Fabulous writing process, part the 1st
Apr. 5th, 2009 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catherineldfBecause I did say I was going to do this and I am a woman of my word. Most of the time, anyway.
I'll start out with transitions, since Pamela brought that up as a topic. Later on, there'll be more fun posts on things like time management, writing in multiple genres and whatever else occurs to me or someone asks. And anything I say in these posts applies to me and may or may not work for anyone else. It may not work for me either but if it's here, I'm wrestling with it.
At the moment, speaking of transitions, I'm moving from being primarily a short form writer to being a long form writer. What this means is that most of my oeuvre to date has been short fiction - 1000-7000 words - and short articles. I've completed a couple of novelettes and novellas - 15,000 to 20,000 words to date but now I'm hankering for novel length. The tally thus far - 20,000 words of werewolf novel in progress; 50,000 words of alternate Regency currently on hiatus but may come back to life soon; 30,000 words of off the wall fantasy novel about multiple types of personified death - think "Dead Like Me," only a lot more angsty in a fantasy setting. Also more or less on hiatus with occasional bursts of activity; and then there's several thousand words here and there of other things that may grow up to be looooong someday.
This is in comparison to the 60 short stories, 2 novellas and 30 or so articles and essays that I've had published, plus the few that haven't seen the light of day - estimated grand total is something like 350,000 - 400,000 words. I kind of suck at keeping those kinds of records so I don't know for sure. Working on that too.
Since short fiction has been my thing for quite awhile now (1996 to present), when I write longer pieces, I do them scene by scene because that's how I learned to write in short form. Things occur to me, often when I'm doing other things, and I add them to a story when I get a chance. I'm generally working on multiple pieces at the same time, so at any one given point in time, I may be writing scenes for 2-3 different stories or novels in progress. Given that, everything comes out of the back of my brain in chunks. This can be anything from a paragraph to full chapters. I'm not terribly good at outlining so that's something else I'm working on. The advantage to doing this is that things usually flow together reasonably well, at least up to 20-30,000 words; we'll see how it goes when I get to bigger stuff.
I'm finding that what I write makes some difference in how I write it, but not much. Plot isn't usually the most important aspect of short form erotica, but things like voice, description and setting are. But the more plot you have, the more your work stands out, as a rule. Romance and sf/f require all of that, plus longer and sometimes more elaborate story arcs, world building and in my case, historical scene-setting. So while I'm writing linear scenes, transitioning through time, space, POVs, etc., I'm also going back and adding details at earlier points in the story.
Other things I have tried that involved transitions - a novel that switches character perspectives every chapter. This would be the alt. Regency. One of the reasons that's bogged down was that I got wildly happy with subplots and everyone's perspective on them and lost track of my plot arcs. The fun part has been getting to spend time in each character's head, developing their own adventures as it twere. The not so fun part - getting to spend time in each character's head, trying to figure out how to tie it all together.
Some of the same problems going on with the other fantasy novel in prog as well, thought I got that one down to 2 POVs instead of the 4 in the Regency.
The werewolf novel has lots of time and some place transitions but is always from the same POV. For the most part, I'm switching chapters on these kinds of transitions rather than putting in the ever popular "Time passed." I'm finding that's working fairly well thus far. Then again, sometimes I just put in scene breaks to get from one point to another. For my alternate history short story "Great Reckonings, Little Rooms" which is about the death of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, I'm using act and scene notes to suggest a play. For other pieces, like my novella "Beauty," I tried to work the time transitions in as part of the story. The POV character moves around in space, time and development as one more or less continuous story arc with no obvious scene breaks. In theory, I prefer this method but in practice I vary it a lot.
Thoughts? Questions (on this topic specifically)? Fire away!
I'll start out with transitions, since Pamela brought that up as a topic. Later on, there'll be more fun posts on things like time management, writing in multiple genres and whatever else occurs to me or someone asks. And anything I say in these posts applies to me and may or may not work for anyone else. It may not work for me either but if it's here, I'm wrestling with it.
At the moment, speaking of transitions, I'm moving from being primarily a short form writer to being a long form writer. What this means is that most of my oeuvre to date has been short fiction - 1000-7000 words - and short articles. I've completed a couple of novelettes and novellas - 15,000 to 20,000 words to date but now I'm hankering for novel length. The tally thus far - 20,000 words of werewolf novel in progress; 50,000 words of alternate Regency currently on hiatus but may come back to life soon; 30,000 words of off the wall fantasy novel about multiple types of personified death - think "Dead Like Me," only a lot more angsty in a fantasy setting. Also more or less on hiatus with occasional bursts of activity; and then there's several thousand words here and there of other things that may grow up to be looooong someday.
This is in comparison to the 60 short stories, 2 novellas and 30 or so articles and essays that I've had published, plus the few that haven't seen the light of day - estimated grand total is something like 350,000 - 400,000 words. I kind of suck at keeping those kinds of records so I don't know for sure. Working on that too.
Since short fiction has been my thing for quite awhile now (1996 to present), when I write longer pieces, I do them scene by scene because that's how I learned to write in short form. Things occur to me, often when I'm doing other things, and I add them to a story when I get a chance. I'm generally working on multiple pieces at the same time, so at any one given point in time, I may be writing scenes for 2-3 different stories or novels in progress. Given that, everything comes out of the back of my brain in chunks. This can be anything from a paragraph to full chapters. I'm not terribly good at outlining so that's something else I'm working on. The advantage to doing this is that things usually flow together reasonably well, at least up to 20-30,000 words; we'll see how it goes when I get to bigger stuff.
I'm finding that what I write makes some difference in how I write it, but not much. Plot isn't usually the most important aspect of short form erotica, but things like voice, description and setting are. But the more plot you have, the more your work stands out, as a rule. Romance and sf/f require all of that, plus longer and sometimes more elaborate story arcs, world building and in my case, historical scene-setting. So while I'm writing linear scenes, transitioning through time, space, POVs, etc., I'm also going back and adding details at earlier points in the story.
Other things I have tried that involved transitions - a novel that switches character perspectives every chapter. This would be the alt. Regency. One of the reasons that's bogged down was that I got wildly happy with subplots and everyone's perspective on them and lost track of my plot arcs. The fun part has been getting to spend time in each character's head, developing their own adventures as it twere. The not so fun part - getting to spend time in each character's head, trying to figure out how to tie it all together.
Some of the same problems going on with the other fantasy novel in prog as well, thought I got that one down to 2 POVs instead of the 4 in the Regency.
The werewolf novel has lots of time and some place transitions but is always from the same POV. For the most part, I'm switching chapters on these kinds of transitions rather than putting in the ever popular "Time passed." I'm finding that's working fairly well thus far. Then again, sometimes I just put in scene breaks to get from one point to another. For my alternate history short story "Great Reckonings, Little Rooms" which is about the death of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, I'm using act and scene notes to suggest a play. For other pieces, like my novella "Beauty," I tried to work the time transitions in as part of the story. The POV character moves around in space, time and development as one more or less continuous story arc with no obvious scene breaks. In theory, I prefer this method but in practice I vary it a lot.
Thoughts? Questions (on this topic specifically)? Fire away!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-06 02:51 pm (UTC)I can only comment on my current N.I.P. which is fantasy/s&s.
My transitions are virtually all based on groups of characters,
and where they are, and what they are doing. So I jump from place
to place, and tell what each character or group of characters is doing,
and then I switch to another group for each chapter. I don't jump back
and forth in time as I go, although I might jump to the far past at some
point.
The timeline moves fairly linearly along, and the viewpoint switches in a round-robin fashion as things happen in multiple locations. There is a lot of action and conflict, and there are many characters and interesting
locations to deal with.
I am very much a NON-expository lump type writer, so the action drives everything. I don't intentionally "cliff-hanger" each chapter, but I do
switch away at critical times, if I know something important is happening elsewhere.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-06 10:57 pm (UTC)The short-fiction/long-fiction transition is interesting; I hadn't thought about that.
P.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 01:13 am (UTC)