I was talking to my local writing group friends the other day and it dawned on me that I write in snatches. At the time, I hadn’t thought much about how and when I write.
But it is important, I realize now, to be aware of this, because then it is possible to improve the routine for a better quantity and quality of writing.
I wake up first thing in the morning and write for ten minutes before I freshen up. Dream journal, whatever.
I write while waiting for a cab I have called. Write while waiting for the pasta to boil. Write a post based on writing prompts.
I do sit down and write an hour or so every once in a while, a few times a week, and usually get an average of 4000 words written a week. So, I have learned not to complain.
I know I haven’t yet made it to the stage of discipline where I sit down and write every single day at a particular place. My favourite writing days are those when I get a lot done in snatches, finish a story, for example, or do a series of writing exercises.
I’m getting a few short stories published in Antologies here and there, but I wonder if my sort of writing routine would be any good for longer stretches of work. Since most of the girls on this blog are novel-writers, prolific ones at that, I’m curious. Is it possible to write a novel in snatches?
Confident (overconfident, perhaps) in my narrative skills, until recently I had never followed a piece of advice that I’ve heard and sometimes given. To read your manuscript aloud. I have now learned the value of this simple technique. I’ve also seen the suggestion to listen to your writing with text-to-speech software, but I haven’t tried that, and don’t know that you’d get the same benefits as reading it aloud yourself.
Now, I’ve advised writers to read aloud as a way to sense whether or not the narrative they’ve crafted is doing the job of being compelling or not. I came to this because many of the submissions I get on my blog, Flogging the Quill, fall considerably short of that mark because they open with backstory, or you-need-to-know-this-to-understand info dump.
My thought there was that if you’re reading your manuscript aloud and your mind starts to wander, that’s a sure sign of a narrative that has bogged down and is taking the reader nowhere. This happens to me when I’m reading such a manuscript silently, but I can see how a writer might not be able to do that with his own work, and it made sense that reading it aloud could help them become aware of pacelessness.
I think it’s a difference in how our minds process
In reading words and sentences to pronounce them out loud, we use additional parts of our brains, and I think that’s what makes us more aware of the actual content of the sentences than when we’re reading silently. Necessarily, there’s a tighter focus, too, and less tendency to skim and skip.
As I mentioned, I hadn’t been in the practice of reading my stuff aloud. I now regret that I haven’t been. This epiphany is due to creating podcasts for my latest novel, The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles. The manuscript was copyedited by a reasonably sharp-eyed colleague who performs that function for the university where I work. It was read by my sharp-eyed English-major wife. And I read it again and again and again before publishing it, both in manuscript form and in book form.
Yet reading it aloud has uncovered at least a dozen typos and other linguistic mistakes. Argh! Despite all the care and attention, there they embarrassingly were. I’m almost finished with the podcasts, and will load a revised version into the POD supplier, Lightning Source, when I’m done. Because it costs $40 for me to make that change, current copies purchased will have glitches in them. (Maybe they’ll become collector’s items—get your copy from Amazon today!)
On the other hand, there’s a good chance the errors will go unnoticed. After all, they escaped the beady-eyed gazes of people who were on the alert for goofs. I also think that the nature of the narrative is a factor. There’s plenty of humor to distract you, not to mention seeing the world through a cat’s eyes, and fast-paced action that becomes quite involving. Readers (not all, it does have its critics) speed through the story, constantly racing forward to find out what’s going to happen next in the madcap tale. I like to think that, in a way, quality of storytelling is the culprit.
The goofs have primarily been just that—goofs. A typo now and then. A word out of place. Once a description that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Here’s an interesting sidebar: I use contractions in the narrative quite a lot, partly because it’s in first person. However, in reading it aloud for the podcast recording, I found that the rhythm and sense of the words play better when the contractions revert to whole words. I’m not going to change them in the typeset narrative, but, when I record, I find myself de-contracting the contractions more and more.
So now I’m reading another one aloud
I’m still working on getting my We the Enemy story ready for publication (I just rewrote the opening and some key parts thanks to the input of a beta reader–thanks, Jami), and now I’ve embarked on reading it aloud, though not for recording.
And guess what—I’m finding a word missing now and then, some hidden echoes, and other glitches that have not been seen by the same crew that missed those in vampire kitty-cat—the wife, the editor, and myself. Just this morning I found a line that had a character finishing a beer—only I’d cut the earlier reference to him having one! Argh!
(I’m still interested in finding beta readers for this book. Here’s ad copy I’ve composed about We the Enemy: “Madmen, madchildren, and criminals kill us with terrifying firepower. Revolving-door law spits felons back onto streets uncaught, unreformed. But maybe there are ways to change. A gripping ride in a unique speculative thriller that sparks thought.” If you’d like to give it a read and give me feedback, email me at ray at ftqpress dot com.)
On the positive side, I’m still confident of my narrative ability. I’m finding that the prose reads well and is involving, and doesn’t need much in the way of revision—but I am also seeing ways to clarify now and then, which means a better read. This reinforces the lesson I learned with the kitty-cat novel—storytelling and writing craft abilities aside, my ability to get it right is only 98 percent accurate. Read it aloud. A valuable and humbling lesson learned. I’m going to do it with the other WIP that’s been “finished” for years, Finding Magic.
If you think this advice doesn’t mean you . . .
I ignored this advice for years, to my detriment. So why not do this? Take a couple of chapters of something you feel is polished and tight, right now, and read them aloud. If you don’t discover anything, excellent. But it you do . . .
For what it’s worth.
Ray Rhamey is a writer and editor, and has made his living through creativity and words for a few decades now. As a writer and then creative director in advertising, he rose to the top tier of the Chicago advertising scene, then left it to try screenwriting.
In 2001 he launched editorrr.com (now FtQ Edits), and have clients from the Pacific Northwest to Lebanon. He’s been a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association and the Northwest Independent Editors Guild, and a member/board member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Seattle Writers Association.
On the writing side, he’s had novels represented by a literary agent, although he’s currently seeking a change in representation. Ray’s written five novels that range from literary fantasy to a coming-of-age mystery.
There are times when I write and the story or characters seem to get stuck deeper and deeper in a rut. I have written them into a corner that there is no way out of. So what do you do when this happens? Start over? Backtrack?
Generally, for me, I start over. I of course could probably solve some of these problems if I were better at outlining, but when a story is flowing, I’m not outlining, therefore I back up and rework it. And yes, this is often when I start the outline that might have saved me time if I’d just done it in the beginning.
So how do you dig yourself out? What skills do you use?
Both of them were quite adamant about the use of pen and paper. Pen and paper, they said, would not let you edit as you draft, which is very important for first drafts.
Also, it slows down your thinking and writing, which, apparently, is a good thing. They even said something about writing by hand being an organic process as opposed to typing, closer to our hands and hearts.
This brought to mind my writing teacher and friend, who does not allow laptops in her creative writing classes for beginners. An year ago, I could not imagine putting pen to paper, it seemed an alien skill after years of typing.
But when I started off, I realised that with pen and paper I could access the creative side of my brain much easier. Thus far I had typed out all my articles, official letters, reports and so on. So, for me, the pen and paper became the starting point for all my first drafts, after which I typed them on to a document.
While typing I started editing automatically, my first draft virtually became my second draft. I printed this out, and started scribbling on it, adding in and deleting parts, then typing them in again.
This has become my de-facto drafting process for all my short stories. I have not managed a novel yet, so I don’t know what drafting an entire novel by hand would be like. As others have said, it could have its disadvantages.
Patrick Gale does all his first drafts in long hand on notebooks. As writers we have all have different processes, and I’m curious to know how other writers create their drafts. So how do you draft your work?
In my writing, I struggle with dialog. How do I get it to a point where the conversation is not only meaningful, it also advances the plot and reveals character?
I have done a few dialog-writing exercises, but the results are often dead, stilted.
But today I read some interesting bits about real-life conversation in a curious book called the 3 am Epiphany, which I’ve borrowed from a friend. They sort of made me realize that dialog does not have to be always clean, cut-and-dried, but can imitate life in various ways, all the while doing what I ask of it: advancing the plot and revealing character.
Without further ado, here are the pages I’m referring to:
It’s inevitable that as you start on your journey in creating a story, you don’t start at day one. So where do you start?
For me, when I first started writing, I started too early into the story. My friend Bethany helped the inexperienced me understand that the story starts often after the trauma, after the move, after the big change. That ridded me of my first two chapters of book one. Now, as I write, I try to start where the story actually begins, but I realize that often I still need someone to say, “Nope, here’s the start to your story.”
That leaves the backstory to be woven into the novel, not dumped in, but layered throughout.
Often, we tend to think that something can’t be cut because it’s important for the reader to know. So, my question is: How do you work it in without dumping it?
i never thought i'd write chick lit. not that i don't enjoy it...i just never saw Myself doing it. but i love it now that i've started!! :))05:23:16 PM August 03, 2010from web
