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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“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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Recently I was involved in an accident (I got hit by a car). I’m ok, I’m not badly hurt, but I’m taking a fair quantity of prescription pain-killers and they’re making me a little groggy.
What does that have to do with anything? Well, I try to get at least one article a month up on this blog. I’d been working on a piece based on the Digital Film Making course I’ve been studying, and I thought it was in good shape in spite of all the drugs I’ve been taking. This morning, realising I was running out of time, I read it over with a view to publishing.
It was not in good shape.
It made no sense. It was full of errors. It was, basically, bad. And this got me thinking.
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For $25 you can not only enter the Atlantis Short Story Competition but also receive 1-2 pages of detailed feedback on your work. But is it worth it? In this article I am going to share the feedback I received when I entered, as well as linking a copy of the story I submitted, and talking about where, how and if I found that it useful. It should give you a good idea of whether you will feel it worth your while to enter, as well as giving you some idea of what sort of things make useful story feedback. (more…)
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!
