Tag: Writing

Ed’s Casual Friday: August and Everything After…

Yes, I totally stole this post title from a Counting Crows album. I’m an old guy, so sue me. No wait, please don’t.

All last month, my Ed’s Casual Friday column here at IU consisted of a four-part look at one-star reviews on a hundred novels regarded as the “best” literature has to offer. The astute among you may have noticed that doing those four articles allowed me to write a full month of posts all at once, and then basically not show up for the rest of July. My lack of presence was not exclusive to IU, but to all the “social media outlets” around which us writerly types tend to congregate. Facebook pages, boards, groups, sites, lists, on and on, ad nauseum. I largely stayed off line for all of July, and I didn’t really do any writing, either. After finishing the fourth book in a series and releasing it at the end of June, before launching into book five I took a couple Mental Health days that turned into a week, and then the full month. Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: August and Everything After…”

The Closer

No, not THAT Closer…

The opening line of a book is given great importance, for it is that sentence which invites the reader to further investigation. But what of the closer? Is the last line of a book important?

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. –George Orwell, Animal Farm

After all, tomorrow is another day. –Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind Continue reading “The Closer”

No Experience Is Wasted

Crunch time in the marketing department. Only a week before the biggest trade show of the year and I was making sales literature for products that didn’t exist yet. Everyone else had gone home. The factory workers left hours ago. During yet another trip to the copier in the engineering department, I stopped on the catwalk and leaned against the cool metal rail, listening to the sigh and wheeze of the ventilation required even when the assembly lines sat idle. Then I saw the forklift. A colleague and I had a running joke. When the job broke us, who would be the first to commandeer a forklift and race it across the factory floor? I didn’t want to wait. I longed to climb into the cockpit and take the beast for a spin before crashing it through a plate glass wall.

And because of my secret identity as a writer, I didn’t have to wait. It went into the novel. Everything goes into the novels, eventually. Continue reading “No Experience Is Wasted”

What Kind of Writer Are You?

I never realized it before, but I am suddenly becoming ultra aware of how I function as a writer. Because I wrote my trilogy over such a long time (3 years), it feels like an age since I’ve started a manuscript from scratch. I am learning a lot about myself this time around. It’s made me wonder what other people are like.

How do you function as a writer?

Me? I’m a planner. I plan my little tooshie off until I know the story inside out. It’s start in my head – a spark of an idea – and mulls around in there for a few months. I jot down notes as I go along and the story twists and turns until I keep coming back to the same scenes over and over… these are obviously the ones that work.

I then move into planning mode. I tend to start by revising a good “how to write well” kind of book to get my head in the game, then I get stuck in. I plan every scene, I write chunks of dialogue, I character profile, I research the area. I really take my time here. I find it works best for me.

Then I get to my favourite part… the first draft! Whoop! Bring it on. I jump into this new world and swim around in there for weeks. I love it. I love seeing a story go from bullet point life into paragraphs of emotion, tension, angst, action… I could go on forever here.

Now – this is the part that I have suddenly noticed about myself. I always just thought I wrote the first draft like everybody else, but I don’t. I edit as I go. I am a layer writer.

I write my first chapter or two, depending on how the writing juices are flowing and my time constraints. When I’m away from my computer I mull it over in my head… thinking about what I’ve written, how I’ve made my character’s behave, questioning if it’s true to who they are and how it will effect the rest of the story. I jot down notes, new ideas that will make the story better.

In my next writing session, I start by going back and adding a second layer to those first few chapters, then I move onto the next scene. Next time I write, I do the same thing, add another layer – tweak, refine, adjust – then move on. Continue reading “What Kind of Writer Are You?”