Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 07 Nov 2019| 1 Comment »
It wasn’t a good first week for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but progress, albeit modest, was made.
I suspect my challenges are the same as many of yours:
Posted in Writing, tagged climate change, creative writing, global warming, rising seas, short fiction on 01 Nov 2019|
Twenty-odd years ago (when I was just starting out with speculative fiction), I wrote the short-short below. It was a light-hearted look at a theory that was, back then, just emerging into the popular culture. Several recent headlines brought it back to mind, and it ain’t so funny, anymore.
Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 26 Oct 2019| 4 Comments »
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, Creativity, short fiction, Writing, writing novels on 29 Aug 2019| 1 Comment »
The Princess Gang rolled into the cul-de-sac on the same day Mr. B’s plum tree decided to bloom.
That’s the first line from a story that started flowing yesterday. Remembering, of course, that (say it with me) all first drafts are crap, it’ll obviously go through some revisions, but the important thing is that it was followed by a thousand words of a quiet little story that’s been pinballing around my brain for over a year.
The reason I share this is because nothing like this has happened for a long, long time.
Yes, I’ve written some fiction in the past handful of years. Most of it has been in posts on this very blog—vignettes, word imagery, poems—all meant for immediate consumption. I’ve also been slugging my way through a championship bout with a new novel which, though reportedly of good quality (especially for a first draft), has been the most difficult fiction project of my life. But a short story, a for-real short story? It’s been years. The last one I wrote was “The Book of Solomon.” It’s good, and it found a home in The Timberline Review, but I wrote that story years ago, and there has been zip-a-dee-doo-dah since.
Then yesterday: Boom. My pen began to work. My brain began to conjure. It was like my voice suddenly returned after a decade of muted trauma.
Why? (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged caravan, creative writing, immigration, modern poetry, Poetry, short story, vignettes on 13 Aug 2019| 4 Comments »
August, without a doubt, is my least favorite month. It’s when the garden starts to pant and parch, spiders build massive obstacle courses in the yard, fruit goes from unripe green to fuzzy grey within minutes, and wildfire smoke descends to choke our skies, our lungs, our eyes.
And this August, it’s also when a “great” idea for a bit of topical poetry falls totally flat. (more…)
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged building believable characters, Characters, creative writing, novel writing, setting, write what you know on 11 Jul 2019| 2 Comments »
If I were to have followed the standard advice of “write what you know” (meaning only write from personal experience), then none of my books would ever have come into being. I would never have written about anything historical (how could I, if I was born in 19-hrmahrm?), or about anything set in Brittany, or certainly I could never ever have written anything to do with dinosaurs (who could?).
The only book I’ve written that had a shred of “what I know”ishness to it is Dreams of the Desert Wind. The setting was a place I lived in for a time (Jerusalem) and I drew on a lot of personal experience for descriptions of the street scenes (like the one mentioned here, with “Samovar Man“).
No, when I started writing, if I’d written only what I knew, then I’d have written a book about working in IT (now there’s a page-turner), or something set in the world of classical music. (more…)
Posted in Books, Writing, tagged A.S. Byatt, Possession, Reading, vocabulary on 27 Jun 2019| 4 Comments »
Integument
Casuistry
Disquisition
Jackstraw
Books. You never really know what you’re getting until you crack the boards and step inside. Cover art, blurbs, reviews, recommendations, they paint a picture, but as with all art, though the rest of world might love it, for you can be a big fat nothing-burger. Or worse. Will it be a breezy fun-filled page-turner? A deeply engrossing dive into the belly of the dark societal beast? A slog through a mire of typos, anachronisms, and cliches stitched together with wooden dialog spoken by lackluster characters? It’s hard to tell at the outset.
Spillikin
Tergiversate
Congeries
Houseled
A good book isn’t always an easy read. Some very good books take a lot of work to get through. Complicated, intertwined timelines can make your brain hurt. You can get lost amid involuted syntax, tripped up by participial phrases and subordinate adjectival clauses. Or you can be barraged by salvos of words unknown or unfamiliar to you. This doesn’t make the book unreadable; it just makes it a challenge.
Bathos
Panopticon
Nugatory
Irenic
I don’t mind if a good book is a challenge. I don’t mind having to work for it. It’s part of the journey, no? Where a single “there”/”their” mix-up can be the last straw on a book already fraught with issues, I’ll work hard with another book if the prose is exceptional, the story compelling, the characters so interesting that they draw me in and hold me down as I fight my way through the convoluted plot.
I am halfway through a book right now, and have had to look up a ton of words, more than in any other book I’ve ever read. These words were either wholly unknown to me (spillikin?) or ones that I was only “pretty sure” I knew (integument, disquisition). In a lesser book, I would likely be put off by these words as being out of character or too highfalutin for the subject, but in this book these words are a perfect oriel from which I can peer into the minds of the characters (a pair of Victorian poets). And, hey, new words.
Oh, and in case you didn’t know: spillikin and jackstraw? Synonyms.
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Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 