misbehavin'

" . . . part of me was still a writer, I guess, and a writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave."
Mike Noonan, protagonist of Bag of Bones by Stephen King.

time on task = success

When I was teaching high school and middle school English, the easiest way to explain to students and parents how to bring up a student's grade was to simply "do the work and try to do it well." In most cases bad grades had less to do with intelligence and talent than it had to do with "time on task," how long the student spent on an assignment or independent study. Greater time on task equaled better grades.

The same case can be made for success in writing. Here's what novelist David Morrell has to say about accomplishing the task of writing a novel in his non-fiction work on the subject, The Successful Novelist.

"To accomplish the task, the goal has to be redefined. When I sit down to write a novel, I don't think of it as a novel. Oh, sure, I've made my preparations. I know the scope of the plot and the nature of the characters. But if I keep reminding myself of the size of the job, if I constantly bear in mind that I'll be sitting at this same spot a year from now, working on the same project, I'll quit with exhaustion before I get started. For me, the goal isn't to write a novel. It's to write five pages a day. They're not perfect. They need frequent revision down the road. But at least they exist.

If you're someone who doesn't have the luxury of writing all day, restrict your goal to so many words per day or week. The mathematics is interesting. A page a day is 365pages a year, the length of a novel. The key is to subdivide the huge task of a novel into smaller steps. By achieving the manageable goal you've set for yourself, you'll have a sense of daily accomplishment. Focus your attention on the short term, and the novel will take care of itself."

My goal is to average a 1,000 words a day, but I don't write every day. I'm happy if I write 7,000 words in a week, even if it means nothing on one day and 2,500 on another, as long as I make my 7,000 at the end of the week.

What's your writing goal?

and . . . scene!

Yesterday I struggled with two scenes from the novel. What did I need each scene to do? How did these scenes advance the plot? How did each scene mirror the novel as a whole? Had I entered and exited each scene effectively?

Often the universe will point me in the right direction when I reach out. Here's where it took me.

From The Craft of Writing by William Sloane:

"The experience of fiction is accumulative as well as sequential. All scenes are contributory and all scenes are contributory on most of the various levels of the novel. List, if you must, what each scene does for the action, for the characterizations, for the foreshadowing, for the reader's entire experience at your fiction. Lay the scenes out in front of you and look at them in as relaxed a way as you can and see what they say back to you. But keep in mind that a scene that shows the reader nothing except a couple of characters being all too forgettable is not a scene but a fictional entry.

Scenes are something like miniature stories. They have in them the germ of the entire story or book, and they are like the larger whole in other respects. Scenes have a beginning and an ending, like any complete story. Each scene has a means of perception. Occasionally more than one, but rarely. Each scene has a setting -- it takes place somewhere. Each scene poses the same problems that the story or novel poses. It must establish the reader as fast as possible. It must give evidence as soon as possible that it intends to continue the contract with the reader."

"I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father."
William Shakespeare

R.I.P., Daddy.

oh, those writers . . .

Feeling a bit snarky today. In honor of the smug snark that lies in the hearts of every writer now and then, two quotes from two of the greats.

"This is what I find encouraging about the writing trade: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"They always think that if you write well you're somehow cheating, you're not being democratic by writing as badly as everybody else does." - Gore Vidal

Raowww! Writers, please, retract your claws.

Crime and Squirrels Lead Foreign Lists

Publishers Weekly reports on international novels making the scene.
Crime and Squirrels Lead Foreign Lists

Crime novels and feel-good story about the squirrels of Central Park head the list of must-read international novels. I've never been a big fan of crime novels, but The Squirrels of Central Park Are Sad on Monday by French novelist Katherine Pancol has piqued my interest. How about combining the two ideas? A murder in Central Park orchestrated by a rouge band of squirrels -- Of Crime and Squirrels. I kid, of course. Or, do I? Hmmm...

feeding your muse

I wanted to post something inspirational today. Yesterday's post? Well ... I feel rather bad about it. I don't mean to sound negative, but I'm a realist. I think we all have days when writing is more pain than delight, more terror than thrill. But if we have too many of those days, we may lay down the pen, put away the keyboard, starve our muse from sheer fear and neglect. So, we must find ways to continue to "feed our muse," in the words of dear Uncle Ray. (Note: If you're new to my blog, I've adopted Ray Bradbury as my honorary uncle.)

We must strive to look at things in a new way; stir up things now and then as to see what comes of it; stop to look and listen, though we may get the occasional odd stare. I'll admit it. I've eavesdropped on others' conversations, hoping some overheard tidbit will offer a story idea or help me hone my dialogue-writing skills. I'll do just about anything to keep my muse fed.

Uncle Ray tells us we must "stuff ourselves" with food for our muse. What is this food? The stuff, the sights, the sounds, the impressions of life. Okay, Uncle Ray says it much better than I ever can:

"Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes,and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events.
These are the stuffs, the foods, of which The Muse grows."

You heard Uncle Ray. Let's get out there, folks. Stuffing ourselves with the foods of life. Let's feed our muse.