I just won a caption contest over at Inkygirl.com! Her cartoon art is wonderful, and I was just tickled to see my name there also!
For those who haven’t checked out Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s website, treat yourself today. She is very writerly, and also produces a cute webcomic about writers called Will Write for Chocolate.
Where can you go? What can you do? Where can you get advice on writing? The story is burning a hole in your soul and you want to get it out, but how? Many of us need advice about writing; we need it because we are new at the process, or are afraid of it, or unsure if what we want to write is good enough or new enough.
Enter all the writing resources on the Internet. There are tons of them. Yes, I hope this blog is one of them! But as for myself, I also enjoy so many of the others, I thought I’d bring them to you in periodic posts.
The first one, of course, is I Should Be Writing. This is the first writing podcast I found, and boy was I glad I did.
Now, when I first logged onto this site, Mur Lafferty (the writer) called it “For wanna-be fiction writers by a wanna-be fiction writer.” But, that’s changed to “For wanna-be fiction writers by a writer who’s still learning.” That’s because in the meantime, Mur has published her works in hardcover, as well as via Podiobooks. That’s good news for all of us wanna-bes! And that’s what her message is to us: if she can do it with some creativity and honest hard work, then so can the rest of us.
Mur’s advice is down to earth and well-founded. Her struggles with developing a regular writing habit, with editing, with finding an agent, with self-publishing are all there and ready for us to listen to and benefit from. Be sure to check out her rules for writing. Also, Mur talks a lot about how the Internet has affected how writers need to approach their craft from a self-promotion perspective. She has interviewed many established writers, such as James Patrick Kelly, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, China Miéville, and Neil Gaiman! There are more, you just have to go and see!
And that’s my point: go, check out I Should Be Writing. Subscribe to it with whatever podcatcher makes you happy. Then come back and thank me. Go now!
Now, I’ve gotta go, because I should be cranking plot.
Well, it’s been a busy week. Princess and I celebrated our 11th anniversary yesterday, AND…I actually finished a rough outline for my short story! (and the crowd goes wild!)
Yes, once I did some work on a character write-up for the protagonist, the plot seemed to come into focus more. Imagine that, having some character development was actually good for the story!
Next week, I’ll begin writing the story. Or rather, rewriting the story. I have a couple pages of a first draft that are totally awful. The opening paragraph isn’t bad, but the rest…yuck! I think I’ve left the story on the back burner for a while now because of this first paragraph. It was good, and yet didn’t work at the same time. So, like the wise man once said, kill your darlings. I will probably rework the opening or scrap it all together.
Hopefully there will be more good news to tell by the end of the week. In the meantime, keep cranking!
In my attempt to get this short story written, I’ve already promised myself (and you, my faithful reader) an outline of the story. After long straining, I have one, of sorts. But, there just seemed to be something missing. The outline was boring in a way. I had no reason to believe that these things would happen to my main character.
That was when I realized I had been going at it the wrong way entirely. I usually start a story with a Neat Idea, if you know what I mean. For this particular story, the Neat Idea was a mining asteroid. I began to think about what kind of story I could make on an asteroid that was being mined for materials. Pretty soon I had a couple of characters and an attention-grabbing opening scene. And that was it. There was no story to go with it. Fizzle.
That’s why it’s been in my ToDo box for all these years. Years! When I put together my Project List, this story went onto it, and now I am finally giving it some attention.
Back to present. After knocking together my paltry outline, I realized that I knew next to nothing about the main character. Why was he on the asteroid? I started to write a character profile for him, fleshing out what had happened to him in the recent past, and what pushed him into such a desperate situation. I’m happy to say that I understand ol’ Les a lot better now. I can now work on the other three characters’ profiles, which should give me some more crucial insight into motivations and personality. Needless to say, only a fraction of this material will go into the story. But, it’s not often that a character springs fully formed from my forehead. I should spend more time getting to know these people, and then the story will come out.
This might just work for me for other Neat Ideas I have. If I can get the character motivations worked out, then maybe it will become more obvious how they fit into my Neat Idea and from that a plot just. might. happen.
