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

Unfinished Stories are Toxic Waste

I’ve had a writing-advice heavy run of posts of late, largely ’cause people asked writing-advice type questions, so I figure I’m going to hitch this one to the end of the sequence ’cause it’s thematically appropriate. No-one actually asked about this, but I’ve been rocking the writing-before-work thing and this bit comes from personal observation. All the usual caveats about using a sample-size of one and your writing process being different from my writing process apply. Alright, here we go. There is, in writing circles, some advice that goes along the lines of this: JUST FINISH YOUR DAMN STORY, MAN This is one of the hardest damn things to do when you start out as a writer. Usually this is ’cause you’re not that good and you spend an awful lot of time flailing and flailing and flailing at the page, producing things you know aren’t good (’cause, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t be doing this writing thing if you

PeterMBall 03/10/2012
Works in Progress

I’m Far To Easily Amused By The Phrase “ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL”

So my friend Nic, who scribbles a bit but doesn’t have a website, snuck a final question in on the end of the dancing monkey series: What do you do with an idea or story that just runs out of steam far too early? (Say many thousands of words short of what it needs) Well, much as I’d like to say I’ve experienced this one, I’m generally an up-against-the-word-limits-can-I-have-a-few-thousand-more-please-gov’ner kind of writer. I spend half my structural redrafts trying to cut things out of my manuscripts, so should a story come in several thousand words under my approach I’d probably sing hallelujahs and weep with goddamn joy. Writing shorter is one of my goals, not a problem. Assuming for the sake of argument (and blog post) that I did suddenly run into such a problem – say for whatever unlikely reason an editor really needed a 10k gap in an anthology filled and my pinch-hitting story only came in at

PeterMBall 01/10/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

Crank up the organ grinder and gather around the popcorn, ’cause we’re almost at the end of the dancing monkey series. For our second-last entry, John Farrell asked: I have awful problems constructing a plot. How do you do that? Apparently you folks don’t want to go with the easy questions, huh? This is not a topic where I’m known to be *concise*, so I’m going to set myself a word-budget on this one and send you off into the wide world with some reading homework, ’cause really, plot is big. Here we go: EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS 1. PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST – FIGHT! Most plots hang off a pretty simple dynamic designed drive a story forward. It goes something like this: your protagonist wants something really badly; your antagonist denies your protagonist the thing they really want; delicious, awesome conflict ensues. Take Lord of the Rings as an example – Frodo wants to live

PeterMBall 28/09/2012
Gaming

Gaming is not Writing

Once again, I dance like a monkey for your amusement. This time around my friend Al asked via facebook: Why should writers never write RPG campaigns as stories, why on earth did you do just that, why isn’t it finished yet? Okay, we’re going to kick this one off with a list o’ reasons, some of which people are likely to disagree with. 1) EDITORS DON’T LIKE IT Let’s kick this off with the obvious – the best reason to avoid writing up RPG campaigns as stories is the fact that places that give you money for writing aren’t a big fan of things that are based on RPG campaigns. This warning from Strange Horizon’s List of Stories They See Too Often isn’t exactly uncommon, where they pretty much tell you to avoid anything where: Story is based in whole or part on a D&D game or world. a.       A party of D&D characters (usually including a fighter, a magic-user, and a

PeterMBall 26/09/2012
Works in Progress

I Do Believe in Syntax

And lo, it is Monday, and we continue the dancing monkey series wherein people ask me questions and I blog long, rambling answers in response. Once more into the breach and all that. Today, Peter Kerby offered up the following: Just to stir the pot; English is living language and all living things evolve, so how much licence should be tolerated when it comes to grammar and spelling, or does it depend on the intended audience. Verily, I am the wrong person to ask this sort of question, ’cause my response is invariably something along the lines of “so long as you can be understood, rock the fucking Kasbah, lolz, peace out, peeps.” Except, you know, not in so many words, and potentially in ways that make me sound less like an idiot and more like I have some understanding of what da kidz are speaking like with their crazy slang these days. I mean, hipsters, man, who gets them? (Hipsters

PeterMBall 24/09/2012
Works in Progress

The Only Person I Have to Live With Is Me, So That’s Who I’m Going To Care About

So as part of the Dancing Monkey series, Chris Slee asked What have you always wanted to write but haven’t because a) it would never sell and b) it would be socially unacceptable? Okay, let me see if I can formulate an answer to this that doesn’t involve gleeful, if slightly diabolical, laughter. My track record is actually pretty good when it comes to finding a concept that seems utterly unsellable and still finding a way to make money out of it. I mean, let us look at the list of stories I thought were utterly unsalable that then went on to actually make me a fair chunk of change: Unicorns and underage pornography? Sold. Thinly veiled erotica about John Flamsteed saving the world by shagging aliens? Sold Werewolf stories with a meandering, non-werewolf plot? Sold. A convoluted story-within-a-story about a tragedy where nothing much happens? Sold, and reprinted in a year’s best to boot. I mean, Jesus, a story

PeterMBall 21/09/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

A Few More Ideas About Ideas

You know what’s handy when you pre-write a bunch of blog posts and set them to post while you’re away? Actually remembering to set them to post. Seems I forgot to hit the all-important Publish button in my rush to get ready for the Adelaide trip last week, which means we’re starting the dancing monkey series a little later than expected. If there’s a topic you’d like to throw into the mix, you can still do so by pitching it here.  A Few More Ideas About Ideas A few years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the often-maligned question of where do your ideas come from. I wrote it ’cause I didn’t like the way most writers behaved when they were asked that question, and ’cause I kind of like understanding my process. Plus, as a guy whose occasionally asked to teach people how to write, it’s a useful thing to be able to talk about process

PeterMBall 15/08/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

500 words

So it appears that I finished a story draft this week. It’s not a good story, not yet, but it started the week with a 200 word opening and by Wednesday night I declared the draft zero complete around 2,500 words. It will need some rewriting – that’s what this weekend is for – and it’ll need some fleshing out in order to make the story bits actually resemble a story, but it’s a draft and it’s finished and it’s broken a somewhat long drought. Many droughts, actually, in that I have a) finished a story draft, b) that’s shorter than 7,000 words, and c) actually started the next story more-or-less right away. The pattern I’m aiming for is 500 words a day, every day, and a finished story every two weeks. My instinct is to scoff at that pace, to write it off as easy to accomplish, because my instincts were forged in the days when I taught session

PeterMBall 27/07/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Why Count Words

It’s been about two weeks since the QWC Rabbit Hole, and you’re still reading blog posts that I drafted during the manic two-and-bit days of writing. This, it should be noted, is quite by design – I knew I was heading down to Melbourne, knew that the Continuum weekend wouldn’t give me enough time to write anything for the week that followed, and I knew that one of these days I wanted to get sufficiently ahead of the blog that I could have some posts in reserve. One of the more interesting conversations I had during the rabbit hole was with a participant who didn’t quite understand why we counted words. She was writing…well, to be honest, I don’t really know, but I’m guessing it was memoir…and the concept of hitting a set number of words every hour/day, even the concept of writing 30,000 words in a weekend, was utterly alien to her. We ended up discussing it during a

PeterMBall 18/06/2012
Works in Progress

Four Words All Creative Practitioners Should Live By

RESPECT YOUR GODDAMN AUDIENCE. Okay, here’s your warning. I’m going to rant my fucking pants off in this one, ’cause I’m mightly passionate and this post has been sparked by something that really pissed me off. If you’d prefer to skip the rage, feel free. Go read something else. I won’t be offended. Just remember those four words, ’cause everything else is just a cautionary tale explaining why they’re important. Respect your goddamn audience. There’s plenty of reasons to follow this advice, but here’s the big one: if you don’t, there’s pretty good odds I’m going to hunt you down and carve out your fucking spleen with an ice-cream scoop. Especially if I’m part of that audience, and you’ve contrived things so I don’t have the option of leaving when it becomes obvious that your fucking lack of respect is wasting my goddamn time. This one irritates me enough that it probably should have been a conversation with the spokesbear entry, if

PeterMBall 15/06/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part Two

The second thing that can’t be learned about writing by listening to Al Snow rant: People don’t have a physical relationship with pro-wrestling. This is fricking brilliant, and it’s something every SF writer should memorize immediately. If you look at most forms of athletic competition there’s usually a correlation between the most popular sports and the sports we play as kids. Every Australian male kicks a football around, for example, and gets forced to play cricket as part of their school curriculum. We’re forced to run, at the very least, at school sports days. Depending on your school, you may be forced to swim. When we watch people competing at a professional level, we have muscle memory and experience that tells us how hard these things are and allows us to appreciate the achievements of professional athletes. We know just how good they are, because we know our own limits. Professional wrestling doesn’t have that. How many of us can legitimately claim to

PeterMBall 11/06/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

“There’s so much I could’a done if they’d let me”

Today, because I’m in such a cheerful mood, I’m mainlining Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads album. Somewhere in my CD collection I’ve got a copy of his b-sides and rarities triple-disc thingy, which includes a four-part, extended thirty-minute long version of O’Malley’s Bar. That’s going on next, ’cause sometimes, misogyny be damned, you just need a series of songs about killing every mother-fucker in the room in an unrelenting and utterly debauched fashion. This is my alternative to curling up on the floor of my bedroom and having a temper tantrum, ’cause really the closest I’m getting to articulating my mood these days is the ability to randomly shout “Hate! Hate! Hate!” at the top of my lungs. There are very few things in my life that aren’t filling me with loathing at the moment, from my less-interesting dayjob (which puts Fight Club into all kinds of interesting new perspectives for me) to my more interesting dayjob (which I hate, primarily,

PeterMBall 15/04/2011