It’s amazing how much of my time is spent writing, editing, or teaching writing these days. (Now if I could just earn a little money from it…)
It’s equally amazing how many of my clients and students are completely surprised at how many silly mistakes I catch when I’m editing.
If you intend to share what you’ve written, it is imperative that you proofread it. Check for flow, punctuation, spelling. Does it make sense? Does it read well? If you aren’t sure, have someone else read it! An extra pair of eyes can show you things in your writing that you may not have noticed before, both good and bad.
Remember, when you publish something, it’s out there. Sure, you can edit it, but it’ll save you time and face if you’re careful in your pre-publishing checks!
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:02 AM EDT
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I’d really like to share this with the NaNoWriMo crew, but I think most people would benefit from reading it.
The hardest part about writing is that it’s so tedious that most people don’t want to give it much effort. Wait, that’s unfair. It’s not that writing is tedious. It’s that people want to write the perfect piece on the first shot…
…except it doesn’t work that way.
The first draft exists to capture all of your thoughts, badly worded, poorly punctuated, painfully phrased. That’s its job. It lives to capture utter crap. Without the poorly executed first draft, the polished piece cannot exist. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t have a benchmark to compare it to, to pull that feeling of genuine accomplishment from.
Love your first draft. Respect the sanctity of the first draft. Don’t worry about the quality; focus first on the quantity.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 8:21 AM EDT
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A friend was kind enough to give me Eats, Shoots and Leaves for my birthday this year, and I finally found time to read it!
If you have not read this little gem yet, you must. No, seriously! Go out right this minute and obtain a copy (or if you’re more patient, click on the link above and order it). It is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year. Not bad given that it’s a book on punctuation (complete with its own punctuation repair kit)!
She not only discusses how to properly use various punctuation marks, but also includes examples of common misusage with an explanation of the problem. She also includes a history of the punctuation marks. Did you know punctuation marks originally were to instruct actors on how to read lines? It wasn’t until society became more literate that they became important to the general populace. It’s another connection between writing and acting!
It’s informative. It’s charming. It’s worth the read, and you’ll come away smarter!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:21 AM EDT
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Over the weekend, I sat down to tackle a script for a fan girl. I’m used to doing a lot of work when I edit her pieces, but this times was a bit much.
I spent quite a bit of my childhood involved in drama. I think I was seven when I saw my first script. I’ll never forget being handed my very first side when I was sixteen. Last summer, I spent a good chunk of time researching the writing of scripts when I was starting to tackle my graphic novel script.
It never actually occurred to me until Friday that it was possible for someone to take on writing a script without ever having seen one. Even more disturbing, there really don’t seem to be any good articles discussing how to write a script. Part of this is because script styling really depends on what you’re writing and where you’re writing. Despite the styling issues, I think there could still be some sort of article discussing the differences between writing narrative prose and writing a script. It would certainly have made my life easier this weekend.
From my experience (and those of you with scriptwriting experience are invited to correct me), the script itself is basically made of three parts- the dialogue, the stage direction, and the setting (often times presented with stage directions). The dialogue is fairly obvious. It’s what being said. The trick is that the dialogue is also pretty much the only way to convey information about characters and the plot. We really don’t give the stage direction much thought when they’re done correctly, because they are directions to the author. Unless we have intimate knowledge of the script (or the setting, in the case of many sci-fi shows), we have no idea when an action has happened out of place. The same is true for the setting.
To recap more simply, the dialogue is what is said by the characters. It’s public knowledge. The stage directions are what creates the scene, the atmosphere around the characters. They are not public knowledge. If you want your audience/readers to know something, it needs to be worked into the dialogue.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 7:50 AM EDT
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I blog. I maintain several blogs actually. I started blogging a few years ago becasue I wanted to share links I found interesting and to share my knowledge and discoveries of various topics.
Today, I blog to help diseminate information. I’m a teacher, sharing knowledge is in my blood. If someone asks to add my blog to a blogroll, or asks to feed my content to another site designed to share information, then I’m willing to oblige. If someone links to a post on my blog or feeds it somewhere without my consent, as long as the site in question is out to share information, too, then I’m perfectly fine with it.
This is why I publish under the non-commercial, attribution, share-alike Creative Commons license. Hoarding information benefits no one, and it’s not why I blog.
There are many bloggers who feel the same way I do. I have the honor of contributing to blogs with them. I enjoy sharing the blogosphere with them because we blog with the same mindset.
However, there are bloggers that I have seriously considered throwing off my blogrolls and removing from my aggregator becasue they don’t blog to share knowledge. In fact, I’m not sure what their motivation is, and I have finally decided that i don’t want to know because it would only cause me to lose respect for them.
These are the bloggers who blow a gasket when someone links to them without their prior consent. These are the bloggers who respond to a trackback with a rude comment. These are the bloggers who try to coerce other bloggers to make it difficult for their information to be copied.
To a certain extent, I can understand wanting to protect intellectual property, which is why attribution is part of the CC license on my blogs. I understand that there are some very unscrupulous people out there who try to use others’ content for personal gain without ever crediting their source. (I’ve actually had to contact such a site myself to get my content removed from their site.) But are there seriously so many jerks out there that those who have dubbed themselves blogging elite feel they need to hoard their knowledge? To be condescending to those who link or credit in good faith?
I think an interesting game is playing out through the blogosphere right now as those of us who share openly and those of us who blog for other reasons try to come to some sort of compromise.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:34 AM EDT
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A recent conversation with another writer on FanFiction.net prompted me to do a little research into what length constitutes various classification of work.
Let’s start with the topic of the conversations, the drabble (a term that seem to appear mostly in fan fiction). In my research during the conversation, I uncovered two definitions for “drabble”:
A fan fiction that is self contained and is no more than 100 hundred words. A half drabble is a fan fiction of 50 words and a double drabble is a fan fiction of 200 words. OR A drabble can sometimes mean a very short fic that is not exactly 100 words but extremely short, for instance, it is not incorrect to call a 500 word fan fiction a drabble.
expressions.populli.net/dictionary.html
A Drabble is an extremely short work of fiction with exactly one hundred words (or sometimes 100 words maximum depending on the exercise or contest). The purpose of the drabble is to teach brevity and test author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drabble
Then there is the class I’m trying to learn currently, the flash fiction:
fiction under 500 words
www.writefromhome.com/writingtradearticles/197.htm
Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction
Then there is the class that gave me no end of headaches over the weekend, the short story:
short story, brief prose fiction. The term covers a wide variety of narratives—from stories in which the main focus is on the course of events to studies of character, from the “short short” story to extended and complex narratives such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Most often the short story is restricted in character and situation and is concerned with creating a single, dynamic effect. Its length usually falls between 2,000 and 10,000 words. (This came from an answers.com article that is full of thoughts on the short story.)
The novel, playground of NaNoWriMo, is still the bane of my writing existence, but I feel confident I could turn out a half-hearted novella:
The novella is a prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. There is no standard definition of length, but since rules of thumb are sometimes handy, we might say that the short story ends at about 20,000 words, while the novel begins at about 50,000. Thus, the novella is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words. www.virtualsalt.com/litterms.htm
Though I can only find referential evidence to support this, it would appear that a novel is generally considered to have a minimum of 50,000 words. If anyone has good, clear evidence to support this, please contact me.
Posted by Ceara as Resources at 8:20 AM EDT
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That’s one of my more misleading titles. I’m really thinking about two separate, but much-espoused “rules”. The first, and older, is that publishers absolutely will not publish anything that has already be seen by people. There are paranoia freaks all throughout various writing communities that will scream this at you at the top of their lungs.
Of course, these are the same people who are convinced the word counting algorithm for NaNoWriMo is out to steal their superior manuscript (because are perfection), and who believe editors have little better to with their time than steal the manuscripts of new writers. But nonetheless, the idea is out there that publishers won’t publish if the material has been previously seen or published online.
The second one isn’t so much a rule, but it’s being recommended by so many people who have successfully published a book that it will likely become one by the end of the year. These new authors advocate blogging your book. By blogging the book, you get feedback from your intended audience. You learn who your potential audience will be, which can help you determine if you’re reaching your intended audience. It also is rumored to help you catch the attention of publishers.
I’m not sure how valid that last one is (I suspect it’s about as likely as a publisher noticing you becasue you wrote a 100,000 word novel in five days during NaNoWriMo.), but it’s certainly starting to show up in more than one place.
I can understand both positions. I wonder if the truth is somewhere in between the two since times and practices are changing.
I’m now working on two books I’d like to see published, and I’m experimenting with posting bits of them as articles online. We’ll see what comes of that. It’ll be an interesting exercise!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:31 AM EDT
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I’ve been rediscovering the joys of jeans with pockets over the past couple of weeks. One of my pockets is dedicated to carrying a small composition book dedicated to all of my writing tasks. So far it’s been a happy relationship, and I’m forgetting less of what I want to post about when I get home from work. I’m even getting the occasional flash fic written over the course of a week.
During the BlogHer conference, many posts relayed the goings on and conversations out to those of us unable to go. My favorite was one from Amy Gahran sharing tips for keeping a good blogging notebook that she and a handful of other bloggers came up with:
- Size matters: It has to be small enough to fit easily into a compartment of your purse, or your pocket, so that it’s not a struggle to yank it out in an instant.
- Stiff cover: this can either be the notebook’s binding, or a snazzy cover like Lisa uses to carry a simple spiral notebook. This not only protects the pages, but keeps you from searching for a usable writing surface.
- Make it a habit. Get used to pulling out the notebook every time you think of something you want to remember. Pretty soon you won’t have to think about it, and you’ll start to feel naked (not in a good way) when you don’t have your notebook handy. I think of this as “Harriet the Spy Syndrome.”
- Capture choice phrases. Jen said that often she’ll be on the go, doing something, and a perfect sentence, metaphor, or point will occur to her. She’ll scribble down the wording, not just the concept. Same for good quotes — capture the phrasing.
- Carry multiple pens. Your notebook won’t do you a bit of good if your pen dies. Since I fly from mile-high Colorado to many sea-level destinations, I’m forever killing ballpoint pens. They can’t handle the pressure change. I’m going to switch to exclusively carrying felt tips.
I carry a mechanical pencil because I’ve been a pencil girl most of my life, but I absolutely adore these tips. Having a notebook on hand is one of the smartest decisions you can make.
Posted by Ceara as Resources at 8:20 AM EDT
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Recent reading has told me that manuscripts should go through the following cycle: write the entire piece, throw it in a drawer for a bit, edit. Working on my own pieces, I’m thinking that’s a great idea…so long as you don’t leave it in the drawer too long.
When you wait, you distance yourself from the piece. When you come back, it’s like reading the piece with fresh eyes. You’re reading with a different mindset than you wrote, allowing you to be less emotional, and perhaps even a bit more objective about the piece as you work through the editing. That objectivity makes it much simpler to remove the bits you might have felt sentimental about right after writing.
Of course, as I’m learning the hard way, you really shouldn’t let it sit around too long, or you mind find yourself so disconnected from it that you don’t know how to best approach it.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 7:42 AM EDT
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