Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Sneaky Writer Tricks: Estrangement and Disruption

So two lads with cellos do a pretty kick-ass cover of Guns’n’Roses Welcome to the Jungle in this youtube clip. As a fan of string instruments and the Gunners, I encourage you to check it out before we move on, ’cause it’s going to be relevant: Let me be completely honest here: this kind of thing rocks my world, and it kind of demonstrates one of the sneaky writer tricks I often mention to people in writing workshops: try to find a way to make the familiar strange. Everyone has their own definition of what makes great art, but mine has a lot in common with a Russian theorist named Victor Shklovsky who basically said that the role of art was estrangement – taking something familiar and making it alien so that the viewer is forced to re-examine it in a conscious way. Shklovsky essentially argues against the automatism of perception – the process where something has become so familiar that we

PeterMBall 13/05/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Three Things Writers Can Learn About Villains from Daredevil’s Wilson Fisk

It’s been a long time since I watched a TV show at the same time it entered into the cultural Zeitgeist, but the combination of Netflix coming to Australia and the recent release of Daredevil, Season 1, means that I’ve inhaled thirteen episodes of comic-book awesomeness at the same time as everyone else is watching it. For those who are wondering: Daredevil is good. Very good. Very dark, at times, but Daredevil was always the character to do that with. For all that Batman has a reputation for being grimdark these days, largely courtesy of the Nolan films, Daredevil is the original hard-luck film-noir superhero. Nothing good happens to him in the comics. Like, seriously, nothing. You need both hands just to count the dead girlfriends, you know? Or the times he’s been driven crazy and started to think of himself as an actual devil. Or the times he’s actually been possessed and turned into a devil. Well, you get

PeterMBall 14/04/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Writing Advice: David Farland on Tone

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

PeterMBall 06/04/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The End of the Streak

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

PeterMBall 25/02/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Problems with Word Count

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,

PeterMBall 16/01/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Can Get Done in Twenty Minutes

I’m always astonished by the patently untrue things I’ll internalise about writing, given half a chance. For me, the big one is the myth of time, which manifests in the belief that it’s not worth sitting down to write anything unless I’ve got a significant chunk of time to devote to the effort. It leads to some pretty weird decision making. Give me a two hour gap in my schedule, and I’ll consider filling it with writing. Give me a fifteen minute gap in my schedule, and I’ll consider filling it with Facebook on my cell phone. In my head, writing requires an long stretch of time and energy to make it worth while. Which is odd, ’cause I know that’s bullshit. I even have the data to back it up, courtesy of the novella diary I kept back in May of 2013, which largely constructed a draft out of ten and fifteen minute writing bursts of a couple of hundred words. It

PeterMBall 15/01/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Six Things Writers Can Learn from Highlander (1986)

Highlander is a terrible movie. I wanted to get that out of the way early, because it’s the films sequel that famously earns the franchise the vast majority of its grief. People remember the second Highlander film as this massively disappointing experience, an incoherent mess compared to its predecessor, and truthfully it is all those things, but to lay all the blame on the various sequels of the film is a little unfair. You see, the first Highlander is godawful as well. Actually painful to watch, when you force yourself to sit down and pay attention to everything, rather than just tuning in for the bits you remember fondly. This truly surprised me when we re-watched the film as part of the Trashy Tuesday movie series. Like most gents of a geeky persuasion, both my flatmate and I had seen the film when we were teenagers and remembered it being all kinds of awesome. There were sword fights. There was Queen.

PeterMBall 12/08/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Three Things Writers Can Learn from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

One of the few things I like about being sick? The guilt-free viewing of terrible comfort movies as you’re curled up on the coach, nursing yourself back to health. Which is why I found myself perusing the Quickflix streaming site this weekend, looking for something mindless to watch, and settled on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. I’m a fan of F&F franchise, in a very casual kind of way. I picked the first two up on DVD a few years ago, planning on studying them to figure out the beats associated with a racing story. I ended up seeing the latter films with my former flatmate and appreciated their outright absurdity and desire to hit exactly the mark they were aiming for in terms of story. One day, when they actually finish the entire series, I’ll probably buy a boxed set…and yet I’d always managed to skip Tokyo Drift. It just wasn’t on my radar. Partially this is

PeterMBall 05/08/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Six Things Writers Can Learn From Hackers (1995)

I’ve always had a lot of time for Hackers – it’s one of the few #TrashyTuesdayMovies I was actually looking forward to seeing. It may be an uneven movie, but it’s one of the first major films that came out and tackled the developing paranoia about the internet that swept through the 90s, taking the fear of out of the realm of science fiction and planting it in the present day. On the list of vaguely disappointing cyberpunk movies that came out of the era , it actually nails the feel of William Gibson’s novels and short-stories far better than the genre works. It’s also hard to think of a more iconic nineties movie than Hackers. It’s one of those terrible movies that defines a generation – if you were in your late teens or early twenties in 1995, when the film came out, then there’s pretty good odds you remember this film as the thing that killed of Johnny

PeterMBall 29/07/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Three

So I’ve been meaning to write the last three Die Hard posts for a couple of months now, transforming my raw notes into something readable, but my life was basically mugged by putting together the GenreCon program, then chairing panels at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, then coping with the fact that GenreCon’s attendance kinda exploded, then actually running the con, then going to the UK, then watching my deadlines go boom, then moving then, then… Well, shit, I guess I’m out of excuses, and it’s time to finish this series off, albeit nearly three quarters of a year after it started. WHAT WRITERS OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT DIE HARD, PART THREE Since it’s been a while, it might be worth going back to taking a refresher look at the posts regarding Die Hard’s Ongoing Metaphors and my notes breaking down The First Act. In fact, even if you remember the second post, go back anyway. I adore first acts. They’re some of

PeterMBall 22/07/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Why I Wrote Exile

It started with an IM from Jenn Brozek at Apocalypse Ink: Have you ever through about adapting the Flotsam series you did for The Edge of Propinquity into novella form? It’s one of those questions you answer carefully when it comes from an editor, particularly one you’ve worked with before who has launched their own small publishing company. Sure, I said, I’ve thought about it. Why do you ask? Jenn explained her reasons for asking. We went back and forth about the details. Somewhere along the line, I signed a contract. On this level, the why behind EXILE is easy: Jenn was interested in working with me, and she offered an advance. When you’re a writer, working freelance, that’s a combo you don’t turn down. But there’s more to EXILE than opportunity and income; there always is, when you set out to write something, even if you convince yourself otherwise. So for the rest of the post I figured I’d

PeterMBall 17/07/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Five (Well, Six, Actually) Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Wing Commander (1999)

Our work offices are located in the State Library of Queensland, which means I’ll occasionally walk past signs for upcoming library events on my way into work. Last week, one of those signs advertised the library’s classic movie screening of the German submarine classic Das Boot and I was…well, mildly interested. Unfortunately, the screening was during work hours and I missed it, so I went home and made do with the next best thing – Das Boot in space, AKA the cinematic adaptation of the Wing Commander computer games. Fans of the game hate this film. Like, passionately hate this film. My former flatmate, who reveled in the shittiest of films during our #TrashyTuesdayMovie run, chose not to sit through Wing Commander when it was scheduled. My friends who love the games claim that it fails as an adaptation on multiple levels, but I can’t really speak to that. I never actually played the games, so I was forced to take the film on

PeterMBall 15/07/2014