Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 26 Nov 2019| Leave a Comment »
The final week of this year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) has been a mixed bag. Overall, I have to say I’m pleased with the experiment. Using NaNoWriMo as a way to simply increase my productivity has proved a much better approach (for me) than setting some unrealistic (for me) word-count goal. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 21 Nov 2019| Leave a Comment »
Week Three of NaNoWriMo has been productive. Sort of.
At the end of last week, I was facing a scene I’ve been dreading for a long time. A sex scene.
I hate writing sex scenes. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 14 Nov 2019| Leave a Comment »
My second week of NaNoWriMo went better than my first, and there’s a reason for that (apart from my getting back into the flow of writing, that is).
Like many writers, I’ve often used a soundtrack to set an audio foundation for my writing time. A soundtrack can do two things. First, it can set a consistent mood that underpins the prose as I write, and second, it can help block out the sounds of the real world and allow me to concentrate more fully on the world I’m trying to get out of my head. (On the downside, it can also ruin a particular album/artist, as eventually, due to repetition and earworms, I grow sick of what I’m listening to.) (more…)
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 creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 26 Oct 2019| 4 Comments »
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 Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, novel writing, percolation, problem solving on 14 Mar 2019| Leave a Comment »
On occasion, I ask my brain to go through its memory banks and search for something I know I know, but which I cannot at the moment remember. This search method is a technique honed by decades of living in a pre-Internet world, before Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, and all the rest.
What is her phone number? Didn’t I read a book about this subject? Who wrote that song? Where have I seen that actor before?
I got so good at this that I could do it in my sleep. Literally.
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir