The Craft of Writing 490


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Robspierre
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Robspierre »

You want to read about a real writer who gives good advice?
http://www.stevenpressfield.com/categor ... ednesdays/

Lately he has been posting about his working on a novel for the last three years. Yep. One novel, three years. According to hackboi, Pressfield is a failure.

What I like about Pressfield is that he attempts to find ways of showing that writing can be an art, that writing is not a paint by the numbers assembly line product.

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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Freakzilla »

Three years! He must be getting paid by the hour.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by A Thing of Eternity »

One thing I will say, is that I do have a hard time believing some of these authors who put out less than a book a year are working full time. Now, if they're making fine art, and that for some reason means they can only put in 10 hours a week, fine, as long as it kicks ass. But it is frustrating when waiting for a new book from an author, and you pretty much know that they're playing more golf than writing.

8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year... that's a plenty long time for a book in an existing series (backstory, worldbuilding, character development all done). If it's a new project, then sure, I could see it taking much longer.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Robspierre »

While Pressfield does play golf on a regular basis he did write, Legend of Bagger Vance after all, he works on more than one project at a time, including screen writing projects for studios. The main point is, he focus' on putting out a quality work over flooding the market with shit.

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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by A Thing of Eternity »

I'm not trying to give those authors a hard time, I just think some of them are full of shite when it comes to how many hours they say they work. Some work their asses off I'm sure.

Also, for some people, spreading out the hours might help them get better quality per hour, for some people it might be the opposite. It's hard to say "this much writing of such and such a quality happens per hour, so a book should take this many hours" and so forth.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Sev »

Keith's tip for the day: Know the difference between writing and editing.

Duh, that's easy Keith - one you do while walking, the other while watching a DVD :laughing:
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by TheDukester »

ZING!

Nice one. And a nice set-up from Keith, too. :lol:
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Kojiro »

Sev wrote:Keith's tip for the day: Know the difference between writing and editing.

Duh, that's easy Keith - one you do while walking, the other while watching a DVD :laughing:
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Hunchback Jack »

LOL. Nice one. That was brilliant.

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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by SandChigger »

Has someone Tweeted it at him? :lol:
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Robspierre »

Jeff Vandermeer posted this bit about catching the voice and getting the tone of a character right. He included a pic of his first page.


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I've bolded some highlights that I feel emphasize some of the problems with KJA's approach to writing.

After helping Ann deliver the Lambshead Cabinet antho, I’m back on track with my novel Borne.

In case anyone thinks writing a novel is a swift or easy thing to do, above find the marked-up first page of Borne above. I think it’s safe to post this since I’ve posted a version of this opening before.

Process-wise, I originally wrote the description of Mord in this post-apoc city with no real sense of the character’s point of view. I was more interested in getting down the description/details and making it a tactile, real experience. So I polished that until it was in shape for that initial, very simple purpose.

But, as usually happens, you get a deeper sense of character as you write, and have to go back. Somewhere around 10,000 words, the character clicked into focus and the next 10,000 words were different in style and voice. I let that run out to about a total of 35,000 words before coming back to the beginning, just so I’d have enough text to work with.

Now that I’m going back over the manuscript frag, that first 10,000 will change radically in voice as well as structure, and that will affect the next 25,000 because some stuff that occurs later in the novel will be placed closer to the beginning and the whole thing will eat itself and regenerate along different lines. Among the things that entails is fleshing out a character called the Magician, researching the history of traps, and reading Mike Davis’s Dead Cities.

The page above had gone through five drafts to get the description down, and now I’m ripping up the floorboards and constructing a different kind of room, so to speak. Some changes have to do with the narration, some with moving around information, some with setting. And in more than a few places this draft had way too many words better suited for an essay. I was much too in love with the descriptions, which would work perfectly well if this were a short-short. But it’s not. It’s the opening of a novel that is supporting, foreshadowing, and setting up many different things. In an odd way, it has to be simpler to become more complex. And, since I now know I’m writing a novel not a novella the opening can simultaneously convey less pure information since I have more space to add in what needs to be added in to properly contextualize.

A lot of this may seem bloodless in the way I’m describing process, but it’s actually an extremely personal, intimate, and emotional type of drafting, as my aim is to remain true to character and to the integrity of the events that should occur. There are also issues of balancing types of scenes, as the past is integral to the present of the story, but big lumps of past inserted incorrectly will, from the reader’s point of view, just slow down the story. So they must be correctly connected to the other scenes, including transitions that aren’t arbitrary or surface but hardwired and integral to the narrative.

All in all, just another day on the job, and immensely satisfying. But: requiring patience. Shortcuts and thinking something is done when it isn’t are killers to drawing out the full potential of a manuscript.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by merkin muffley »

But I heard that if you take the Superstars of Writing Seminar with KJA, they teach you had to produce polished prose without all that work. All that time he spends "writing drafts" he could be adding to his word count. KJA would say all that is counter-productive. :wink:
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Kojiro »

When I write, I have a tendency to tear apart the sentence and rewrite it as I'm writing it. Although a word processor tends to make such messy surgery easier.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Shaitan »

Robspierre wrote:Jeff Vandermeer posted this bit about catching the voice and getting the tone of a character right. He included a pic of his first page.
Precisely the sort of thing that I think shows real commitment to the quality of writing and not just the quantity (e.g. = $) on the part of the author.

God help me, I've spent the past ten years ripping up probably upwards of a hundred drafts of the opening scenes to the pilot for my mixed-media series. And almost as many outlines that are quite distinct from one another. I look back on my early work and can't imagine the wreck I would have made of what I'd like to think are some pretty good basic ideas.

Some, who shall remain clueless, seem content with any old ideas that will sell books, or tv manuscripts, or apparently, even superhero comics. Then, they write out some fairly obvious, uninspired story for the themes to play out. One draft and then a single round of "editing" (basically looking for obvious typos or other flaws that can't be ignored even when you don't give a shit about what you're looking at). Bang, done.

The only thing that really confuses me about that type of writer is that they even bother to pretend that they care whether anyone likes it....if they "liked" it enough to shell out some cash, that's all that seems to matter. So why pretend that quality or inspiring people or sharing amazing realms of possibility with those whose lives will be made better by having experienced them, matters worth a damn to them? That's the part I'll never understand. I guess it goes with the territory.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Shaitan »

Kojiro wrote:When I write, I have a tendency to tear apart the sentence and rewrite it as I'm writing it. Although a word processor tends to make such messy surgery easier.
See, that's the surest sign that you actually give a shit, instead of merely doing a job.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Kojiro »

It doesn't stay until I like it.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by A Thing of Eternity »

That method can really bog you down too though. Some people I'm sure it works for, but almost all writing teachers and professional authors I've heard on the subject advocate just getting the story out onto the paper, regardless of how nice each sentence sounds, then going back and revising (and this method has a lot of variety in it, maybe you write a page then edit it, or finish the whole book then edit it, lots of options).

I float back and forth. Sometimes I'm in a poetic mood so I sit there and craft nice sounding prose (or attempt to), but when writing scenes that I haven't plotted out in great detail, just rambling on and on and then going back and slicing and dicing it is much more productive.

As long as a writer can manage a pace they're happy with, and neither gets caught up in over-editing a rough draft, nor forgets to go back for further revisions, it's all good. Whatever is written is going to need lots of revision on way or another.

I often look at writing a rough draft as more of a brainstorming excercise than anything else. Sure, I know the bulk of what'll happen in a chapter, but it's not until I start writing all the details that I find most of the faults and get most of my ideas to improve it. I don''t worry about writing quality much at all at this stage, because for me it's not a case of "I'll go back and edit it lots later" - it's a case of "this is brainstorming, and will literally be discarded wholesale, then I'll write the real rough draft and put that through multiple edits".
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Kojiro »

Well, I have yet to get bogged down. I do manage to finish, I just don't like settling for less.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by A Thing of Eternity »

Kojiro wrote:Well, I have yet to get bogged down. I do manage to finish, I just don't like settling for less.
If it works for you it's a good system. I think many people end up with edit-itis (as one teacher called it), spending so much time that they lost their train of thought, or were overwhelmed with the prospect of finishing at that pace. Neither way is "settling for less" though, a writer is only settling for less or more when it comes to the final draft. How each writer gets there is irrelivent.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Hunchback Jack »

The article from Vandermeer was really interesting - he's editing the book as a whole though successive drafts, not just editing the language (which is important, too). That's *real* editing, not what KJA does. I doubt whether KJA has ever done any major editing after the first draft.

If I ever get a chance to ask him something, it will probably be something about whether he does this kind of editing - abandoning a plot thread that isn't working, changing the order of events for dramatic effect, introducing a character earlier than originally intended, just to name a few examples.

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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by A Thing of Eternity »

That's one thing I'm still trying to learn to do properly, just get on with writing without too much second guessing of the plot (because by this point there's extensive outlining that's been done), but also remain totally flexible. If in the course of writing it or even the later stages of editing I discover things that don't add up, just seem awkward or not believable/natural etc, then I'm always ready to throw it out. Sometimes if it's really important I'll try to hammer the story to fit it, but if it doesn't work it doesn't work. I could see changing as big a detail as which side everyone is on right up in the editing phase.

KJA on the other hand is just looking for spelling mistakes.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by TheDukester »

A Thing of Eternity wrote:KJA on the other hand is just looking for spelling mistakes.
Remember, that sort of thing makes Becky feel important, too. She's the one who is always doing the "correx" and "line edits."

I have a feeling this is huge in keeping the unholy union between Keith and Becky going, as it makes her feel like she's part of the team. I remain totally unconvinced that she's ever really written a single word of fiction in her lifetime.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Sev »

Have to agree with The Dukester here...

Meanwhile Keith has blogged his final two tips -ZZZZZZzzzzzz

#10 Be inspired. Apparently to be a better writer, he's always seeking out new experiences, learning new skills, going to new places. This is all very well, Keith, but it doesn't really help...IF YOU CAN'T FUCKING WRITE IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!

#10 Know when to stop. Laughable coming from a man currently working on his 11th McDune and prepping his 8th, 9th, and 10th Saggy Sun...
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Mandy »

His idea of knowing when to stop probably means knowing when to stop editing and just send the crap off to the publisher.
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Re: The Craft of Writing (Work in Progress)

Post by Freakzilla »

ZING! :lol:
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