Tag Archives: writing

2015-02-01 · 23:22

Short Stories and Shoe Horns

I’ve written a story. That is a rather redundant statement as I am a writer but its true.

Specifically I’ve written a story for a competition and I’m not sure its any good.

I’ve used a character I’ve used before and written a story for the competition. The competition simple asked for a story based around a provided opening line. I may have shoe horned an existing idea into place. It kind of fits. The story works. i.e: the protagonist has a problem, she discusses that problem, and comes up with a solution.

That is the basis of almost any story. The problem is it covers everything from walking in to Mordor to walking to the shops to buy an apple…

…

Problem: I’m hungry

Solution: Get food.

Once upon a time I was hungry and their was no food in the house. I got up off my lazy butt and went to the shops. I bought food. Several of the chocolate bars did not survive the journey home.

…

That is a story outline but unless you’re having to battle a dragon to get to the shop its not going to do too well.

There is something to be said for submitting anything and every thing. The simple act of writing can be an idea generation machine. So maybe I will. The entrance fee is £3 and the prize is £250. Which isn’t too bad really. Is there a point submitting when there isn’t much of a chance of winning? I’m not sure I have an answer to that.

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2015-01-18 · 18:00

It’s Time for Plan B

The other day I downloaded Scrivener. Scrivener is creative writing software. It is designed to bring a story all the way from idea to finished product. Its early days yet but I have high hopes that this will be useful.

The main feature I’ve used thus far is the cork board. Essential you write ideas in little boxes, these could be paragraph or chapter summaries, to get the overview of the story. You can then rearrange them to get a clear idea of the story in a simple form. This is invaluable if writing a novel as its easy to get lost in the hundreds of pages a novel can be.

Scrivener offers a 30 day free trial. What is great about this is that it is a true thirty days. i.e it’s thirty days of actual use so if you used it once a week it will last 30 weeks.

I should declare that this isn’t sponsored. There are many other creative writing programs out there. You could probably get more or less the same effect with a spreadsheet. Though a spreadsheet is not designed with this idea in mind.

I have no idea how many restarts I’ve had of my novel. It has been time for plan B for a long time. Time to plan and write the novel out in two hundred sentences before making it a 100,000 words or so. I used to think planning was boring – maybe it is – its also essential.

___

O’Neill:”It’s time for plan B.”
Carter: “We have a plan B?”
O’Neill: “No, but it’s time for one.”

Stargate SG-1 – Orpheus.

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2014-09-21 · 10:00

One Hundred

This is my one hundredth post on this site. So I’ve been bringing you poorly edited stuff for quite a while now! In all seriousness I do edit and proofread but something is always missed. Its a lot easier to notice mistakes made by others than it is ones you’ve made.

My novel, Rolling Shadows, is going well. This novel has been altered to within an inch of its life. If I was writing on paper I would have got through a small forest. Nothing has really been deleted in the processing of the novel but I am confused. I start to wonder if a particular fact was in the current draft or the previous draft.

The common wisdom is that on finishing a novel you should stick it in a draw for a few months. This enables you to forget all the story paths you didn’t take. You also need an editor who can point out all the story flaws. I try to be aware of these flaws because I like to nitpick. I try to think critically about what I’m writing. I want to find the flaws and fix them to deprive a review of saying how stupid I was.

One of the hardest potential flaws to detect is implication. This is when you give your character or star ship some ability and, without realising it, you imply another ability. An example of this would be Star Trek with its transporters and torpedoes. I assume you can see where I’m going with this. Yet it wasn’t until Dark Frontier that that was shown. Even then it didn’t become a standard tactic. It seems to me that that could, even should, be their standard tactic. Weaken the shields enough to beam a torpedo aboard and then boom.

This is even more difficult when dealing with magic. Where are the limits? In the Harry Potter series glasses can be fixed with a spell but not, apparently, eyes. Obviously eyes are far more complicated but couldn’t you conjure up something like contact lens?

There is no answer. My advice to anyone reading over their own work is to pretend its written by someone you don’t like. That way you might be more critical. I know that if Doctor Who does something stupid I’ll forgive it. Doctor Who is British, made in Cardiff no less, so I forgive its foibles. However if its a show I’m ambivalent towards, or even don’t like, I’ll use it as one more reason to hate it. I’m irrational that way.

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2014-08-24 · 23:09

Darlings on the Firing Line

I’ve said it before and hope never to say it again. This time my novel will be finished. I’m moving stuff around. Several of the chapters, that will be in the final novel, have been chapter one.

The upshot of this is that a chapter might have been written to introduce a character but now they’ve been in the book for a while. In other words it is a mess! The mess will be sorted though! For my next novel, I’m going to plan it to within an inch of its life.

There will be some casualties of this novel. One of the original ideas was a talking Guinea Pig – he is gone. That is no great loss. However, as any author will know, there are also the darlings.

Darlings are a way that some authors describe passages of their work that they like but that don’t belong. It might be irrelevant, out of character, or a fundamental change in the story renders it unworkable.

You see my main character, Stacy Tanner, used to be 18. I was 18 when I started writing it. So I have a chapter about her high school prom. I decided to make her older, as I am older, as it fitted better with the story. The prom therefore is now back story and no longer belongs in the novel.

I’m sure I will find other darlings for the chop. I will put them here. I’ve almost finished looking over the prom chapter and it will be on this site by the end of next week.

Those of you in the UK I hope you enjoy the Bank Holiday tomorrow – I have to work. Damn it.

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2014-06-15 · 18:00

Going Through the Motions

I said at the beginning of the year that I wanted to post every week. Unfortunately I’ve had a rather busy week this week – so I’m going to fulfill my promise by sending you else where.

I’m subscribed to a blog called: terribleminds.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about writing on this site. I’m just read a post called The Varied Emotional Stages of Writing a Book.  As you’ll see it was written a little while ago, I’m going through an email backlog, but it really spoke to me as I’m sure it will to many writers.

Of particular note for me is talking about being 50k in and the main character hasn’t appeared yet. That’s the boat I’m in. What began as back story has now become a novel in its own right. I suppose that’s good as I might now have two novels, or even three, where I thought it would be one.

So hope you like the terribleminds post and I’ll be back next week.

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2014-06-01 · 22:58

The Bridge is Too Well Guarded

JMS says, I’m paraphrasing here, that when writing is going well it becomes effortless. He knows his characters so well that his writing experience is one of observation. He can set up the situation, put a character in it, and he knows how they will act.

I dream of that experience. Writing is still a struggle. At the moment my characters are fairly interchangeable. Making dialogue unique for each character is difficult. I think this is something that comes with time. Everyone knows that the first draft is always utter rubbish! In my mind the first draft should be the bare bones of the story. When that is down you can go back and change things. Maybe you deiced a particular character never swears. So you go back and change the words. A friend of mine used to say ‘bar steward’ as a swearing substitute – though she did swear too. This is just the start then you can change other things and slowly build up a better idea of character.

The most important thing when writing is to finish the damn thing. That is the part that I still struggle with. It is getting there though – very very slowly. The characters I’m dealing with aren’t human and that is a little difficult. My Centaurs speak like Teal’c.

The hardest part of writing is, what I call, bridging chapters. I.e you can write the stuff about the troubled teen – you can writer the upstanding Police officer but getting the one to the other is difficult. If the transformation is too slow it becomes dull – too fast its unbelievable –  and just jumping ahead feels like is cheating.

_______

Teal’c: If we are discovered, you will be brought to Apophis along with us.
O’Neill: Well, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
Bra’tac: No. The bridge is too well guarded.

Bloodlines – Stargate SG-1 – Season 1 Episode 12.

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2014-01-12 · 23:10

The Doctor

One of my new year’s resolutions was to post regularly on this site. This means that some of the time I will be writing ahead of time. It feels like a bit of a cheat but there you are.

Speaking of time did you see the Christmas Day episode of Doctor Who? It was unfortunately not very good. The Doctor Who episodes have, in my opinion, become far to complicated recently. Classic Who tended to be small scale. The base under siege stories were often very good. However now the Doctor has saved not only the Earth, not just the galaxy, but the entire freaking universe! Now let’s be clear. I thought the pandorica story was excellent. The disaster was caused by the TARDIS and solved by the Doctor and in that way wrapped up quite neatly.

Generally though the smaller scale stories are better. Part of the reason for this is how the audience relates to the situation. Everyone can understand the fear of run from the monster. However when the threat is planet wide the solution is complicated, might involve techno babble, and it can be a little difficult to follow.

For Christmas my mum got the first four seasons of new Who. I had forgotten how great it was. The stories were great. The Doctor and Rose faced many creatures and the stories were tight. Of course they dabbled in more complicated plots, Army of Ghosts, but they were still wonderful.

Complicated stories can work, and do, but it takes a very skilled writer to make them work. My own novel is too complicated for me because of all the characters and settings. I’m starting to work out the kinks though. One show that does complicated very well is Sherlock. Naturally I’ve just finished watching Sherlock. I think that the writer of Sherlock should have a talk with the writer of Doctor Who and… oh wait…

When Doctor Who returns with Peter Capaldi I hope that Doctor Who will get back to its routs. It is at its best when it tells simple stories with a few key characters.

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2013-08-18 · 14:18

Analyse That!

There are some people who say they can analyses dreams. I’m very skeptical when it comes to such things. Though I will admit that the subconscious mind can be a very odd think indeed. Mostly I’m skeptical about such things because my dreams are so off the wall that they defy analysis.

In this dream I was with a friend whom I haven’t seen in about two years. Dreams always have a disconnect so there is no proper narrative. I know though that the dream was about different realities. On the walls there were these small protrusions and when shot at with a laser gun the whole of reality changed. Aside from that I only remember that there was a cinema and here the guns acted like a remote control, only changing what was on the screen, and that one of the guns’ ends was encased in ice.

It gave me an idea which could work its way into a story – so watch this space for that – and as an author that’s what you really want form a dream.

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2013-08-03 · 20:14

Writer’s Block (Again)

For my university project I’m writing a television pilot for a science fiction series. It started out as a film but I decided to make it into a pilot instead. Partly because I felt there was enough material to go further but also because I couldn’t think up a good ending.

Endings can be extremely tricky. There are no real endings, unless I blow up the star ship with all hands, there is always a new story to tell. A film can have an open ending but usually you want some sort of closure. With a television pilot an open ending is expected because it is introducing the story. Now that I’ve decided on a television pilot I have to complete another task – Episode synopses.

And instead of planning those episodes I’ve been procrastinating. My brain doesn’t seem willing to come up with ideas! Of course, unless you’re JMS, a series is usually written by several people.

Planning is going to be the key. Me and planning have a long an dubious relationship. Part of the problem is I’m not exactly sure what sort of series its going to be. The central story is of a ship trying to get home. It was influenced by Star Trek: Voyager but I believe it has become its own thing.

The Star Trek style of story telling general revolves around one main character. So you have: Worf episodes, Data episodes, Picard episodes, and God help us all, Troi episodes. Stargate episodes generally focus on the entire team but they cleverly placed different characters together. Of particular note is ‘Window of Opportunity‘ – where the problem has to be solved by Teal’c and O’Neill – who are normally the warriors. Worf and Teal'c

Similarly TNG has Parallels in which Worf is switching between realities – which is a nice change from the Klingon stories  – not that I don’t like those episodes.

So that route is useful. If done well (Duet) it can give an insight into a character but if done badly (Tattoo) it can be a disaster.

The other option is to follow the Battlestar Galactica model which is a true ensemble show. You don’t get episodes that focus on one character in quite the same way.

This brings me to an important point. I see this series as being somewhere between Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek Voyager. It will not be as bleak as the former and not as light as the latter.

I figured that writing this might help generate some idea. It doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe I will just blow up the damn ship!

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2013-03-04 · 10:07

Circumstantial Evidence

Sometimes I get bogged down in research. This happens in one of two ways. Either the answers to the questions are not forthcoming and I spend all my time jumping between sites or I get engrossed and suddenly know more than I ever needed to know.

As a writer I research a variety of things: the United States Navy, the Royal Navy, the New Zealand Navy, nurseries, the effect of a vacuum on the human body, village post offices, the travel time between New Zealand and New York, the average age of a Naval Lieutenant, Police procedures, the Salem Witch tries, explosives, guns, nuclear weapons, and Ford Prefect Cars.

These are not all for the same story. I do wonder though what conclusions someone might draw were my Google searches ever called into question.

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