do so I keep having those "aha!" moments when I realize that a minor character ought to be a major one, or two characters who weren't going to meet really should, or that I've had another insight about magic and its limitations that spurs another idea for another notecard (or two, or three, or a half-dozen...). Eventually, the villain's goals will make themselves known.

I know I'm not the only one by far who plots with notecards like this, but it's already been incredibly helpful. Being able to see the way scenes relate to each other and move them around at will, or add new cards, or toss some of them out is taking a lot of the pain out of plotting. I did it with a (not very good) novel I wrote last summer, and as I did it, breaking the book down into sections and chapters was easy. If there were plot holes or if a scene didn't seem to fit, it was obvious. If I was leaning too heavily on one character and not giving enough space to others, that showed up, too.

When I sat down and typed out the contents of all the cards, in order, I had my plot outline. From there, it was just a matter of sitting down every day and making it into a novel. It isn't a good one--it was a leftover attempt at writing "literary" fiction that I had started five or six years ago--and halfway through I realized I was writing about a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately self-centered middle-class white people who annoyed me. I could have turned it into satire, but by the time I thought to do so, I didn't care. The book lacks heart, but I finished the bloody thing. Since then, I've decided to rescue the one character I really liked, turn him into a wizard, and stick him in the urban fantasy (where he already seems to be thriving). The rest of it shall remain desk ballast forevermore.
 

Mistook

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Julian Black said:
Interesting post, JD!

Ithe past, I never used outlines--which is probably why it took me decades to actually finish a novel after a lot of false starts.

My problem has been that I'm very good at writing individual scenes or episodes, but I wasn't able to link them into a larger story. What finally tuned me around was going back to school, majoring in history, and figuring out how to write 20-35 page research papers for the first time in my life.

I kept ending up with unruly stacks of paper I couldn't keep track of, and long, meandering first drafts that took forever to wrestle into shape. Finally, in frustration, I took a pair of scissors and cut apart the first draft of a 25-page paper that had been giving me nightmares. I cut it into paragraphs, and then laid the resulting slips of paper out on a table, shuffling them around until I had an order that made sense. I had to re-write a few of those paragraphs, and break some of them in two; I also realized what I was missing and thus needed to write from scratch so I could fill in the holes.

A paper that had taken me six weeks of agony just to get to an ugly, crippled monster of a first draft ended up going together very quickly after I hacked it up--I was finally able to see how the pieces would go together. I had the second draft done in a week.

So the next time I had to write a big paper, I decided to work with it as separate pieces, rather than one big monster, from the very beginning. I wrote rough paragraphs on blank index cards, getting down the general idea I was trying to convey in each paragraph, and a few supporting notes (with references). Since the cats kept knocking the cards off the dining-room table, I made a big (4x8') bulletin board, and began sticking cards up on it, trying to find the best order for them. It took me three weeks of fiddling with it, adding more cards, making more elaborate notes on others, and then standing back and staring at the whole thing before I sat down and started typing it out. I had a decent first draft done in five days, with much less pain. (The footnotes were, as always, the biggest headache. One of the things that made me happiest about quitting academia to write fiction is that I no longer have to cite references.)

I'm taking the same approach with a novel right now. I'm doing research for a historical fantasy, but at the same time I have a contemporary urban fantasy in mind and I'm using the note card method to try and figure it out. Every time I think of a scene, I write the bare bones of it on a 3x5 card, in very direct "this is what happens" language. Sometimes there will be a line of dialogue or two, if I think of a joke or something clever that really works, but most of it is pure Joe-Friday-just-the-facts-m'am.

I keep sticking cards with different scenes up on the bulletin board. This story is missing a major plot component right now because as much as I know about the villain, I still don't really know what he's trying to dominate or why (all of my options so far have just seemed cheesy and cliched). But I keep writing scenes and adding cards, and as I do so I keep having those "aha!" moments when I realize that a minor character ought to be a major one, or two characters who weren't going to meet really should, or that I've had another insight about magic and its limitations that spurs another idea for another notecard (or two, or three, or a half-dozen...). Eventually, the villain's goals will make themselves known.

I know I'm not the only one by far who plots with notecards like this, but it's already been incredibly helpful. Being able to see the way scenes relate to each other and move them around at will, or add new cards, or toss some of them out is taking a lot of the pain out of plotting. I did it with a (not very good) novel I wrote last summer, and as I did it, breaking the book down into sections and chapters was easy. If there were plot holes or if a scene didn't seem to fit, it was obvious. If I was leaning too heavily on one character and not giving enough space to others, that showed up, too.

When I sat down and typed out the contents of all the cards, in order, I had my plot outline. From there, it was just a matter of sitting down every day and making it into a novel. It isn't a good one--it was a leftover attempt at writing "literary" fiction that I had started five or six years ago--and halfway through I realized I was writing about a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately self-centered middle-class white people who annoyed me. I could have turned it into satire, but by the time I thought to do so, I didn't care. The book lacks heart, but I finished the bloody thing. Since then, I've decided to rescue the one character I really liked, turn him into a wizard, and stick him in the urban fantasy (where he already seems to be thriving). The rest of it shall remain desk ballast forevermore.


Juilian,

More or less, you've described exactly what happens in my brain while I'm at work. I don't write on physical note-cards, but the process is exactly the same. There's a giant bulletin board in my head with all these notes for the story, pinned-up.
 

Julian Black

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Mistook said:
Juilian,

More or less, you've described exactly what happens in my brain while I'm at work. I don't write on physical note-cards, but the process is exactly the same. There's a giant bulletin board in my head with all these notes for the story, pinned-up.
I'm very good at visualization, but when I start dealing with too many elements that have to be in a specific order it all falls apart. I'm also an artist, and I'm very visually-oriented, so it's perhaps not surprising that I really do need to "see" everything in front of me.

Lucky you, to be able to keep it all straight! I wish I could.
 

Julian Black

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Originally Posted by Mistook
A 932-word quote
Galoot said:
Oh my god. reph's gonna kill you.
Of course, I'm the logorrheic loonball who insists on writing 932-word posts. As I glanced back over it just now I kept thinking, "For God's sake, Julian! Shut up already!"

Let's just say getting in 2,000 words a day is rarely a problem...
 
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