Day: May 22, 2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-Two

Context: Solid writing sessions this morning, charging towards the end of a specific scene. Stuck now, ’cause there’s a multiplicity of things that could come next, and they all seem to be leading me off into an expansive approach to the narrative that’ll lead me into writing a novel. I am not writing a novel. Which is why I spent 51 minutes messing around with the opening part of the next scene and wrote pretty much nothing; I’m about to engage the Kress protocol and go back into the previous scene to chance something and see how if affects the narrative. I need to be bounced off into a new direction. Session 22.1 (7:56 AM – 8:24 AM) Word Count: 610 Session 22.2 (8:36 AM – 8:50 AM) Word Count: 385 Session 22.3 (8:03 PM – 8:54 PM) Word Count: 191 Total Daily Writing Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Daily Word Count Total: 1,186 Total Manuscript Writing Time: 22 hours, 4 minutes

PeterMBall 22/05/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Why King’s “On Writing” Can be Dangerous to New Writers

So my boss caught up on the Novella Dairy yesterday and commented on the fact that I was crapping on Stephen King in my post asking for feedback about the future of the project. “I crapped on Stephen King?” I said. “I don’t remember doing that.” “Sure you do,” she said. “You basically quote him and then talk about all the ways he’s wrong. You’re all It’s all very well for Stephen King to write about sitting in the chair until he hits 2K a day, but some of us have day jobs…” I’ll admit, at this point, that my record of this conversation probably isn’t 100% accurate, but it captures the gist. It refers back to an ongoing conversation we’ve had at work, where I’ve brought up the fact that I think On Writing has the potential to be a dangerous resource for some new writers and it bothers me that it’s so…omnipresent, I guess, as a source of advice.

PeterMBall 22/05/2013