Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

Writing Advice: David Farland on Tone

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Sometimes you don’t have the language you need to adequately discuss a story’s flaws.

For instance, I used to dread the “pretty good” stories when I was a creative writing tutor. And by pretty good, I mean the stories that were technically pretty solid: they didn’t have any major flaws in characterisation or plot, nor did they have any egregious errors in language or formatting. You’d read them and immediately know that something was missing, but there wasn’t anything mechanical to point at and explain “you need to fix this.”

One of my colleagues used to refer to them as BP stories. Shorthand for “Make this Better, Please,” which appeared all to frequently in their notes.

I’m sure it used to frustrate the students who got that response. Hell, I know it frustrated me – one of my lecturers wrote the comment good, but not great on one of my poems in undergraduate, and I spent the next two weeks bugging the hell out of them trying to figure out what I needed to do in order to improve my mark.

Make it better, please is horribly uninformative to an aspiring writer, but at the time we didn’t have the terminology for articulating what was going wrong with the stories in a meaningful way.

This is one of the reasons I love the internet – given time and enough people posting about the writing process, eventually you’re going to get the language you need. Today, I’ve got some particular love for David Farland, largely thanks to his recent post about tone in short fiction, which immediately hones in on the issue those pretty good stories used to have and talks about what’s really going wrong.

One of the most common problems that I see with unpublished stories deals with “tone.” I reject about 85% of the stories that I see in my first pass, and with most of those, tone is an issue. The tonal problems come in several types…

Are You Tone Deaf, David Farland

A useful tool to add to your writing toolbox, and well worth reading. If you’re looking for follow-up, his book on Drawing Upon the Power of Resonance in Writing is also a pretty killer discussion of something most how-to-write books don’t articulate particularly well.

The End of the Streak

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I broke my writing streak last week. After 171 consecutive days of writing – including a five days where I held onto to streak by the skin of my teeth while on Holidays at the Adelaide Fringe Festival – it was eventually killed off on the final day of holidays by Cyclone Marcia, writing a two-day workshop, and the uncertainty of knowing whether or not we’d be able to fly home.

Of course, February was a pretty rough month for writing even before I lost my thread. February always is. I’m going to finish the month well short of the 50k I need to reach my 600k goal for the year, but I’ve planned for that, and March will be a month of catching up and getting stuff finished.

So what did 171 days of writing get me? More than I thought. Since I started tracking the writing streak, I’ve achieved the following:

  • Finished Crusade (aka Flotsam #3), a novella of about 40k words in first draft.
  • Finished Valiant, the first novella in a werewolf PI series, at about 32k
  • Put together about 20,000 words of short fiction drafts I need to go back and finish
  • Produced 10,000 words on the two novellas that will follow Valiant in my werewolf PI series.
  • Produced 17,000 words on a Space Opera novella
  • Produced 10,000 words of what I’m hoping will be a serialized novel in 2016
  • Produced 36,000 words on an urban fantasy novel draft

Not a bad innings, really. That total is ten times the number of words I achieved in the whole of 2013 and pretty close to 1,000 words a day on average.

Today I printed off a new tracking sheet. Time to start trying to beat my record…

 

 

The Problems with Word Count

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , ,

Since starting the 600K Year, I’ve been aiming to write an average of 1,800 words per day. I managed it pretty consistently through the chaos of November, failed pretty consistently during the chaos of December, and carried my December habits through to the first two weeks of January.

Which means that I’m now trying to write an average of 2,750 words a day. I’m not quite hitting it – yet – but I’m getting within a hundred words or so.

I’ve always been fond of word count as a productivity metric, but I’m conscious that it’s not without it’s problems. The first, somewhat related to Parkinson’s Law which suggests that work expands to fit the time available to complete it, is that your process expands to meet the word count expected of it.

Once I know how to reach 1,800 words regularly, I let the cracks start to appear in my process. I’ll stop writing to check a fact on wikipedia, or I’ll duck into twitter for a minute just to see what’s happening. An hour that could have been spent writing 900 words is suddenly spent writing 800, then 700, then 600. Which is fine, ’cause I’m hitting my writing goal comfortably, but it ignores the fact that I could be writing more.

The one thing I’m noticing, as a result of the 600k Year, is that I like writing more. I want to push myself and get more done, ’cause I love this gig and I love being read and, dear god, there are so many stories I want to tell and only so much time left to tell them in.

And now:

MODOK SAYS WRITE YOUR BOOK