Last week, I wrote on conflict, and how its necessary to drive a story. Now, you can write amazing stories where conflict is resolved in the courtroom, in conversations and arguments, or even in the operating room. Sadly, I am not a lawyer, I'm a merely decent debator and I can write what I know about surgery on the back of a postage stamp. In most stories, however, especially in speculative and adventure fiction, many of not most conflicts are going to come down to one method of ... Read more »
Blog
Goals update
ONSET 2 has not changed. I've been focusing on Shadows of the Grey Tower for the last couple of weeks. Shadows of the Grey Tower is now at 22,853 words. Thats roughly 2500 and a bit last week and this week. Third project, Vigilante, has just been remembered and I haven't actually looked at it recently. The project there is taking one book with a too-large time lapse in the middle and turning it into a duology with a much smaller time lapse between books. ... Read more »
Conflict
Today's post is about two different kinds of conflict. One is the conflict between a writers goals and the realities of life (calling back to last weeks post), and the other is on conflict in your story. First, on goals. Like I said last week, goals are awesome. Set them. Small ones are good until you know you can meet them. I thought 500 words a day was great. I'm still going to try to hold to it, even though Ive failed miserable this last week *grin* Inevitably, life is going to ... Read more »
500 Words a Day – Goals and Discipline
So, of those of us who have tried to write a novel, who has reached a point where you are having problems finding the motivation to go on? Yes, you in the back. You in the front. You in the second row, with your hand down? You're lying. It can be hard to keep writing. It tends to come in dribs and drabs, a spurt of a few thousand words here, a good week there. Most of my completed books were written in four or five spurts of really good inspiration. There are writers, who will remain ... Read more »
Time, length and time
Shadows of the Grey Tower has been in Limbo since December, due to basically Writer's block on my part - I needed a way to transition between two points in time. Five years needed to pass, the main character needed to grow up, and while not much important occurs in those five years I had maintained a relatively continuous flow of narrative. So, in the end, five years of novel time consumed 1700 words of novel length and two months of writer time. It also resulted in my spending a good ... Read more »
Thoughts on Dialect
When I started Shadows of the Grey Tower, I decided to experiment with something I don't work with a lot - dialect. Most of my characters generally speak english, sometimes at varying vocabulary levels, sometimes mixed in with other languages, but I never really tried to create dialects before. For Grey Tower I had five distinct cultural groups that were going to play into the story to varying degrees, and only one of them was going to be speaking a truly different language. While I decided ... Read more »