Tag Archives: Writing

Experimental Prose

So, I have been experimenting with a new writing style.

This is a very novel experiment for me as style, that elusive and difficult to define aspect, is something I have not tried to craft. The lecture series I purchased has given me thoughts and really courage to experiment in this way.

After the jump is a short story playing with this new style, albeit in an extreme form. Let me know what you think.

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a moderately large re-write

So it started with just a line edit to Love and Loyalty. I spotted a few sentences that were a bit on the clumsy side and decided to fix them, leading to the discovery that my sentence construction skills had advanced in the last two years and that the entire book needed a line edit. Fine, I’ve been buckling down and working my chapter by chapter on this line edit.

That lead me to discover that some chapter were incomplete, missing vital scenes I had not bothered to write, nor even think of, when I originally composed them. So I started a file listing the newt scenes to write, along with the plans for an entirely new chapter 2. The job had grown, but just a bit.

Now my list of new scenes is more than 13 scenes long, no counting the entirely new chapter 2, and while washing my hands an epiphany exploded behind my eyeballs. (Truly, it feels better than it sounds.)

Now I am going to have to move chapters around. A fairly critical even in the novel, which happened more by chance than any other agency, will now be the direct result of actions taken by Seth Jackson the protagonist of the plot. The novel is growing deeper with more points of view now required to fully explain the plot. That said, I still think this will about at most 10,000 word in total, but I could wrong. Only time and pages will tell.

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Leveling up

So last week, Tuesday in fact, after my visit to the dentist to get five crowns put into my mouth, that was an experience let me say, I came home and banged around the condo for the rest of the day. One of the things that happened due to those hours on my hand was I scanned through a flyer/brochure that had arrived a few days earlier. This one was for college lectures as CDs, DVDs, or Downloads. I was just passing the time until I saw this course Building Great Sentences. Hmm, I had felt for sometime that was weakest in my sentence level construction and this might be of some help. The catalogue advertised a price of about $40, but I felt certain that logging into their website I would discover a much higher price awaited me.

Nope. $40 if I purchased it a a download, no physical media. Well, that didn’t bother any, so, with only a little trepidation as to what the sweetie-wife might say when she learned of this purchase, I spent the money and downloaded the 24 lectures.

Of course the final judgment will rest with the opinions of others, those readers, editors, and members of my writing community if this course has impacted, for better or for ill, on my skill as a writer. However, I am very pleased with the course and feel that I have leveled up as a writer.  You can judge for yourself.

Here is the opening sentence to a new short story I am crafting.

Enkidu crossed the last measure of grass, entering the forest, his young eyes adapting quickly to the dim light barely filtering through the thick canopy of leaves, his bare feet silently crushing wet moldering leaves in his step, the sharp, sweet smell of decay filling his nose and from deeper in the forest the presence of the dead filling his thoughts with silent voices.

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More than a line edit

That is what the edit of Love and Loyalty is turning into. I started off just trying to bring my sentence construction up to my current standards. However as I have mentioned here I discovered a glaring fault in chapter two, with the feedback from the MG Writers group, and so that means a total re-write of chapter ttwo.

Now I have found several scenes that would greatly enhance the novel with their addition. Some were scenes that existed in the plot, but were handled ‘off-screen’ as it were. Some were scenes I knew about but never wrote into the narrative because I thought it worked without them. Now I understand hat I need to expand the POV of the novel and employ more of Hitchcock’s ‘ticking Bomb theory of suspense.’

lovely

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Solution Found

So less than a day after diagnosing the problem with chapter 2 of Love and Loyalty (it was not character driven and did not reveal anything about the character) I have mapped out a solution to the problem. It will entail rewriting nearly all of chapter 2, but I think I was have a much stronger chapter and novel for the work.

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Another Epiphany

This is why being a member of the Mysterious Galaxy Writers Group is worth it. Not only do I meet great and interesting characters — not just the fictional ones either — and hear some great pieces of writing, but the feedback from fellow writers open up vista in my mind to where I have been blind.

I can see clearly fault in the plotting and form of chapter 2 that have nothing to do with the prose style. Now, to figure out a way to fix them.

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A quote that cheered me up

“Books aren’t written. They’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.” Michael Crichton.

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Depression Lifting

Last Friday I slipped into a fairly deep funk. Most of it had passed by the next day with only lingering effect through the next week. Today was the first day I truly felt like I had shaken off this depression. I know exactly what prompted this feeling.

As you know if you have been reading my blog I recently got my official rejection from a major publishing house for my military SF novel, Love and Loyalty. When I looked at chapter one with an eye to reading it at the Mysterious Galaxy Writers group I saw that I could improve the quality of the writing and decided to do a new line edit through the enitre novel.

Friday at my day job I was working on Love and Loyalty ,(during breaks and lunch, my boss get his money’s worth out of me) and suddenly I was struck just how ineptly I had written the book the first time. Mind you this was a manuscript that I had written, edited, gotten beta-read feedback on, re-written and then re-edited.  It had been through at least two full line level of editing.

Despite that the lines looked utterly crappy to me. I had been blind to my crap and the enormity of it staggered me. I was so upset that I think if someone had said a cross word to me I might have wept.

Just look at the number of changes and corrections I have scribbled onto this one page. A page that has been changed and corrected more than twice before. I don’t know why it hurt and devastated me so badly Friday, but there is no doubting that it did do just that.

I have kept working at it, hoping that the crap I am blind to is not as major as the crap I had been blind to.

I will not quite. I adore my characters and the adventure, but I do get discouraged.

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Not much of a post tonight

I am suffering from a headache. Nasty enough to put me off my editing and posting tonight.

I was going to post a length essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey , but instead I will leave you with this challenge. IN that famous SF film, before thing start going wrong aboard Discovery, how many scenes can you find that have a dramatic nature and not a purely expository nature?

For a scene to have a dramatic nature it must posses a character, that character must have a goal, and there must be an obstruction to that goal. An Expository scene conveys information about the setting or character or plot that the viewer needs to understand the events of the film. (I would also posit that the expository scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey do a particularly  poor job of exposition.)

Personally I cannot think of any scenes before we are on the Discovery that were not of a purely expository nature. Drama simple did not exist in that film until HAL went nuts.

**shudder**

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