If you find you are getting too many blog-post emails and you really don’t want them, you can subscribe to the news only mailing list which I promise not to inundate. So: before I talk about revisions, and what that meant at the time, I want to talk a little bit about a couple of other things. A writer has to learn to handle critiques, because you are going to get them. If from no one else, then from your editor. There are things that are not clear, and things that make no sense (because you’ve left some of the sensible parts on the inside of your head. “But – I explained all that!” “No, you didn’t.” “But I did.” Michelle thinks about this because she is certain she has. … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: March 2019
I’m honestly not certain who is interested in these posts – except me. I am clearly interested in them. Bits and pieces of what becomes a post have been floating in the back brain, and I’ve returned to them time and again. Practically speaking, leaving the entire musing and contemplation aside, “Just write” is the only correct advice. But… writing can be isolating in many ways. Finding explicit How To, taking courses that teach explicit How To, finding authors who have written distinct How To (and to be fair to them, they are trying to be useful and they are cutting down the musing to get to what seems the skeleton, the bones, of process) are often meant as advice, as dictum. I am, for … Continue reading
ETA: So many typos T_T I want to take a small detour to talk about outlines – the thing I don’t write. I want to close the gap between outlines and pantsing a bit. And I want to make clear that nothing about either is cut and dried. When I finished the Books of the Sundered, I realized the thing that had really, really slowed me down was lack of concrete details in my worldbuilding. I had a story I wanted to tell — and this story became the two book Sacred Hunt, the Hunter duology. (For the record, I thought it was one book when I started it.) The scene that came to me was the end of Stephen’s arc, and to me it was really strong. But I had to, once again, build a world in … Continue reading
In university, I had some poems published in the UC Review. I felt that I understood poetry (all free-verse style; I find that actual meter is difficult to write because I get overwhelmed by the “sound” of the beats the form dictates; I almost can’t catch the words and their meaning, they get so drowned out. If I read them out loud, I can, because one doesn’t read out loud with that heavy, heavy rhythm, but writing isn’t about out loud, initially, at least not to me). Poetry was the art of creating metaphors to circumscribe emotions. Reading poetry is reading a language of experience; you see, in the metaphors that you would not have written because they wouldn’t have occurred to you, a new way of looking at things … Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about how to write about my writing process. I want to make clear that this is not really meant to be advice, or to be practical advice, because writing process is very individual. Yes, those of us who write in English are composing sentences of (mostly) English words, and the technical aspect — writing sentences — is what eventually results in a book. But our approach to those sentences and the eventual story those sentences present is highly idiosyncratic. What I do is not what other writers do because all writers work differently. I know writers whose process are similar to mine, at least superficially, but no two writers approach writing the same way. I am a bit of a process geek, and I find process discussions endlessly … Continue reading