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Category Archive for 'writing process'

organizing your novel notes

Two nights ago I sat down to begin my typein (yay!). I brought out my scene cards, my story notebook, my story binder, and the first chapter of my marked-up ms. After looking at the sorry state of my worldbuilding notes—loose sheets of paper higgledy-piggledy crammed into my binder, scribbled lines amidst the plot details [...]

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Dear Brain

Dear Brain, I’m very appreciative of the fact that you took time out of your busy schedule to plot out the last three scenes of Quartz for me. I thank you for all of the cool new insights into the magic system and the nifty little plot details you put in. I’m also really grateful [...]

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ten drafts, or one?

Talk about being on opposite sides of the spectrum!: Does rewriting make your story better or worse? Me, I fall somewhere in the middle. My first drafts are me trying to tell the story to myself. They’re the place where I can spend pages describing a forest scene, leap without any thought for logic or [...]

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It is HOT in here. Muggy hot. Stuffy hot from drawn shades and closed windows. Outside, it’s my-steering-wheel-is-going-to-burn-my-hands and the-pavement’s-going-to-melt and the-metal-is-going-to-take-off-my-skin HOT. Yes, folks, we’re having a heat wave of temps in the mid-90s up here in Vermont. I’ll wait while all you Florida and Arizona and other southern state people stop laughing. Remember, [...]

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summer school

I usually take summer off from serious writing, probably because seventeen years of schooling has ingrained in me the sanctity of summer vacations. This year, though, I hit the actual revising part of HTRYN at the beginning of June. Yes, folks, all of what I’ve been doing since January(!) has been prep work for this. [...]

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Line-editing comes easily to me. I can spend hours tweaking sentences, polishing description, making dialog snappier. All of which is akin to lovingly smoothing on the wallpaper while the roof leaks, the furnace belches carbon monoxide and a colony of rabid bats has taken residence in the attic. It’s harder to see the overall arc [...]

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so, yesterday I wrote

I haven’t written a lick of original fiction since–*squints into the misty past*–I worked on Rainbird last fall (*gasp*!). This year, I’ve funneled all my storytelling efforts into revising Quartz using the HTRYN course, and diligently beat down any other contenders for my writing time with a big thick stick. I blame spring for what [...]

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titular

Here at the playground, I spent a couple of posts talking about that bane of my writing life–coming up with titles! Since I want that process to be less painful with more satisfying results, I went through my booklists to  find templates or formulae for titles. First off, we have the one-word titles. These include [...]

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retitled

It’s been a lot of fun to read how titles fit into everyone’s writing process. No matter where you are on the spectrum, it’s a great feeling to have picked out the right title for your story. Here are a few of my favorites, from my own stories: 1. Out of Shape, because it fits [...]

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[title goes here]

I suck at titles. Once in a while, titles leap fully-formed from my head with accompanying stories (Out of Shape and Second Sight being two) but mostly, coming up with a title is a hard slog. You can see my lack in the entitling department in my lackluster novel names: The Changeling (boring), Season of [...]

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