May 8, 2013  

Camp Nanowrimo: A Retospective

It might come as a surprise for those of you who started reading during April, when I was busy with the A To Z Blogging Challenge, but I actually did participate in the April Camp Nanowrimo, on top of also completely my university assignments. Suffice to say that it was a pretty hectic month for me.

This years Camp allowed participants the choice of what their goal would be and I, being the overly ambitious person that I am, decided to go for a full-length novel of 125k words. Care to take a guess how much of that I actually wrote? About 47k. Yep, less than needed to win the actual Nanowrimo. Oh, and I am nowhere near finished with the novel.

Given that I have five exams and two essays due this month, the chances on me finishing it before the end of the month are pretty slim, which puts a bit of a cramp in my plan to write the sequel for the June Camp. Given the unlikelihood of managing to get the first one done, I’ve decided to scrap that plan and schedule June to finish off the first novel. This means that I now have May free to study and work on other writing projects. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to detail out a bit more planning for that novel so I don’t keep getting stuck.

So, what exactly went wrong during April that made me perform so under par? I mean, obviously I was severely overwhelmed, but was it more than just that?

First off, my goal was way to unrealistic. Sure, I managed two days over five thousand right at the beginning but straight after I began to get behind. The unwritten words just kept piling on top of the backlog, and I just kept fooling myself that I could get it all done in time. After a while, it just no longer seemed worth writing to try to catch up, since there was no way it would ever work.

Secondly, I was relatively unprepared. Sure, I had a broad plot of the novel, but I hadn’t even come close to the nitty-gritty of it. Basically, within the first chapter I had invented (on the spot) no less than four named characters that weren’t in my original outline.

Lastly, I was much too overconfident about my writing efficiency after the reasonable success of last November’s Nanowrimo and did next to no preparation.

Now that I’ve made a note of all the things that went wrong this time around, fingers crossed that I will do better come June’s Camp NAnowrimo. Although I will be doing some international travelling that whole month, cause I just don;t know when to quit.

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Book recommendation: Dragon Bones (The Hurog Duology, Book 1) - fantasy

April 30, 2013  

3 Tricks To Help Keep Your Zeal About Your Writing (A To Z Blogging)

Okay, this is the last day of the A To Z Blogging challenge, so you might be starting to feel a bit drained. I know I do. So, to get your enthusiasm back up, here are some tips about how to continue to be an obsessive zealot about your writing.

Also, apologies again for not responding to comments. Starting from tomorrow, I will be working my way through all of them.

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1. Take the time to see what can be done with storytelling

There is nothing quite so inspiring for a storyteller than to see how it can be done right. You don’t need to limit yourself only too writing either; there is so much to be learnt about characterisation and dialogue form good TV shows, for example. Try to consume as many story’s as you can; even the bad ones can inspire you write something better, and show you what not to do.

2. Convince yourself that your characters are real people

If they feel real to you, then that’s going to make them important. Sure, you might get to dictate what their stories are, but if you feel that the characters are important then it will feel important to finish their stories. If you do your job properly, they will feel like real people to the readers anyway so you might as well do it yourself. Besides, it will also help you make them more realistic.

3. Write something you desperately want to read

The best way to stay enthusiastic about your writing is to want to read it yourself. If you are writing a story that you want to read, you feel the pressure to finish because  if you don’t then you will never get to know what happens. Think of every TV show that was cancelled too soon, every movie you never got to see the end off, every book you never got to finish through no fault of your own and roll it all up into one. That’s what it feels like to not know the ending to your own story. It’s a feeling that will haunt you for the rest of your life, until you finish the damn thing.

So why are you wasting your time here? Go write!

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Related posts:

There are many fun things to do on the internet. Among them are tweeting with Emilie, liking her facebook fanpage and .

April 29, 2013  

3 Trick To Avoid Writing A Yawner (A To Z Blogging)

1. Always have something happening

It’s all about the conflict people, that should carry you along just fine. The moment it doesn’t, make something, anything happen. Pull a Chandler and have someone burst into the room waving a gun. Do something exciting but appropriate for your genre. Terrorist attack, sudden earthquake, surprise promotion; constantly shake things up.

2. Reinforce the stakes

Some writing advice says to constantly up the tension, but the slow boil can sometimes be as much, if not more, effective. All you need to do is never let the reader forget exactly what the stakes are. If they’re life or death, have someone non-essential die (or, even better, someone essential).

3. Have something unexpected

This may sound similar to number 1, but its not at all the same. This is not about reigniting the action, but about changing the situation. My favourite way of doing this is to introduce established characters that have never met to each other and to have the relationship turn out to be something other than what was expected. It can be anything though, the trick is to put together established or predictable and to pull something completely unexpected out of… well, you get the idea.

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Related posts:

There are many fun things to do on the internet. Among them are tweeting with Emilie, liking her facebook fanpage and .

April 28, 2013  

3 Problems Caused By “Writing Xenophobia” (A To Z Blogging)

There are many writers who refuse to learn, to incorporate anything new or foreign into their writing process. And, well, that’s their choice and they are perfectly free to do just that but that choice isn’t without its consequences. This is for those writers.

1. The writing gets stale

When you’re essentially writing the same thing over and over again, there are only so many different ways to present the same thing. Eventually you end up playing out all the different possible takes on the concepts and you have to start repeating yourself. If your readers wanted to read the same thing again, they’d read your previous work again.

2. You get to the point where your personal opinions leak through

Frankly, the age where authors used their works as propaganda is long over. While there are probably still some around,  the fact that most readers don’t want other people’s opinions shoved down their throat means that the market for those kinds of books is near non-existent. In doing that, you’re severely limiting your audience.

3. Destroying the joy of creating

While I don’t believe that authors need to feel some kind of ecstasy of creation while they’re writing, there’s no pleasure to be found in doing the same thing over and over. It destroys all the joy of discovery that’s so much a part of writing, because there is nothing new in your writing to discover.

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Related posts:

There are many fun things to do on the internet. Among them are tweeting with Emilie, liking her facebook fanpage and .

April 27, 2013  

3 Ways To Understand Weakness For Characters (A To Z Blogging)

1. Universal weaknesses

There are character traits that most people, if not everyone, consider to be character weaknesses, things like cowardice or greed. While these are the most relatable and that need the least amount of explanation and set up for the readers to understand, they’re also the most generic. These are all weaknesses that everyone’s seen a thousand times before, to the point where they’re practically stereotypes.

2. Personal weaknesses

This is where it starts to get interesting. Thing is, different people have different experiences, different values, different priorities. By extension, people (and characters) have different conceptions of what is weakness. A recovering alcoholic might consider somebody to be weak if they give into peer pressure and have one drink when they weren’t going to, even if they don’t have a drinking problem. On the contrary, a character might have a trait that they have no qualms with but that the rest of the world might dis agree.

3. Weaknesses are not the same as flaws

It might seem like nitpicking, but it is a fundamental difference that helps writers truly conceptualise characters. Flaws are character traits that cause characters to make wrong decisions; weaknesses are character traits that others can use to hinder their attempt to achieve their goals. Essentially, flaws are internal problems, weaknesses are externally triggered problems.

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Related posts:

There are many fun things to do on the internet. Among them are tweeting with Emilie, liking her facebook fanpage and .

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