Remember, remember, the first of November

by Andrew | Leave a comment

It’s NaNoWriMo time! Gimme an N! Gimme an A! Gimme a paragraph that’s a unit of thought!

I really admire the application and steadfastness fostered by the National Novel Writing Month. There’s much to be said for the instinct that can grow from that regular output of writing (1,667 words a day = a 50,000-word novel in the month of November). Plus it’s fun, and you’re writing within a global community that has lots of local groups and gatherings.

But sometimes I wish for an approach that’s a bit less cheerleadery, and a bit more quality. Maybe I’ve simply read a few too many unfiltered outpourings, and wondered if a more measured approach might have been more helpful for the writers concerned. Apparently:

Last year, NaNoWriMo writers wrote a collective total of 3,073,176,540 words. The writing marathon has generated 90 published novels, according to the organizers.

I’ve even heard of some of their publishers.

Gosh, I feel I’ve shown too much of my dark side now. I’ve never done it myself, so what the hell do I know?

Okay. A new type of challenge. How about a NaNoWriThreeMo – a season’s worth of writing? Or even a NaNoWriYear? Something that’s more gradual, more sustainable, less of a binge? It’s not a race, you know.

Meanwhile, the good folk of NaNoWriMo do produce an awful lot of useful resources. And here from Galleycat are 60 NaNoWriMo Writing Tips in a Single Post. (The link to the Fantasy Novelist’s Exam is particularly funny. Question #1: Does nothing happen in the first fifty pages? Hahaha.)

Friday Writing Experiment No. 7: Ghost Story

by Andrew | 1 Comment

Tis the witching season.

* Write a story or a poem about a ghost.

* Include some trove that you uncover via a chance operation. Either: (a) Reach for the nearest book to you, open it at a previously decided page (‘I’ll open this at page 41’), and select the first interesting word. Or: (b) Look out of (or into, if you’re outdoors) the nearest window, and choose the first interesting object to strike your attention. Or: (c) use some random reckoning of your own. Then somehow wrap your story/poem around the word/object that you found.

* Write by candlelight, or the spectral glow of your computer screen (there are ghosts in the machine).

Round-up, 25 October 2012: Murderous Self-Publishers, DRM, Supply and Demand, Handwriting, Serials

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A lot of noise this week (quite rightly in my view) on how Amazon controls your Kindle content, and can shut it down at its own whim, it seems. More on this another time, perhaps, but here is the original blog that kicked up the fuss, and some other links with perhaps some of the most useful commentary:

Outlawed By Amazon (original blog)

Amazon Inspires Wave of Anti-DRM Sentiment Following Customer Kindle Shutdown (links from Booktrade.info)

I increasingly favour the DRM-free approach to publishing, at least for many aspects of content. What you give away comes back to you some way or other, I feel (but then I am a generous kinda guy, I hope). Here is an article from Publishing Perspectives describing a succesful DRM-free venture: Top SF Authors Raise $1m With Pick-Your-Price, DRM-Free E-Titles. May their success ever increase (and I love how its the genre writers who’re pioneering this).

From IndieReader, some provocative views on whether self-publishing is killing the publishing industry (basically, self-publishers need to get a bit more professional):

If indie authors are going to make their mark, they’ll need to band together, put out reputable works, and stop looking for get-sales-quick gimmicks.

And from the Globe and Mail, a pertinent discussion on the creative writing industry and whether we’re creating more writers than can or will be read, with Canadian examples: Writers: graduating by the bushel, but can they find readers? Given the laws of supply and demand, I’m inclined to think that Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid is right when he (only half?) jokes that perhaps writers need to slip a five-dollar bill into their books in order to pay their readers …

And from earlier in the week a lovely blog on the lost art of letter-writing in the Guardian. Do follow some of the links therein, and also back to the extract from Philip Hensher’s book on handwriting: Why Handwriting Matters.

And finally: I am a big fan of the idea of serial fiction, and I am enjoying the reports on Naomi Alderman and Margaret Atwood’s serialised novel The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home. I can see (see above too) I am going to have to look into Wattpad some more. 

Friday Writing Experiment No. 6: Writing Good Sentences

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We can come up with brilliant ideas, storylines, and characters, but they’re unlikely to be much use unless we can bring them to life with elegant, vibrant, cogent, taut, muscular sentences.

I.e., unless we can write.

The book I recommend more than any other to writers and students is Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax, which is a lively and informative overview of all the grammar and usage we probably did not learn in English classes. I’m keen to acquire a copy of her new book Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch (one on the way, or rather, I’m on the way to one), which is – ahhhh! – devoted to verbs, those powerhouses of the sentence. I hope to review both of these books in the near future, but meanwhile take a look at Constance Hale’s newly designed website and blog, which has a ton of useful resources.

And inspired by St Constance’s love for ‘wicked good prose’ (and a day late – oops!), this week’s writing experiment is dedicated to writing powerful sentences.

Take any interesting sentence you’ve written lately – interesting as in a sentence you were pleased with, or maybe it’s a sentence that gave you a problem because it felt a bit clunky or did not quite express what you wanted. Or perhaps it’s just any old sentence from an email, or you can borrow one from someone else.

And if you are feeling bold and have the time: take a whole paragraph.

Now perform at least five different operations on that sentence/paragraph, i.e., rewrite it or modify it in at least five different ways.

Some suggestions:

* Change the word choices subtly, e.g., use a thesaurus to bring different shades of meaning out of each word in the sentence.

* Change the word choices radically, e.g., replace each word with another word that’s an equivalent part of speech acquired randomly – perhaps replace its first noun with the first noun you find in a newspaper story, then replace the next noun with the next noun you find in that same story, and so on. Understand word order, and words as placeholders of content.

* Express the action using passive verbs instead of active, or vice-versa.

* Remove all adjectives.

* Remove all adverbs.

* Change nouns to proper nouns, where you can (e.g., change ‘tea’ to ‘PG Tips’).

* If the/a sentence has more than one verb, remove unnecessary verbs (purging yourself of linking verbs and auxiliary verbs). If all the verbs seem necessary, let them take turns at being the only verb in the sentence. Change the verb if it seems necessary.

* Feel free to extend or develop sentences using content from other sentences from the original text, e.g., merging it with a nearby sentence to create a compound sentence and/or a complex sentence.

* Extend sentences by using a co-ordinating conjunction and another clause to make compound sentences. What effect does that have?

* Extend sentences by using a subordinating conjunction and a dependent clause to make a complex sentences. What effect does that have?

* Double the length of your sentence, without changing the basic meaning.

* Halve the length of your sentence, without changing the basic meaning.

* Rewrite your sentence/paragraph as a text message or a Tweet (under 280 characters, or 140 in old money).

* Add more life to your sentence/paragraph.

* Think abstractly. Conceive of your original sentence/paragraph as an action: right now, is it a kiss, a kick, a projection, a hinge, or some other gesture? How can you make it into a different action: a flight, a decoration, a flick, a punch?

* Assess the elemental quality of your sentence/paragraph: is it mostly Fire, Water, Air, or Earth? Like an alchemist, translate it into another element through your sentence structure and word choices. Aim to keep close to the original meaning, perhaps, but also explore how the sense can be shifted.

* Invent your own sentence operations, and share them with the class. Let your imagination go a bit wild with sentences.

I suggest you do these exercises by hand in a notebook. You can of course do on screen as well. In fact, it might be interesting to explore these processes of composition in different media: on the screen of your phone, on a blackboard, on Post-its.

And then repeat over with a different sentence/paragraph. It can be a good constraint, though, to use the same sentence/paragraph for several different operations in order to explore the possibilities.

If you need to look anything up, and don’t have your own Sin and Syntax (why not?!), here are some useful resources:

* Mantex study notes on English language

* Parts of Speech Overview – from Purdue’s Online Writing Lab

* Definitions of Basic Sentence Parts