Tag Archives: writing fiction

Can You Change Your Pantster?

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About three weeks ago I wrote a comment on a blog and used the phrase “sometimes you have to know where to stand.” When it was agreed that it sounded like a title, I wrote a quick three sentence synopsis of a non-existent movie. I liked the idea, so I sat down and wrote a 6,000 word story. I had no idea where I was going, I just had the phrase and a little off-the-cuff synopsis to use. I didn’t plan. I just wrote. Here is the story, which is pretty much a rough draft, yet passes as a finished story.

People often say that there are two types of writers, planners and pansters, i.e., people who write from the seat of their pants. My example above is pure panster. It is the method I use most often. I write for some of the challenges you can find on WordPress, and those are pure panster as well – I see the photo, perhaps read a key word, and write. I wrote two long novellas (25K + words) based on Writephoto challenges, so as I was writing those stories, I had no idea where I would go until I saw the next photo. I also wrote a full length novel this way! I have not published that novel, but it was written.

Most challenges are written 100% off the cuff as was the story described in the first paragraph, but more often I will write non-challenge stories when I am walking. I will at the very least get the basic idea, some major plot points and even whole chapters (if a book), but will often have the entire thing down, start to finish, in my head. I then will sit down and write it all out, like I am taking dictation.

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YA?

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I have a few questions about YA. Of course, I am talking “Young Adult Fiction”, not Yearly Allotment or Yesterday’s Anger.

But just what is meant by “Young Adult”?

I remember a college student being angry because they enjoyed YA but most of the books they had read recently seemed to be aimed squarely at 12 year olds. What in the world is adult about a 12 year old? Not a thing. Technically, if we look at the world and society, a 21 year old IS a young adult, a 12 year old isn’t!

But the definition I see is “Fiction written for ages between 12 and 18”. If you have ever talked to a 12 year old and an 18 year old, they are very, very different beasts.

I did see one definition that called it between 13 and 18 (in the US that is 7th grade through graduating high school), which I like better, but I am going to say high school age. We can stretch it to Jr. High, but the difference between what a 7th grader reads and a sophomore in high school reads is much much larger than between a high school freshman and a high school senior. Same number of years between, but what a difference those two years makes!

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Politics and Fiction – Oil and Vinegar?

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I have three general rules that I use when writing fiction, particularly longer form fiction.  I mean, there are more than three rules, but I want to talk about these three interrelated rules today.

The first is that if it doesn’t meet the needs of the story, it doesn’t belong.  I just read about a cool discovery on Venus.  Needed?  Nope, it stays out.  I discovered the meaning of life.  Needed for the story?  No.  Use it elsewhere. There are grey areas, of course, but usually they can be justified.  For instance, in fleshing out my characters, Bob might be an extreme astronomy nerd, so he starts a conversation with, “Did you hear about what they found on Venus?” instead, “Hi! How are you today?”  This tells you a lot more about Bob than it does about Venus. 

The second rule is that the author needs to stay out of a work of fiction.  The author seems to intrude in older fiction all of the time, but it doesn’t settle well in modern works.  The author (me!) can feel strongly about something, but it stays out unless it can be worked naturally into the story.  If I, as the author, just write in “Nazis are bad people,” it is jarring, but I can have, “Bob read Frida’s post and discovered she was a Nazi, and Nazis are bad people.” This is something Bob is thinking, not the author, so it isn’t jarring.  Unless you previously liked Frida.

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Killing Characters and Reality in Writing….

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These two topics, killing off characters in your work and the amount of reality you need, can each take a half a dozen posts or more, but I was thinking about the intersection of the two.

My writing can be called “speculative fiction”: the majority is science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy and horror.  Yeah, I’m often working with the supernatural, so how real do I need it? Of course I do put some reality in there to make it easier for the reader to connect, but every day things, like sleeping, eating and using the little boys/girls room is only put in if there is a reason.

My WIP, The Old Mill, is more on the horror end of the urban fantasy-horror spectrum. Not really a “real” genre ;)

About the time I finished my rough draft of The Old Mill, I read a blog post about killing characters in horror. Pretty much the idea was, if people aren’t dying, why would the main character, or the reader, be afraid? Of course you can ask how many people died in the scariest book I ever read, The Shining (not including looking into the past), but that book was written in the 1970s, not the twenty-teens! If you finish the book and six of your eight main characters are still alive, go back and kill four or five of them…

Maybe a little extreme, but she had a point. Continue reading →

Drafting and Editing

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Fiction

Typically when I write “The End” on a story, that is the beginning of the journey. Revisions and editing are a much longer, and to me, more difficult process than writing. Writing is a lot of fun! Editing? Not so much.

We each have our own methods and our own ways of doing things. I tend to get more granular as I write each draft. Ooops, but hold on. I really need to talk about how I define “draft” here, because it may be different than you think.

Draft Numbering

In ways my background as a computer nerd come to the surface in my draft numbering scheme. There are two or three components. There is the draft number and then the revision number and often a date-stamp.

I follow normal writing convention by calling my original rough draft “1st draft”. If I were really following the software model, this would be draft “0”.

I change the draft number when there are significant changes, usually end to end. This is typically rewriting chapters, deleting large blocks of text, adding chapters, adding large blocks of text, etc. Of course, as I said, as I go on it gets more granular, so I’m not adding or subtracting chapters at draft five! At that time, it is just a feeling that there have been significant changes since the last draft number. Continue reading →

Conversations About Dialog

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Fiction

What do you consider your biggest strength when it comes to writing?  I think dialog comes close to the top of the list for me.  I’ve had several people remark on it.  Yeah, I keep my mouth closed in real life, but my characters blab away…

Truthfully, I overdo dialog.  In fact, in the past I have had beta readers comment on my over use of dialog. Not all – I’ve had others that had positive things to say about it.

I have started editing “The Old Mill”, a book that I posted here as a serial.  One thing that I discovered, to my dismay, is that I have entire chapters that are 100% dialog.  Some are phone conversations.  Others are people sitting around chatting.  After I did one quick pass through the book I almost felt that it would be easier to make it into a play than a novel.  Not just a play, but an Elizabethan era play, with few stage directions. Or perhaps an opera.

Ouch. How do I fix that?

I am now in the middle of a rewrite. One thing that I am doing is changing it from all first person to third person.  Every chapter is in one person’s POV (well, for the most part), but the chapters can be in different POVs.  OK, most are in the main character’s POV, just third person. But I have added other POVs, which really helps develop the characters and makes the entire story more three dimensional.

Does this help with the dialog issue? Continue reading →

Data Dumps

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You have a great idea for a fantasy. There are four hominoid races that range from almost good but a little more on the bad side to very good, practically angelic. There are also corruptions of two of the races that are evil.  Of course there are also wizards that really don’t make a race, but are different from the others.  Plus, of course a handful of intelligent and semi-intelligent creatures and monsters, like dragons. They all have their own cultures, religions, myths, personality traits, physical characteristics, ways they use magic (or don’t), etc. And, of course, the world has a rich 10,000 year history plus the “Age of Myth and Legend” which gives another 25,000 years.

So there is all of that detail in your story.  But then we get to the story itself. Hold, though, we need even more detail… Continue reading →

Writing Exercises and POV (Part 1)

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Lost Star

When I first started this blog I did a series of writing exercises.  Every now and again I do more.  I’m not talking about just following the various challenges, like Friday Fictioneers or Sue’s #writephoto, I am talking about experimenting.  As anyone who read the story I posted yesterday, Honor, knows, I am doing a bit of experimentation again. This time it was triggered by the Ursula K. Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft, which I received for Christmas.

Point of View (POV) and tense are two big choice any writer has to make when starting a story.  They are also areas that are very easy to screw up.  Before i started a blog, I spent some time over at the forums on Writer’s Digest and found that people were very militant with POV.  Pretty much only first person and limited third person from a single person was acceptable.  There could be no changes whatsoever in any work.  One POV, solid like granite. Continue reading →

A First Year

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Trent-11-9-2018-phone-2-print

I have always enjoyed writing.  I also enjoyed creating stories.  The problem is, those two things didn’t always coincide quite right.  I would write stories in my head and nonfiction for school, work or different organizations, but I always grew frustrated with myself when I tried to actually write those stories out.

One morning in November of 2009 I posted a poetic line about the beautiful, unseasonably warm day.  A friend told me that she thought it sounded like a great first line of a short story.  So I sat down and over the next few days I wrote a story to fit that line.  What came out was the story Indian Summer, which I posted a few days ago.

A week or two later I wrote another story, a “short-short” of about 500 words.  A few weeks later, in mid-December of 2010, I wrote another longer story.  The new story, Five Long Walks, I planned out in my head before starting.

I was hooked. Continue reading →

The Haley Branch Blurb Take 2

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The Hamlet Symphny - Alt Image

A few weeks ago I posted a couple of draft blurbs for The Halley Branch.  Since then, I have sat on them, not trying to think of them at all.  This weekend I decided to have another go at the blurb.  Here is what I came up with:

An evil 300 years in the making.  A trap set 150 years in the past.

The day should have been a normal “family day” at the Hawkins’ Mausoleum, but a premonition followed Trevor into the crypt. To make matters worse, he couldn’t shake his morning vision of dead woman draped in a funeral-shroud.

After rescuing a girl trapped in the tomb, repressed memories force him to reevaluate everything. Is his extended family a cult with roots going back to America’s colonial past?  Is the evil Benjamin Halley still stalking his tomb after 150 years? Is there any truth to the Power described by the family’s patriarch, Miles Hawkins?

Trevor realizes that he is being manipulated and drawn into a trap set in the 19th century, and fears that everyone around him has already been ensnared.  Who can he trust?  The members of his own family’s Branch, The Bradford’s, like his cousins Bill or Stan?  Perhaps members of the Hawkins Branch, such as the beautiful but jaded Amelie?  The one Branch he knows not to trust is the extinct Halley Branch.

But the Halley’s are the ones who are welcoming him with open, if dead, arms. Continue reading →