Archive
A mid-November update on NaNoWriMo and new short stories
I’m smack dab in the middle of yet another NaNoWriMo, right along with all those thousands of others brave enough (or foolish enough) to dive headfirst into this annual frenetic activity. For NaNo this year, I chose to do something a little different in November. Instead of writing something completely new, I decided I would take a “completed” draft from a previous NaNoWriMo (2011, to be exact) and spend the month working on revision. I figured if I could get a minimum of 50K words or 30 chapters edited over the course of the month, I’d consider that a win. So far, progress has been great, and my novel is moving another step closer to becoming a finished product. While it’s far from perfect at this point, it’s improving with each revised chapter.
On the short story front … first, thanks to all of you who took the time to read my last story and leave a comment. I appreciate your support, encouragement, and feedback. Second, I’ve got two different short stories I’m working on right now, though the pressures of November writing might make it hard to finish them as soon on time. One hasn’t even been started, but it needs to be finished and polished up by the end of the month. Ooops. Timing for the other is a bit more open-ended, which is nice. I have a partially written story from years ago already in place, so I hope to expand and complete it in time for that submission. Both should be fun projects.
Hope everyone’s having a wonderful November, filled with plans for the upcoming holidays. My favorite time of year …
–dp
On writing: editing with paper and red pen
Recently, I’ve spent almost all my time editing a short story (this one here) and have gone through numerous revisions. I think the story and writing have improved dramatically, so I’m happy with my progress. But as I was about to begin my umpteenth editing session, I realized I was getting sick of staring at my computer monitor for hours on end. Still wanting to make progress, I decided to try a little editing the old-school way. Yep, I printed the story, grabbed my red pen, sat down at my desk, and started marking away.
(Photo by Nic’s events)
I think it was helpful to look at the story differently, i.e., on paper rather than glowing letters on a screen. And it was fun to run that red pen all over the pages as I found various types of errors and problems. But I must confess, though, that the overall editing session didn’t feel as good nor did it feel as complete as my normal computer-based editing. I felt constrained, as it seemed to limit the speed at which I could write down my thoughts, and if the scope of the changes became too large, the method became unwieldy.
So while I was happy to try my hand at editing via paper and pen, for me it just wasn’t as productive, though I suppose if you consider that it did let me keep revising my story when otherwise I’d probably have just stopped for the night, it did, in a small way, allow me to get more done. Not sure if I’ll resort to it again in the future, unless perhaps I find myself ready to stab my computer monitor because my eyes are burning from too many hours of endless edits (that have followed a full day of programming on the same computer).
Anyone edit by hand much? How do you like it? Any of you refuse to resort to the old way of doing things and stick to just their computer? Tried the red pen on a larger project, like a novel? How did it go?
–dp
Throwback Thursday: Retrospective on writing first novel
I don’t think many people were following me when I first posted this multi-part retrospective on writing my first book. Note that only the first part is somewhat long-ish. The others are quicker reads.
Throwback Thursday: unseen posts from the past
Ok … I’ve finally given in. For a while now, I’ve been seeing “throwback Thursday” blog posts fly by here, as well as on Facebook. So, I figured I might as well jump on the bandwagon. In my case, though, I don’t plan on posting old pictures of myself (because, let’s admit it, who really cares about those), but rather, throw out some old blog posts. Most of you out there following me now are relatively new, say within the last year. Since I’ve been blogging off and on for pretty much for 5 years now, I thought it would be fun to share some of the (hopefully) better posts from years gone by.
First up is something I wrote back in August of 2011. It’s all about rediscovering a dream. Hope you enjoy.
–dp
On blogging: to post our writing or not redux
Ok, the first of two short posts today.
For anyone interested, my son sent me this link to an article about what is considered previously published writing. It’s a nice follow-up to one of my earlier posts about this subject, which you can find here. It’s a worthwhile read even though it basically confirms the conclusion reached in the comments/discussion of my older post.
–dp
Why do you write?
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
– Stephen King
Can’t say it a whole lot better than that … Someday, when I publish my first book, I will be absolutely thrilled if even only one person reads it and likes it. If no one reads it, well, I’ll still be happy, just because I finished it. Still, wouldn’t mind getting that one like 🙂
Why do you write?
–dp
On blogging: to post our writing or not
To post or not to post, that is the question.
You see, I’m confused. I seem to have gathered conflicting advice on what to do with what I’ve written. Some say never post anything, some say post what you want. So what is it? Is it ok to post just flash fiction? Or short stories? Maybe excerpts from our novels? Or chapters? The whole book? Or maybe this kind of stuff belongs somewhere else, like Scribophile?
Part of me wants to post my writing so I can get some feedback, and to see if anyone actually likes what I write. But the other part of me is worried that by posting anything, I will lose the opportunity to submit to publications who restrict themselves to unpublished work, where unpublished means it can’t even have appeared in my own blog.
Anyone have thoughts one way or the other on this subject? Any experience with posting your own writing, either positive or negative? Using online writing groups, like Scribophile?
–dp
On writing: slow down to speed up
Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Write slower to write more. Yeah, didn’t seem reasonable to me, either … at first. But, after reading The Secret to Writing Faster, I thought a bit more about the proposition. And you know what? It makes sense.
If you didn’t go and read the article, I can summarize it by saying the author, Karen Dionne, believes that writing longhand can actually be faster, in the end, than using a computer. Pretty outlandish, huh? Well, not necessarily. Many years ago, I wrote a fair amount of my first novel by hand (I mention this briefly in an old blog post My first novel: a retrospective – part I) Though I didn’t expound much on the experience in the older post, I can say now that I did see some of the two main advantages Dionne describes in her article. She said that
My sentences are also cleaner. Because I write more slowly by hand than I can type, I give more thought to what I’m writing, and am thus more careful about what I put on page.
and
… that’s the corollary to writing faster. Slow down. Think about the words before you put them to paper, and the words you write are more likely to be ones that will stay.
Looking back, I can say I think this was true for me as well. Yes, I bemoaned the need for typing in all those well-crafted words after having already written them in notebooks, but I think overall the sentences and the story were better for having been written by hand. Now to be fair, even though I believe what I just said, I haven’t, as of yet, given up my MacBook and Scrivener.
My Desk
It should be noted that the idea of writing slower can also be applied even when sitting in front of a computer and keyboard. It’s just harder, that’s all 🙂
So, anyone out there like to do things old-school? Done it before and hated it? Loved it? Never going to give up on the computer?
–dp
On writing: the guilt we all feel
So, these days I consider myself a writer. Don’t laugh, because it’s taken me a while to get to this point. No, I’m not published, but the desire to write remains, despite rejections and a host of other life issues and emotions attempting to derail anything remotely resembling the life of a writer (whatever that may be). Deep inside, despite it all, something pushes me, speaks to me, tells me I must keep typing words and stringing them together into sentences, paragraphs, scenes and stories. If I don’t do it, all that I think about is doing it, or that I should be doing it.
So yes, I write, but something is holding me back, keeping me from reaching my full potential as a writer. I’ve struggled with it for so long I’ve very nearly giving up writing altogether. And it’s been relentless, beating me down until I barely have the motivation to lift my fingers to the keyboard. The culprit? A little thing called guilt.
Isn’t there something better you could be doing with your time?
Shouldn’t you be spending time with your wife?
Couldn’t you be working a little more so you can get a better year-end review?
Bleah, bleah, bleah, bleah … insert favorite cause of guilt.
On and on it goes, until soon you feel no more able to write than someone frozen by fear of rejection. It doesn’t matter … there’s no difference … you get nothing done. You spend your time surfing the web, researching for your latest idea, doing just about anything but putting one word after another into your latest short story or novel, or even blog post. It’s a sad state affairs, at least for me.
And all along, I naively assumed it was something only I struggled with.
So what made me think of this particular topic? Well, I can thank Victoria over at Crimson League
for making me think about this. While I’d thought about it frequently, it wasn’t until I read her recent post that I realized that, yes, I dealt with this very same problem. All the time. Fortunately, she also had some great ideas on how to beat these guilt feelings. It’s definitely worth a read for anyone who’s not yet read it and thinks they themselves might be suffering from guilt feelings over writing.
–dp
According to Dave 