Planning writing can feel pointless. A lot of us depend on deadlines, caffeine fuelled all-nighters and forgetting how last time we promised we would never do that again. But for a book or PhD sized project – really anything where the finish line is years away and the work too large to write in a night – that approach is unsustainable. Probably. I mean, I’m prepared to give it a go. But there has to be a better way!
This article is about making the choice between planning your work based on content objectives (five thousand words by Friday, a 12 chapters by December) or duration objectives (20 hours a week, 0800-1200 Monday to Friday). We are always operating a balance between the time we have, how much we are prepared to invest and how good the work is going to be. Choosing the right intermediate objectives helps you prioritise the outcomes you want. So how do we choose the right sort of targets?
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Last month I finished the first draft of my first novel. I had a beer and took a holiday. I’m back and the manuscript keeps looking at me. I try to ignore it. It laughs, says “I thought so,” and then stops looking at me in a way that makes it really clear it is still looking at me. So what do I do with it now?
Obviously, I’m not going to let anyone read the first draft. There’s a long process of editing to get through before I even think about trying publishers or agents. But how do you turn a first draft into a final draft? (more…)
I am close to finishing the first draft of a novel on which I have been working for nearly two years. But close, as Rene Russo mysteriously observed in Lethal Weapon 3, is a lingerie shop without a front window[i].
What possessed me to write a novel? Why a fantasy novel? Will anyone take me seriously if I write genre fiction? Why do I care if people take me seriously? What if the story is rubbish? Not good enough to be published? Not good enough to make any money? How much longer can I keep doing this without making any money? What will I say to my wife when the rejection letters start pouring in?
This constant stream of doubts and negative thoughts is slowing me down and making it harder to write. I don’t think I’m the first writer to feel this way! This article is about getting over the finish line in the face of my own fears, without killing my creativity and just writing “fish” twenty thousand times.
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“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
With the first fifteen words of her novel The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood takes a vice-like grip on the reader. She doesn’t let you go until the last page. It is a powerful book, deeply emotive, and, for my money, has an opening line that rates right up there with Rebecca’s “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But what makes it so good? Why does it press all the buttons needed for an effective opening? And what can we do to evoke that sort of sympathy from the first page?
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Some stories touch us. A great story can make us laugh out loud, grieve for the death of someone who never existed, or even burst in to tears in the window seat of a train. But why does it happen? And, as a writer, how can you make it happen?
In this post, I will consider Peter Stockwell’s “Authenticity and Creativity in Reading Lamentation” and how to practically apply some of his ideas in your writing. Do you want to know what it takes to make your readers cry? Read on.
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Planning writing can feel pointless. A lot of us depend on deadlines, caffeine fuelled all-nighters and forgetting how last time we promised we would never do that again. But for a book or PhD sized project – really anything where the finish line is years away and the work too large to write in a night – that approach is unsustainable. Probably. I mean, I’m prepared to give it a go. But there has to be a better way!
