Tobias Buckell’s recent post on chapters was not only interesting in its own right. It also brought me to Scott Westerfeld’s valuable post on pace charts. Even more cool, though was a tidbit in a comment on that post, with details on a cool feature of Scrivener: You can show stamps on the note cards! [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Process category.
First meeting of the incognito writers group
A few of us here in Champaign-Urbana are trying to get a local writers group going again. Caleb Wilson, Kelly Searsmith, Charlie Petit, and I got together last night at the Urbana Library for the new group’s first meeting. I had suggested that we might want to talk about a name for the group, simply [...]
Open Source Fiction?
Frank Gilroy, a guy I used to work with at Motorola, has written a post called My Thoughts on Open Source Story Telling about why he’s putting his fiction up on the web. I had a few thoughts on the topic that I would have shared in a comment, except that he’s got comments turned [...]
My Workspace
My Workspace, originally uploaded by bradipo. I haven’t actually been writing at my desktop for the past couple of weeks. While Steve and Daniel were visiting, we were taking our laptops to the library and using one of their “study rooms” as an office. I’m fixin’ to get back to working here, though. What’s here: [...]
Thinking about Clarion
It’s hot today. Writing when it’s hot always reminds me of Clarion—of the many sweaty hours sitting at my desk in Owen Hall, writing fiction. And I was already thinking of Clarion. In 2001, Clarion started on June 3rd, so I spent much of May getting ready to go. Since then I’ve found my thoughts turn to Clarion every [...]
Heinlein’s Rule Two: Finish What You Start?
I’ve never had a problem with Henlein’s rule one for writers (you must write). I enjoy the writing. I enjoy other stuff too, and want to be sure to get in my reading and exercise and Esperanto and playing of StarCraft, but of all the stages in writing a story, the step I most enjoy [...]
Deciding what to skip
One weak point in my writing is that I sometimes forget to write in scenes. I’m prone to write continuous action, which leads to pages of people just going places and arranging things. Very dull. Very easy to avoid, though, as long as I remember to do so. Just add a scene break and begin [...]
Five hundred words of calling for help
I’ve known right along that I didn’t really know where the novel was going. On novel-length efforts I haven’t had much success writing to an outline, so I thought I’d try just writing. (Another thing I’ve been doing differently this time is giving the chapters to Jackie as I go along, figuring that would give me [...]
Word churn
My false starts last week left me with a bunch of words that probably belonged in the novel but not where I’d tried to put them. The past three days I’ve been working on integrating some of them into the next chapter and moving the rest out of the manuscript. The result is that I’ve [...]
Perfecting Taiji forms
I studied Aikido briefly when I was living in Salt Lake City. My teacher was a gruff Asian man whose English was just adequate and whose teaching style was not unlike what you see in martial arts movies—he would mock or berate students who got things wrong. I don’t know if he thought that was [...]
