It certainly helps to use a structural diagram of some sort. If you know the basic story arc, then it's mainly filling in the blanks and keeping it entertaining along the way.
Using real locations can also be helpful, if for no other reason than providing good filler:
"Dick Wiesel, Private Eye to the Stars, was walking down 38th Street in a bitterly-cold November rain, well past midnight. The shabby commercial structures along the road, with their fading paint and glaring signs, looked like Vegas after the bomb.
It was Friday. Striding past a Shell station, trench coat wrapped around his stick-thin frame, Dick heard the dull throbbing pulses and irritating vibrations of poorly-installed bass speakers, with the occasional burst of rap cutting through the small gusts of bitter wind. Young men and women were parked at the station, trying to hang out, but the miserable weather defeated them. They mainly dashed inside, or conferred through half-open windows before driving off again, with thin strips of drizzle pattering down.
Dick was familiar with this behavior from Los Angeles, but here it seemed a bit less friendly and laid-back. It could be trouble, if he drew attention to himself. However, in the shadows edging the fluorescent lighting and with the weather being so terrible, Dick knew he was too inconsequential a figure to bother, so he continued searching for clues along the roadway."
I NaNoWriMo
Moderator: Moderators
Re: I NaNoWriMo
Hey, Argh what's that story excerpt from? You're right, it's well-written.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
I just made it up, to demonstrate the idea. I wouldn't be caught dead writing detective stories.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
sinbad wtf are you doing, you're already 15k words behind according to this profile you've posted 
At This Rate You Will Finish On May 15
Re: I NaNoWriMo
As I mentioned, I started over a week late. based on my calculations even if I manage the same (2300) a day (including weekends) I'll get 48000 words... which is highly unlikely... so I've already given up... I'm just going to see how well I can do.KaiserJ wrote:sinbad wtf are you doing, you're already 15k words behind according to this profile you've posted
At This Rate You Will Finish On May 15
Re: I NaNoWriMo
Book eats live. Mod eats live. Dont do it.
I write since 4 years on one book, i poolished some sentences for days, it was scifi at the start, but then melted down into a sort of near-by-future were the most interesting part were people, and what they could really archieve as a best of all scenarios outcome. Now im going allover it again, weeding out the bad and the ugly. Its too long, way to long. 700 pages by now.
My heroine is half insane, the best guy in this book is a wannabe dictator ignored by the peopels, and the "evil" organisation ruuling the world is a bureoucracy that has the assertiveness of a amobea. The most interesting thing is actually the invention of folklore:
Fast Made up Exampel:
-"Bad Bill day was dawing upon them, they took the strawpuppet, nobody remembered who he had been, and spilled gasoline over it. Some of the bugs tried to escape the infurnance, but the attempts were futile, because they just hid under the rocks, circling the firespot, to be boiled alive by fixed behaviour patterns."
Storys become more fascinating, when the people whithin have real problems, real emotions, are not just heinlein-muppets or walking clichees, unfortunatly this makes storytelling quite challenging.
For example, one a group in my novell, is sortof immortal by using fixxed up, comatose bodys, but while they live on and on, every new person they possess, becomes part of them, layer upon layer, until they are like a shizo dr.manhatten without superpowers and even less healthy glows to there cancer riddled bodys.
Of course you write in your mothers tongue, you can try in a foreign one, but you can not succeed, it would take a second childhood, to learn/read all the american&english childrenstales, wordpictures and culture referances. I tried and still grab only a small part.
Injoke on Charlie and the choclat factory? Noone in a foreign tongue writing gets it.
I write since 4 years on one book, i poolished some sentences for days, it was scifi at the start, but then melted down into a sort of near-by-future were the most interesting part were people, and what they could really archieve as a best of all scenarios outcome. Now im going allover it again, weeding out the bad and the ugly. Its too long, way to long. 700 pages by now.
My heroine is half insane, the best guy in this book is a wannabe dictator ignored by the peopels, and the "evil" organisation ruuling the world is a bureoucracy that has the assertiveness of a amobea. The most interesting thing is actually the invention of folklore:
Fast Made up Exampel:
-"Bad Bill day was dawing upon them, they took the strawpuppet, nobody remembered who he had been, and spilled gasoline over it. Some of the bugs tried to escape the infurnance, but the attempts were futile, because they just hid under the rocks, circling the firespot, to be boiled alive by fixed behaviour patterns."
Storys become more fascinating, when the people whithin have real problems, real emotions, are not just heinlein-muppets or walking clichees, unfortunatly this makes storytelling quite challenging.
For example, one a group in my novell, is sortof immortal by using fixxed up, comatose bodys, but while they live on and on, every new person they possess, becomes part of them, layer upon layer, until they are like a shizo dr.manhatten without superpowers and even less healthy glows to there cancer riddled bodys.
Of course you write in your mothers tongue, you can try in a foreign one, but you can not succeed, it would take a second childhood, to learn/read all the american&english childrenstales, wordpictures and culture referances. I tried and still grab only a small part.
Injoke on Charlie and the choclat factory? Noone in a foreign tongue writing gets it.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
less calculations, more words per minute
Re: I NaNoWriMo
Its quality that makes you remarkable, not quantity, on the longrun. But yes, you need to like this work, bitching, complaining, but it needs to draw you back to it, a ink syringe for the heroes junkie, just one more dot, and i quit, be done with it, for good. Just one more golden sentence, and i leave the repeative hell behind, that is life.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
more calculations per minute!
Re: I NaNoWriMo
much better
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
Re: I NaNoWriMo
Eh, not to say it's BAD, but it's a bit dry and colorless. It's hard to fit your imagination into the universe if vegas on a stormy night isn't something in your library of experience, and the descriptions used aren't an effective transportation there. Plus, alot of words used for description, slows down the pace of the story and distracts past the point of working memory. It's important to remember while writing, the brain can only process about 7 peices of information at once, so if you have 10 unconnected descriptions of stuff the user has to read slower to process it, and it feels uncomfortable to read.Panda wrote:Hey, Argh what's that story excerpt from? You're right, it's well-written.
The other thing, the "camera" is very frenetic. I'm looking at neon signs, then I'm looking at old buildings, then I'm looking at a gas station, then I'm looking at people, then I'm looking at car stereo speakers, then I'm looking at windows, then I'm looking at rain then Dick again, then florescent lighting... It's a good technique usually to set a backdrop then "focus" on a scene and not pull the attention too much away from the character and things that directly effect him.
Set up "stormy vegas" don't flash the "camera" around, pan it logically, the street is connected to the buildings connected to the signs which cast the light, connections are vitally important because they create the "whole" in the minds eye, and chunk all the details into one coherent part, so I don't think about "the signs, the buildings, the rain, the gas station" I just think "the scene". After the scene is set, focus on the character and maintain that focus as long as is necessary. What does Dick do, what does he feel, what important interactions with the scene does he have. He see's the people, that's irrelevant unless he has some pertinent thought about it, and he does in the original, but the thought is introduced 2 sentences after the event has past, and those two sentences were long and wordy, it's easy to lose sight of what the insight is even relevant to.
Don't get me wrong, it's the kind of work that would get a high mark, probably an A, in grade 12 english, but if the work as a whole carried on like that it would not likely be publishable fiction.
The other thing, mystery is HARD to write, you can't just start at the beginning and write a mystery novel, the whole point of a mystery novel is slowly unraveling a spiders web, of almost all genre's of writing mysteries probably take the most sweat and blood in sheer planning.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
@Swiftspear:
Show us a better example then
I really doubt it'll help poor Sinbad out- he's probably just racking his brain trying to spit out words atm.
However, for it to be fair, you must write it yourself, and you have 15 minutes, no rewrites, no editing after you hit submit. Take 30 minutes to structure it in your head if you like, and be sure to make sure it's international enough and features a steady camera, since you may expect a critique from me
As for mysteries being difficult... no. They're right up there with romance novels, in terms of fundamental difficulty. That doesn't mean that exceptional writers such as Christie or Chalmers haven't raised the bar, in terms of excellence; but they're exceptional writers in a fairly straightforward format, and in Christie's case, only Doyle contributed more to the formulas used.
Show us a better example then
I really doubt it'll help poor Sinbad out- he's probably just racking his brain trying to spit out words atm.However, for it to be fair, you must write it yourself, and you have 15 minutes, no rewrites, no editing after you hit submit. Take 30 minutes to structure it in your head if you like, and be sure to make sure it's international enough and features a steady camera, since you may expect a critique from me
As for mysteries being difficult... no. They're right up there with romance novels, in terms of fundamental difficulty. That doesn't mean that exceptional writers such as Christie or Chalmers haven't raised the bar, in terms of excellence; but they're exceptional writers in a fairly straightforward format, and in Christie's case, only Doyle contributed more to the formulas used.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
only added 2093 words today because work was actually busy for once (though I daren't complain when I have to actually do the job for which I am paid)
I also figured out how all my main characters are connected now so from a story perspective it was a productive day.
I also figured out how all my main characters are connected now so from a story perspective it was a productive day.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
Re: I NaNoWriMo
Romance I find pretty easy to write, not that I really like it. Romance novels have alot of room to flow freely, Mystery has to follow strictly to quite an elaborate track the whole process along. It takes alot of talent to both follow that track and keep the plot interesting.
Anyways, no offense intended Argh, I'm glad you had fun writing your piece, but I honestly don't want to compete. Sorry you got to be the brunt of a little bit of my wrath, but I was just trying to point out how good writing goes really really deep into methodology and theory. I'm not a professional writer either, I could probably write something that corrected the points I harked on, but I'm sure I'd have other errors to hark on none the less. With a bit of time to do research I could probably FIND some work that is a really good example of great writing, but at BEST I'm just a little ways up the tree from where you are in terms of writing skill.
Anyways, no offense intended Argh, I'm glad you had fun writing your piece, but I honestly don't want to compete. Sorry you got to be the brunt of a little bit of my wrath, but I was just trying to point out how good writing goes really really deep into methodology and theory. I'm not a professional writer either, I could probably write something that corrected the points I harked on, but I'm sure I'd have other errors to hark on none the less. With a bit of time to do research I could probably FIND some work that is a really good example of great writing, but at BEST I'm just a little ways up the tree from where you are in terms of writing skill.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
According to the books on writing I've read good writing comes from practice which is why a program that encourages quantity over quality is useful.
Another thing I've learned from reading things written by artists is to keep drawing all the time but not just the easy things... if you draw great anthropomorphic foxes and that's all you draw then you're not going to get better... you need to draw other things like landscapes and inanimate objects and people and stuff.
I also read this one book that said it takes years to come up with a story but that's okay because if you are the kind of person who is going to make a career out of writing you probably already have a story in your mind that you have subconsciously been working on for years anyway.
So, while I do feel like this discussion is good stuff I feel some of you are missing the point... you don't start by writing perfect paragraph after perfect paragraph... you start by writing a whole bunch of good-enough paragraphs and then either go back and fix them or write a new bunch of slightly-better-good enough paragraphs. Or at least that's what Steven Kind, Orson Scott Card, Piers Anthony and the NaNoWriMo people tell me.
Another thing I've learned from reading things written by artists is to keep drawing all the time but not just the easy things... if you draw great anthropomorphic foxes and that's all you draw then you're not going to get better... you need to draw other things like landscapes and inanimate objects and people and stuff.
I also read this one book that said it takes years to come up with a story but that's okay because if you are the kind of person who is going to make a career out of writing you probably already have a story in your mind that you have subconsciously been working on for years anyway.
So, while I do feel like this discussion is good stuff I feel some of you are missing the point... you don't start by writing perfect paragraph after perfect paragraph... you start by writing a whole bunch of good-enough paragraphs and then either go back and fix them or write a new bunch of slightly-better-good enough paragraphs. Or at least that's what Steven Kind, Orson Scott Card, Piers Anthony and the NaNoWriMo people tell me.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
You make it sound so very dull. I think that writing in a journal could help one improve their writing skills. You could practice by writing about interesting things that you see or by responding to prompts such as popular beliefs or quotes. If someone were to try this approach they must remember to be very reflective and add depth to their writing. Otherwise, they could just end up writing shallow entries that don't give the writer much material to work with.SwiftSpear wrote:Romance I find pretty easy to write, not that I really like it. Romance novels have alot of room to flow freely, Mystery has to follow strictly to quite an elaborate track the whole process along. It takes alot of talent to both follow that track and keep the plot interesting.
Anyways, no offense intended Argh, I'm glad you had fun writing your piece, but I honestly don't want to compete. Sorry you got to be the brunt of a little bit of my wrath, but I was just trying to point out how good writing goes really really deep into methodology and theory. I'm not a professional writer either, I could probably write something that corrected the points I harked on, but I'm sure I'd have other errors to hark on none the less. With a bit of time to do research I could probably FIND some work that is a really good example of great writing, but at BEST I'm just a little ways up the tree from where you are in terms of writing skill.
I'm don't really understand what you're saying about romance novels because they've never been my favorite genera of stories, but I think that mysteries are awesome and are probably difficult to write.
Re: I NaNoWriMo
Ugh, only 1171 words today... mostly due to "writers block"... finally pushed through after reading some Wikipedia articles for inspiration that almost served as de-motivators because they pointed out some glaring holes in the "major idea" that is central to my story... I'm less then 1/5th done so I'm currently planning on shifting focus away from my blunder so that the readers are less disappointed when I start explaining things away with the "A Wizard Did It" excuse...
Re: I NaNoWriMo
David Bjerklie is the senior science reporter at TIME magazine says, "As a writer, I want to choose the exact right words for my story. But when I'm stuck, I try to ask myself, What do I REALLY want to tell the readers? Instead of worrying about perfect sentences, I jot down ideas, phrases, the points I think are most important and also things I think are cool or surprising. Once I have notes on paper, it's a lot easier for me to figure out how I want to tell the story."
That seems like good advice for when you have writer's block.
This is a neat looking website too:
http://www.webook.com/911writersblock
That seems like good advice for when you have writer's block.
This is a neat looking website too:
http://www.webook.com/911writersblock
SinbadEV wrote:Ugh, only 1171 words today... mostly due to "writers block"... finally pushed through after reading some Wikipedia articles for inspiration that almost served as de-motivators because they pointed out some glaring holes in the "major idea" that is central to my story... I'm less then 1/5th done so I'm currently planning on shifting focus away from my blunder so that the readers are less disappointed when I start explaining things away with the "A Wizard Did It" excuse...