Tag Archives: author notes

Writer’s challenges – Embracing uncertainty

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In the last couple of days, I wrote 3500 words in the short story. Turned out I needed to start over, make a run at the overall story arc, and then incorporate things that I’d written before. We spent part of the afternoon at the Jewelbox Cafe today, some three hours, drinking a vanilla latte and some blood orange soda while working away at the story. Raven is working on the finishing stages of his next novel, so that was companionable.

Took a break after that for some ‘retail therapy’, and to do our daily walk. We’re both trying to hit two miles a day at present. Raven’s building up stamina and working the long muscles in his thighs to help out his heart function. I’m working on getting down my blood sugar readings.  I strive to treat it (the type 1 diabetes) as ‘annoying but trivial’ which it obviously isn’t – trivial that is.

Hence the emphasis on exercise. It’s one of the few levers I have access to that lowers the blood sugar by a significant amount – up to 100 points for 20 minutes on the Glider – in addition to injections. That, and sleep. Around 7-8 hours on a regular basis makes a world of difference. But enough of that.

The short story is progressing quite nicely, acquiring some interesting beats, and the character dialog is coming along well.

More soon, when I have the first draft completed. It’s an uncertain world sometimes, and not always in ways one would expect.

Writing process – top 10 ways of finding grammar errors

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Grammar errors are one of the most pesky things to eradicate in the writing process. Scrivener doesn’t find grammar mistakes, and while MS Word is pretty good at finding normal passive errors, it fails to recognize idiom. Language is changing. Sentences can and often do start with ‘and, but, or, though’ in colloquial use.wordsForBooks

If you’re like me, when you write the first draft you don’t pay any attention to the rules. Well, truth to tell, rules are hardly ever my best thing. I tend to think in fragments; that means some of my characters share this trait. Enough said.

Even in a blog, the sentence construction is not a slave to the Oxford English way of writing. Be a bit boring if it was. However, the unintentional grammar error is the bane of a writer’s existence. It’s just fine to break rules on purpose, so long as you know your purpose. Richard Morgan stood the grammar rules on their collective head in Altered Carbon. His more stream-of-consciousness writing included sentence fragments much of the time. None of that made it difficult to read. Instead, it made his protagonist much more sympathetic. So how do I find those errors in the editing process? I have a few tips and tricks to share.

  1. Walk away from the writing for a couple of days to give yourself some distance
  2. Print it out and keep a highlighting pen handy to mark the pieces to come back to
  3. Read it out loud to a friend. The tongue will trip over phrases that aren’t quite right
  4. Do an editing pass with track-changes on
  5. Try turning it upside down – for those of us who can read that way, the comma and grammar errors jump out
  6. Do an editing pass just for dialog.
  7. Use Find / Replace to fix issues like quote plus period (“. wrong) rather than period plus quote (.” correct)
  8. Write with a manual of style handy – look up stuff that you know you get wrong
  9. Replace instances of passive voice (often uses words that end in y) with active voice (often ends in ‘ed’)
  10. Relax about it. No matter how many times you edit, someone will disagree with your choices

I hope some of these prove helpful. Please share the tips and tricks you have found work for you.

Stages of writing – the first draft

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The first and quickest part of the writing process, for me, is getting the first draft done. Quite like writing non-fiction, I start anywhere. It might be an introduction to the character, a scene that may be incorporated, or a piece of dialog. From there, I figure out where that piece fits in and write scenes before and after it. Only then does an outline emerge.

I use scrivener for writing for the most part, however, if I’m stuck in a meeting I’ve been known to scribble in the back of a notebook or put some words down into one-note when an idea comes to me. On my phone I use one-note and am learning to use some audio recordings while I’m driving in the car.

Before the first draft there is usually an idea about the scene, some questions that reveal something about the main character and their cirsumstances.

  • Mira has issue with her family that sets her at odds with them. What is that?
  • About the magic? Her place in the family? The arranged marriage they’re trying to get her to agree to?
  • What is it about her magic and power that is at odds with their pursuit of power?
  • What does she see with her gifts that makes her step away from them?

I throw the main character into the first scene against the backdrop of the questions and see what happens. During this phase, I pay attention to the rhythm of the scene – quick, quick, slow or slow, slow, quick – depending on the energy of the events. As the stories are urban fantasy, I want to ground the action in everyday events. The mundane is punctuated by the magical actions and, ideally, the rhythm brings the aspects of the scene into balance.

I may decide to do a second pass on the draft to add action sequences or dialog that shows more of the motivations, especially for the political tensions.

During first draft phase, I also read it aloud to my partner or one of my beta readers. Getting their initial feedback helps me to refine the story on the next pass. It also lets me know which pieces to keep, especially if they clap their hands or laugh in delight. My partner is great at asking questions I hadn’t thought of, or asking about motivations.

Occasionally I’ll plot out a whole short story. For the most part, however, I allow the characters to tell me what they would do as I write. It’s more exciting to me that way and I get to learn as I go along. My first draft is usually in chunks of around 2000 words a day, with the odd day of 5000 words; I live for the 5000 word days. Being that much in the story makes me happy.