RobsWriting

For once in my life, I am mostly lost for words. As a writer, that doesn't come easily to me. Here in the U.K., my friends and I have been deeply shocked and saddened by the tragic event in Orlando and I wish you all much comfort at this difficult time. We have a great community here at G.A., one which I am proud to be a part of. I know that we will help each other through this. Wishing you all love and peace. My thoughts are with you all. Rob.

The sun streamed in through the window of the bedroom as the young-sh man with shoulder length brown hair which, from the look of it, had been washed earlier in the day. It stuck out like the end of a dandelion as he picked up the cold, crisp, refreshing pint of beer that sat on the edge of the desk. It was light brown, honey-ish, and gave off a smell which reminded him of his father's old brewery. The brewery was also sometimes known as the living room for his father had been into home brew since he was in his twenties. A memory of his mother, her face red and voice screeching, rose unbidden into his mind as he reached towards the old, battered keyboard on his desk and replied, "Yes."

I've never yet managed to overcome this. When my muse starts knocking at the door, I have to let it in and once it leaves again I often don't write at all for a few weeks. I prefer to keep in touch with it with the occasional virtual e-mail or half hour on the metphorical phone; it allows me to manage it. But when it comes knocking on my door, boy am I tired afterwards.

Ontario, Canada

Boom

I used to put them into an archive folder and occasionally peruse them when I needed inspiration, but then found over the years that all they were actually doing for me was taking up hard drive space. These days I keep them for a few years and then delete them. I have also become a fan of hitting the delete key immediately if I feel that the story is not and never will go anywhere. At the moment I seem to be in the habit of starting but not ending stories, so those which I keep coming back to I keep, those that I don't touch in a year or more I get rid of. It seems to work well for me at the moment.

I always wait until it is completed and I am happy with it post editing before publishing. For me, the hazard is being able to finish a story, so I never know in advance whether a novel will be seen through to completion until it is actually completed. Sometimes I will decide halfway through that it isn't working and bin it (recycling the bits that worked in future stories if I can fit them in naturally). I also hate to get halfway through a good story and find that the rest of it is missing with no guarantee that it will ever be posted, so that's another reason why I wait for the whole story to be finished and edited before publishing it. As a general thought, sometimes a beta reader is good in this respect as it can *feel* like you're publishing something to be read by another whilst at the same time getting valuable feedback.

Whilst I was writing "Missing" which is currently in its second edit, I had a horrible time with writer's block. At one point it stopped me for almost six months and certainly has delayed getting the novel finished. It continues to plague me in the editing, if I'm honest, but the only way I am able to get through it at the moment is to write/edit a little at a time and sooner or later the novel will be finished. For me, it's a case of pushing on through it as best I can a little at a time. If I contrast it to the novel I am writing at the moment, there is no contest. This new one seems to be flying down onto the page as if there's no tomorrow. It'll probably get rehashed in its own edit, but for now it's being remarkably well behaved. (Long may it continue).

Geriatric

I often have the same problem, considering that a large part of my character cast is male and often to be found in the same place. I try to do as best I can with, "Said Julian", "Miles, have you..." but it is usually a problem I worry about straightening out in the edit, particularly in the scene descriptions when none of them are talking at that moment. I suppose I use what I call the "baton approach". In other words, is the action happening to the last person who I mentioned by name? If yes, I tend to stick with "he", "his," , etc. If not, I will "pass the baton on" to the next character by adding the name of the relevant character and then repeat. Sometimes it doesn't work, but more often than not it does.

I often find that my writing quality goes down when I start writing difficult scenes, I lose faith in my story or when I am just not really in the mood for writing. I have now finished the draft of my second novel and when I looked back on it I found myself thinking that my writing was shocking and it put me off of starting to edit it for about six months. When I did finally start (back in February of this year), I have found that have been dipping in and out of it. Now that my first structural edit is about 4/5 done, I am pleased to say that the writing quality has improved. In my experience, a lot of the quality of the final version lies in the edits. That's where I can tinker with the writing and plot until the quality is what I want it to be. I also have scrapped more short stories/novels than I have finished and published and I think that I'm getting better as the years go on at working out which ideas are a go and which I should not worry about writing up.

Ergonomic

lead

It's unusual for me to put a book down once I have started it, however it's not unheard of. For me, there are certain authors (Shakespeare, Tokein and Gregory Maguire) who I have to be in the mood for reading. If I'm not, they will only hold my interest for a few pages before I give up. On the other hand, when I am in the right mood, these same authors are compulsive page turners for me (particularly Maguire's books "Wicked" and "Son of a Witch", heavy-going though they are). In terms of classics, I tend to find too much a language barrier is off-putting as it means having to mentally translate into modern English, which is something I'm not always in the mood to do. It's why I love books like Bram Stoker's Dracula. In that story the writing still feels very fresh, vivid and modern, even though the story is over a hundred years old now. Ditto for Jeckyll and Hyde (apologies if I haven't spelled that correctly). On the other hand, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein I find completely impenetrable, and I gave up on both The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables after a few chapters of trying. Another example is my love of Dante's Inferno, but my impossible relationship with Homer's Ulysses and Odyssey (again, apologies if I have spelled the names incorrectly). I also fail if suspension of disbelief hasn't happened within a few chapters. That was my major problem with the Twilight novels. I found it too difficult to accept what was being said on the page. On the other hand, The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Vanished was a brilliantly entertaining read, but I have not yet finished it as I can't focus on it for too long. Yet To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favourite books of all time. The plot could be considered dull, but the world is brought to life in such vivid detail that I have been Scout Finch in my mind more times than I care to count.

Quite often, I find myself mooching through this forum. Guess what I am meant to be doing with my story at the moment. On the other hand, reading here lets me keep in touch and get advice and also warms up my fingers ahead of tackling my story.

I always have problems with my characters and swearing in the first draft. Some of those who, on here, only cuss occasionally (or not at all) start off with a lot of verbal garbage which I then have to weed out in the edits. Frankly, I don't blame them for cussing liberally in the first draft. I think I would too if I were them and was faced for the first time with the latest author-induced catastrophe-in-the-making. On the other hand, I will leave cussing in in two situations: 1) when I intend to shock the audience (it works best for me when the character does not normally swear at all) or 2) when no other reaction seems appropriate. I am the first to admit that I will allow them to use words which, in British English, would not generally be regarded as cussing here, but may provoke strong reactions elsewhere (notably, it seems, in America). These tend to be more the character's verbal tics than specific reactions though.

I think for me, it was Professor Dieter Bracker in "The Shadow in the Night". He was not a nice person and was a real challenge to write for. As a person, if I met him, I would dislike him intensely. From a writing perspective, I had to keep re-visiting him and making him ever-nastier during each edit as I didn't feel that he was acting according to his reputation. On the other hand, I loved having him as the principal villain. He was, at least, more nasty than my lead character, Milo Underwood, who has his moments, but is nowhere near as bad. On the other hand, if I didn't really dislike my principal villain, it tends to tell me that they're just not villainous enough yet. Liam is also a character who is apt to drive me nuts sometimes with his infant-like fascination with the question "why?". I love having him in the story as he's the person through whom the magical world is explained, analysed, criticised and challenged, but sometimes it gives me a headache that he won't take facts at face value. Come to that, I seem to recall my university lecturers saying the same of me.

Hi Phoenix. I used to find that I could happily write and publish at the same time as long as I remained about two chapters ahead of my readers. It also used to give me the incentive to write as I really don't like disappointing my readers with long gaps or holding them on cliff-hangers for too long. However, since I wrote "The Shadow in the Night" which, as you know, has quite an intricate plot line, I didn't dare put it out before it was completely finished. Partly it was because of the complex plot line, partly it was because, if something didn't work in a later part of the novel and, as a result, an earlier chapter needed to be changed, were it published I could not do that without having my readers re-read the section so that they weren't confused near the end. Nobody particularly wants to do that. So I find that completing the novel, giving it "drawer time" (the time it spends languishing at the back of one of my desk drawers) and running at least three edits on it, plus my publication "read ahead" (while it's being published here, a final edit to catch anything the previous three didn't in which I am usually at least three chapters ahead of the published one) gives me much more flexibility and, I think, a better experience for the reader and myself.

I am often in the situation of 16 hour days that you describe, although thankfully, not all the time. The only way I have ever been able to manage this and my writing is with very good balancing and planning. Here are a couple of guidelines I have used that might be useful for others in this position: 1) I know it sounds obvious, but I have found that I have to dedicate time to my writing, the same as I have to with anything else. When I am doing 16 hours/day, this means working on the writing at the weekend. It helps me to consider my writing as my therapy, my escape from real life, my fun and my break all rolled into one. It doesn't feel like work because I have never allowed it to become "my job". That makes it all the more appealing to sit down and get on with it. 2) Be realistic about how much time I have to spend on it. I don't mind sitting down with it for only an hour or even less as long as something - anything - gets done. Sooner or later all those half hours and hours turn into a novel. 3) Be open to the idea that writing does not always have to involve... well... writing. There are other activities to be progressed which I have a tendency of calling "activities allied to writing". In my case, these include sitting down with a good book, travelling (always good for inspiration), keeping up with friends (foibles plucked from the grapevine, dressed up, anonymised and re-hashed often make good story material), going to the theatre (you never quite know, especially with "am-dram" (amateur dramatics), when the muse will strike) and other things that I loosely call "research". 4) Don't forget the re-read. If I am just too tired to write, I will often just re-read a few chapters. Not only do I get to enjoy what I have written, I can also sanity-check it as well. 5) Don't forget to give yourself a break. Writing is great, but can become stale if you sit there and do it all day every day (or even just every day, especially if you're tired). I will often put a novel down for weeks to refresh myself. With short stories I will put them down for a few days. This is just my approach to this problem. Feel free to use/modify/discard whatever you fancy. Best wishes, Rob.

The last time I checked my typing speed (mistakes, corrections and all), I came out at around 45wpm without bothering to look at the keyboard and about 55wpm with downward glances. To be honest, on a typical day I probably cover about 2000-ish words, once distractions, research (which also includes browsing Amazon.com *cough*) and text messages/e-mails have been dealt with. On a good day, I have managed about 3000-ish. On a really excellent day, I manage about 6000 and if I am absolutely "in the zone" I have been known to rarely turn out 10,000 (of which about half gets canned in the first edit). I think it also helps that my first draft mantra tends to be, "Don't get it perfect, get it down on paper. You can agonise about the details as much as you like during your three or four edits."

This has happened to me more times than I often care to think about. Over the years I have worked out the following way to deal with it: 1) Curse under my breath. (Not P.C., but it helps me). 2) Work backwards to work out where it all went wrong. (Usually to the last idea I had doubts about). 3) Cut everything after that point and paste it into a new Word document. (I tend not to delete ideas, even bad ones. You never know when they might come in handy for another story where they will fit better). 4) Put the new file into my "Bad Ideas Graveyard" folder. 5) Have a nice cup of freshly-brewed coffee. (My boyfriend is convinced that the definition of the word "Writer" is "A human device for turning coffee and cigarettes into stories.") 6) Re-write. Either a new scene and take the story the story in a fresh direction, or re-write the problem scene in a way that is no longer problematic. I tend to find that this works for me, although you'll find your own way of dealing with it in time. I hope it gives you some ideas though. PS: You could also try writing an outline of the story to map out the rest of the plot. I occasionally do this, although it tends to get departed from within a few chapters (actually within one, if I'm totally honest). It can be very useful for getting yourself out of a problematic scene.

I think it's not only down to the style of the writer, but also down to the trends in the type of fiction you are writing. For me writing in the fantasy genre, epic tomes have been created which go into huge detail (The Lord of the Rings, for example, and the Magician series) and have huge, sweeping plots. On the other hand, some of them (Harry Potter, for example) cover a lot of ground with more in the way of prompts than description. For me, Tolkein is hard going because he tends to explain in detail every facet of Middle Earth. Sometimes I do wish he would get on with telling what is a brilliant story instead of describing the underpass out of the Shire that Frodo et al have to walk through to leave. Similarly, after describing the forest on the other side I find myself wishing we could hurry up and walk into it as I want to find out what's inside. I don't think there's any right answer. The line I tend to take in my own writing is that I will describe something in detail if it is relevant to the storyline or to help the reader to understand the scope of what I'm describing, otherwise I will tend to keep it brief. For example, I had to discuss WizRail in a fair amount of detail so that it is understood that it's a worldwide magical rail system and very different to our own non-magical systems, but I left descriptions of London to a minimum as it's a fairly well understood place already. In my second novel, which I'm writing at the moment, it is very "place-based" as it revolves around a modern-day quest which takes my characters all over the UK and Ireland. Again, London I have left to a minimal description, but Gweedore (a tiny village in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland) I have described as it is probably not as well known outside Ireland. Basically I think you have to write the level of detail which is appropriate to your story.

It's a great feeling, isn't it? The other part of the review system which I love is that it connects me to my readers. If they have a question about the story which is not answered within the story (some of them, I didn't even think of), I can use it to answer them. I only ever include about 20% of what went through my mind whilst writing in the story anyway. Sometimes it's just not relevant to the plot or won't fit, but I need to understand it to write the story convincingly. So often I know the answer already and can share the extra bit of information. The other nice thing about being the writer of your own canon is that you can invent answers where you didn't think of something beforehand, which I find enriches the canon world you write for considerably. I love working with reviews.

Ouch! That review must have hurt. I've been on the end of some nasty ones elsewhere before now, but never one that was so analytical as the one you have received is. My usual strategy is to put away reviews like this, ignore them for a while and then, when I've chilled a bit, come back and treat it as if I were editing my own work. I look at the points raised, reflect on them, compare them to the sections of the story they are complaining about and then if they do not justifiably apply to the story, I invoke the writer's privilege of overruling them in my head. If they are justified, I will also swallow them and re-jig the story to remove or re-frame the offending section. I am also not above replying to reviews with an explanation of why the story is the way that it is, what my intentions were and politely pointing out that perhaps my story is not one which may be suited to their tastes. If I have already put up great big warning signs for homophobia in the plotline, a bully in the story, etc, I will also point these out gently but firmly. Not everybody likes what I write. Not everybody is going to give me good reviews. There are some times when I have thought I have got a story to a point where it is watertight and then, only after posting it, does somebody point out a niggle in the plotline which I simply did not see after three edits and several re-writes as I am too close to my work. This is why I like my moderators. They can provide me with a fresh eye so that hopefully the problems are ironed out before the story goes public. For your review, I would suggest turning it into your own positive checklist. If I had been dealing with your review as if it were mine, I would probably work through some logic like the following: Jock and nerds present? Check. Good, they're meant to be there so that's not a problem. Rampant homophobia? Does it fit in with the plot? Is it aimed at the characters and not the reader? Yes. Good. Check. Bullies? Check same details as for homophobia. If it checks out and is justified in the plot, check it off as a good job well done. Snarky inner dialogue? Well, I know of several gay people in real life who can be very snarky. Does it fit the character? Does it serve a purpose? Yes? Leave it in. Teenagers who are essentially dimwits? Which of us have not done something stupid in our teens? I know I did. Occasionally we even manage to perform them in adulthood. As long as it fits the character, leave it in. If we didn't have tropes, we'd have to invent characters right from the very beginning every time. (Julie Andrews may once have sung about this being a very good place to start, but personally I would much rather start with a trope and build up from there. It's kind of like buying flat-pack furniture and assembling it rather than cutting down your own tree, designing the piece, sawing, whittling and honing it to what you want it to be every single time. Or, at least, that's the way I think of it, anyway. In reality, I tend to have very finely-whittled furniture regardless of its origin. I think it may be a genetic affliction of mine. Oh well...) At the end of the day, not everybody is going to like what you've written. There are too many different people out there for that to ever happen. I would personally only start to worry if the vast majority of my reviews came back to me in the negative. As long as its only a handful which object, you probably don't need to worry about it. Chin up and carry on. If you love writing and what you do, keep on doing it. After all, as Walt Disney once said, "We are not trying to entertain the critics. I will take my chances with the general public." Or course, the other way you could view this is that your writing is good enough to make people form a strong opinion, which in itself is a great achievement.

I've never been able to shake the feeling that it's a good guide to follow, but that's all it is: a guide, not a rule. In my stories, if I had to visit every location that the characters do in order to write about what I know, I would never get any writing done. What I do perform is an awful lot of research. The Internet is a very powerful tool for finding out information and is one which I draw on regularly. I also exploit Google Earth to the limits when it comes to digitally stepping into places and taking a virtual tour. Occasionally I will also do some "field research" and actually go to the places, particularly if I am struggling with a scene. I think what helps me is to remember that you are only creating the illusion of a place, not building the place for real, so you can be afforded some artistic licence.