Category: philosophy

Writing: Fast or Slow?

Do you ever wonder how fast you type? Usually it isn’t an issue, or is it?

Typing is a necessity for many of us, writers even more than most. Something about all those novels makes it hard to understand how you could manage at a slow pace. Do you do 120,000 words on a novel for how many revisions?

In the interest of keeping the writing time down, do you organize your thoughts? Do you wade through an outline or just start chugging from page one through to the end? Do you write longhand or do you sit at the keyboard for hours on end?

I love it when people get to study things like writers tend to be wordier when they do rough drafts at a keyboard instead of by hand. So what does it mean by wordier? Did they put the same writers side by side on the same topics and count words for each of the outpourings? I think it has to be difficult to make a really good comparison between writers. Especially when you consider that there gets to be a point where each writer makes a decision about the form that works better on an individual basis.

I’m one of those writers who logs hours in front of a keyboard. Perhaps less than some who transcribe their longhand so much slower than I type, but more than many if you consider all the other things I do in front of a monitor. Ha.

When I’m warmed up and awake, I can type about 100 words per minute. That’s from a typing test, though, and it isn’t about how fast I can create the words in my head. Creating requires more attention to detail and sometimes the proper word doesn’t just sprout from the fingertips. At times you end up with a blue where you really need a cerulean or a navy.

For me, the first draft is about getting the ideas out. It’s all about the concept. It’s one reason I just let it all run out from my fingers like they’re on fire when the ideas come fast. When they come slow, it’s one word at a time. It’s all about continuing the stream. Sometimes I skip ahead and come back to the troublesome parts. I don’t like to stop where it gets slow; I jump ahead if I have momentum to keep things moving. The movement is how I finish things. Some projects languish when I lose the steam to keep things on track.

It’s one reason I like NaNoWriMo. Everyone’s about moving and keeping the words spilling onto the page without worry about the inner editors getting in the way with whether it ought to be a separate sentence or hooked together with a semicolon. It seems like a small distinction, but it impacts the finished project.

So instead of recording just how fast I type, I’ve been keeping tabs on how fast I can pour out ideas. It varies on topic and particular day for my energy, but it looks like I could finish a day’s worth of a NaNo requirement between 30 and 90 minutes. Big swing, so I’m working on it to see if I can narrow the gap.

Posted on by ransomnoble 2

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Yes, I’m serious. We all have our characters we come to love when we write. We have to in order to make it through an entire novel with them. Do you ever make it too easy on your main character?

In my writer’s group, one of the contributors is working on her first fiction project. She’s got a wonderful flair for description and the short bits she reads us are vivid. I’m sure it helps that she’s got a long history in nonfiction. One of the veterans asked her the question: “What’s the absolute worst thing that can happen to your protagonist? Do that and you’ll find your plot.”

It’s not always how I think of it, but it’s very good advice. Sometimes people try to go easy on their characters if they like them, though the best thing is to torture the poor protagonist until he wants to give up – except you never, ever let that happen. Even giving up is a choice and bad things can happen from it. Just like a juggler who throws all the balls in the air and then doesn’t try to catch them – one of them will turn into the brick to land on his head.

When was the last time you read a book where the worst thing didn’t happen? Did you get bored with reading it? The other extreme might be where believability hits. Did you put the book down because the events just couldn’t happen that way? Within each story world there are possibilities and consequences for every choice made.

Pretend you’re writing a young adult novel and Mom forbids the main character from talking on the phone for a week. The main character has two choices, to follow the restriction or to break it. Either choice has consequences. It seems very cut and dried, but what happens when you add the love interest who’s expecting a call that evening? What happens when you add the mother’s incessant checking of the phone logs? Then a father who allows it because he doesn’t know about the restriction? Does your character choose to follow the restriction even if it means the love interest will be upset? Does the character come clean to Dad about not being able to use the phone (and maybe even why)? Or is it just a one time thing that the character hopes won’t be noticed? Suddenly there’s a plot!

Might not be an epic plot right now, but the more consequences and reactions the writer adds to make the choices more tortured adds to the reader’s pleasure. Somehow George R. R. Martin gets named in protagonist-torturing crowd. Readers might get mad at him for killing off their beloved characters, but as far as I know they’re still reading. And making movies and a game out of the story line. I suppose we can’t all do it that way, but kudos to him for making it work well!

Next time you take a look at your plot, whether you’ve finished writing or if you outline beforehand, really dig in to see if you’ve made your protagonist’s life as troubled as you can. That’s when you know you’re writing a good story.

Note: This is not to say that writers love to torture people. We’re pretty much just aiming to get readers, and we can’t overdose on all the sugary fluffiness that it would require to make an entire novel out of things happening that aren’t bad. 

Posted on by ransomnoble 3

Where Do You Find Your Answers?

I find a challenge is best when looking to boost my creativity. Maybe I should say I’m finding that a challenge is best to really get the gears turning in my mind. This month’s challenge is prepping a novel, which may not seem like such a big deal when one considers that I’ve done this before. Often. But this one I’ve poured my heart into and it’s coming out my ears.

I have a protagonist that has an interesting voice. I have a couple antagonists, one obvious that is simply annoying and a potentially more difficult one who seems friendly mixed in with a lovely set of background events and characters who promise to make life difficult for the main character. I found a big question that my novel is probably answering.

The big challenge today was finding the question. The answer has not yet presented itself, but I’m still working. It’s silly because I wasn’t looking for that particular question. It just popped out of the free-writing exercise like it belonged right in the center of attention. So now, when I think my mind might be quiet, I hear that question whispering through my mind.

Like right before that yoga class I teach, I heard it. Luckily I didn’t repeat it out loud – I replaced it with ‘inhale’ and ‘exhale’ and some movements for my students to follow along. I’ve been thinking about it on and off all day, but it just isn’t clear what the best -or worst- thing to happen is.

I know some people don’t write with all this kind of preparation. A few people can dig right into the novel and write from Once Upon a Time and go until The End and have a story when they finish. Often it has to be dusted out of the wreckage of several drafts, but that’s the fun of writing, isn’t it?

I’m curious what you do to find your answers to those questions when you’re writing or when you’re planning a big project. Do you wait for inspiration to strike, or do you hunt down the answers to those questions with single-minded ferocity?

Posted on by ransomnoble 2

Criticism or Ridicule?

Free speech is a beautiful thing. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and has the ability to express it.

But, sometimes, I wonder what the point of expressing an opinion in a certain way is. I love to read. I love to write. I love this form of expression – and many of you who follow me on Google+ or Facebook will have noticed the YouTube video Words Are My Sandbox.

I learned from reviewing other authors and from working in critique groups that often it’s good to sandwich the bad stuff inside the good things you find about the piece. There are some where it can be difficult to find something nice. There are also venues with spoken-only reading and critique where it is easy to focus on just one flaw and miss all the rest of the beauty of that segment. Many groups implement rules about how to treat other writers and others try to focus on how professional the advice may be – but nearly all of them are not about tearing down an amateur. I know I never would want to be the reason someone decides to stop expressing opinions through words.

How does that change when someone becomes a big name professional? Why is it that I hear conversations where people discuss only the bad aspects of some series and trash the author for it? There are so many examples, but here are two:

1. Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight series seems to take a bad rap from a lot of people. I know many who love the novels and read them again and again. I read them and enjoyed them, but they’re not something that will draw me to read them 50 million times. I’ve heard people call them nothing but a teenage romance and think it’s awful for a 110 year old man (or however old Edward’s character was at the time of publication) to be after a 17 year old girl. Whatever else you say about them, didn’t Meyer make some interesting characters?

2. J. K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter series has throwbacks to the British boarding school novels. Sure. I’m sure there were other critics, possibly about the whole good versus evil thing. But there were rich things in the story, too, that some of the amateur people won’t admit.

Maybe it boils down to jealousy or something else I can’t easily name. I don’t think a single novel will fit every reader out there – which is why we have so many different genres and subgenres and points of view on everything. I wonder if that’s how you know you’re successful – that there are people out there trying to trash your accomplishment. Perhaps I’m just too thin-skinned and I worry what people will say about my work if it’s out there more. It hasn’t stopped me from pursuing publishing yet, and it isn’t likely to in the future.

I can acknowledge that many of the authors I read and enjoy have flaws. Some of them take much less flack than others, but some are much better known than the rest, too. It doesn’t make anyone more discerning to burn another in effigy.

Next time you want to stomp all over someone else’s expressed art, think to yourself- did I even try to see the good in it? What is it about this that so many people find fascinating? We don’t have to “agree to disagree” (don’t get me started on the wrongness of this phrase) or agree on anything at all, but it might be nice to acknowledge that not everyone who disagrees with you is completely wrong. And, also, that the tired, worn-out, dog-eared copy of whatever your favorite novel is has its own baggage. Peace!

Posted on by ransomnoble 4

Deep Thoughts

Often I get magazines for one thing or another, and I like to read them when I have a moment. Recently I got a copy of Working Mother. The magazine had a special edition about the 100 best companies to work for from the perspective of working mothers.

One thing keeps sticking with me. There are three developed countries who do not require companies to offer paid maternity leave: Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and the United States.

Back up. Wait. Really? Why don’t we learn that in other places like we would learn about the Family Medical Leave Act? Do we really want to think about the fact that until 1993 we didn’t even really have something from the government to protect women while they take time off to have children?

At this point, that act guarantees only 12 weeks unpaid leave. Many families can’t afford that. Yet we think about how much time we can take off in terms of how long we can be gone from our positions. Americans must be workaholics. We’re not thinking about taking time off in terms of putting our family together on a schedule. Not considering the changes that will occur when the new bundle arrives. Not planning on discovering how their lives have to flex and going from there. No – it’s all about how much time you can afford to be out of your job.

Right- this shouldn’t be my rant. I stay at home. I don’t want to miss so many things about my children. I don’t have jobs that would pay me to be off since they’re based on my attendance and the students’. Then again, I have friends and acquaintances who tried or were expected to return to a full time schedule a mere two weeks after childbirth.

Why do we think this is acceptable? A woman hasn’t really recovered from the birth at that point. She definitely hasn’t had time to adjust to having a new life dependent on her. Many infants aren’t even close to having a schedule to allow either parent to have slept enough to be functional.

Sometimes I wonder if we know how much we’re missing. A friend of mine told me last night how she considers staying home. She knows there are more challenges with that – she and I speak often about how our lives are progressing. But she and her husband were on vacation with their young toddler and she realized how much she wanted to be part of her son’s daily life. Not that she isn’t – she spends quality time with him every day. She’s a great parent and so is her husband. Like many companies, however, she doesn’t have the flexibility to make her schedule less daunting. Some positions are like that. Many companies make them that way even if they don’t need to be.

Is it the workaholic nature of our culture that we feel this way about working and revolve everything else around that? Or is it that we don’t really value this part of our society except on an individual level? Our schools are falling farther behind and one look at Facebook will tell you how many adults can’t – or won’t – use anything close to proper English among “peers.”

Maybe I forgot we live in a capitalistic society. We follow the money – and right now it’s leading out of here because we’re not the best educated, not the most creative, not the ones to set the bar anymore. Do you ever wonder – what happened?

Posted on by ransomnoble 0

Does the World Need Another Fill-in-the-Blank?

I’m looking at writing an urban fantasy novel for NaNoWriMo. One of the challenges is to understand the market where I think this book would be placed. How often do you think about the market you’re going to be in before you write the book? I can’t say I do it often, though it is somewhere in the back of my mind when I’m thinking about a project.

Part of the trouble is that it’s difficult to imagine my book alongside the ones I take home and read. Not that I won’t be thrilled when that happens, it’s just difficult to picture ahead of time. Sometimes the closer I get, the farther it feels to the eventual goal. I have a published book out there, though it isn’t on the physical shelves of the bookstore. Some days that is hard to remember.

Today I was asking friends about urban fantasy novels they enjoyed. I know I’ve read a few, but I’m curious what draws in others who read that genre. I’ll also be making a trip to the bookstore this week to see what I haven’t read on the shelves that might be interesting or in the same market segment. The tough part might be keeping that list up to date by the time I get this manuscript ready to put in front of someone who can do something about the book-on-physical-shelf thing.

My answer to the title question is yes. It doesn’t matter how many urban fantasy genre books there are – mine will still be different. It’s like so many other things that take time and effort and seem to be a dime a dozen (bloggers and novelists can both fit in this category). If you want to make it work, do it. If you’re going to allow yourself to be daunted by the established names in the field, you’re toast. I’m working toward my goals and I won’t be afraid of failing. The only thing to be afraid of is not trying.

Posted on by ransomnoble 0

Focus

How often do you track your personal and professional goals and judge how you use your time toward those goals? I know every so often I come back to my focus and see how it comes together and try to understand if I’m concentrating on the right activities for what I want to accomplish.

That’s always the ticket with me: is this going to fulfill my goals and is it worth my time? Time is incredibly precious and sometimes it seems completely based on perception. Is it my perception that time is dropping from an eyedropper to mimic the slowness of certain activities? Is it my perception that it magically speeds faster than light when I’m having fun? How am I supposed to judge similar activities as the same time – or not – if my brain is screaming that one went too fast and the other too slow?

Then there’s the other part about whether or not activities are productive. One goal is to be published. That cannot be achieved without doing specific work to help it along: writing, editing, revising, researching markets, submitting to markets, and responding to feedback when received.

There are other things that I track as far as goals are concerned. Sometimes it takes convincing to decide something isn’t worth the effort. Often when the time comes to let go of an activity, there are issues like commitments to other people and also overall enjoyment to consider. But if you never evaluate what you’re doing and how it reflects the goals you have, how do you know you’re doing what you ought to be doing?

A line on Big Bang Theory talked about how one of the characters, Sheldon Cooper, spent over 3000 hours on an online multi-player role playing game. I’m sure his character would have loved every minute of that and thought of it as quite an achievement. I know other people who use games to ‘kill’ time, and I wonder if that’s ever the best use of time. You have nothing at the end except a higher score or a different color badge. What do you gain? If it’s relaxation, then all may be well and good. If at the end you’re tense because some troll ate your carrot field and you have to start over, perhaps there’s another hobby that will suit you better. I stopped playing several games when I realized they weren’t giving me anything. Now I stick with Sudoku and a version of Mah Jong for solitaire play. I don’t spend much time on it, but it’s fairly low key.

So it’s time to re-evaluate. I’ve been listing activities and things that I have been doing to meet them or things I could be doing to reach it in different ways. Sometimes one gets crossed off or my focus changes to incorporate a new perspective. One day it’ll all be worth it, and I count myself successful as I reach those goals, or sometimes even just making significant progress toward a goal.

How do you count success and keep yourself focused?

Posted on by ransomnoble 0

Speaking of Time

I’m sure it means I come from an overly technical background when I regularly have discussions and debates with my husband about how pregnant I am in months. It isn’t about whether or not the time is relative – 24 weeks is 24 weeks no matter what scale you use. [No, I’m not opening debate about how pregnant I am; I can be perfectly fine with the one the doctors use.]

But here’s where the debate lies: is 24 weeks equal to 6 months? My husband’s overly technical answer is no. He insists there are 4.3 weeks per month and that must be taken into account. I suppose he’s got a point, since there are 52 weeks in a year and 6 months is half a year, so 26 weeks, right? The issue there is that there are supposed to be 4 weeks in 1 month. Isn’t that what we learned when we were young? And 6 times 4 is 24. Feels like there ought to be wiggle room.

Then you add in the pregnancy thing being 40 weeks, give or take, and you get a messy tangle. Do you count that as ten months? Do you start the count from a different week to make things more confusing, but less difficult to say “I’m five months pregnant.” Do you ever wonder why we allow such discrepancies? Can’t it be fixed to say one month is so many days and so many weeks?

It’s probably just as easy as switching to the metric system. Something that is resisted in this country yet would make things easier once completed.

It also makes me think of time in books. Often I read science fiction and fantasy. Rarely is another time system used that isn’t based on Gregorian calendar. Many fantasy books turn months into moons, and it changes the pace and tone, but it’s a similar system. Science fiction often uses something along the same lines. Star Trek uses a stardate, but it’s simply a different way to state it.

One series I read by Gayle Greeno, The Ghatti’s Tale, had a system with eight days per week. At the time it made me wonder why more authors didn’t try something like that. Time and its passage isn’t a main focus in these novels or it might have become a problem. Like creating a new language and having to understand all the rules involved, time has its own issues. We think in terms of calendars we know. Once a reader has to convert all of the references into something that has no common point to the popular system of time measurement, it might give the reader a chance to check out and put the book down.

What do you think? Have you ever tried to create a time system for a book that didn’t have large similarities to the Gregorian calendar? Did it become a gargantuan task to keep everything straight in your head and your readers? How many books have you encountered that significantly altered the way time was measured for the story and did it change your opinion of the book?

Posted on by ransomnoble 2

For the Love of Words

I’m a writer, so it makes sense I’m also a word lover. I have an interesting group of friends that also appreciates words. Some of them are writers, and most read voraciously. We regularly have conversations with words that don’t come up often otherwise.

So sometimes when I encounter a student that doesn’t know a certain word that seems like it should be beneath his level, I wonder. How many of these words did the people in my peer group pick up from their reading habits? There are many thousands of words in the English language. I’ll admit I don’t know a fair chunk of them. Only one visit to Save The Words convinced me that there are many words in danger of extinction because the majority of the populace doesn’t use them.

How does someone figure out what level a word is? Sure, a word like blue is in the vocabulary of most with a high degree of understanding, with the exception of the percentage of population who are blind or color-blind in the blue spectrum.

An interesting thing at Word Count is that it counts instances used in our language. While it may not be a good measure of the difficulty of a word, since some large words are used a lot in business settings or to make fun of manager-speak – it can give insight into the exposure a person might have to a certain word.

A somewhat random sampling of their ranking includes:
the – 1
and – 3
blue – 973
navy- 4252
cerulean – 69082 (For those who don’t know, it’s a shade of blue.)
conquistador – 86800 (And the last word listed at the moment.)

It kept me busy yesterday finding the approximate relation of all the rainbow colors. It also helped me understand why some people might have a common vocabulary in the beginning stages, but learn words sporadically as the rank increases.

What direction would you wander in to find the relative difficulty of a word? How do you choose which words to use for whatever level of reader you want to target in your writing? How often do you use some strange word because it’s exactly the one you need even if it requires someone to check in a dictionary? The word lover in me is poised on the edge of my chair to know.

Posted on by ransomnoble 0

Home From the Reunion

It might seem odd to some, that I went to a high school reunion this weekend for a school from which I didn’t technically graduate. However, I moved there for the last bit of third grade and stayed to the end of tenth grade, and we were more well-known to each other than I could manage from any other school I attended K-12. (There were six others. It’s probably a wonder I managed to stay in one place so long.)

It was disappointing that more of my classmates couldn’t make it, but I was pleased to see some of our elementary school teachers. One fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teacher were in attendance, only one of them still a full-time teacher. I suppose that ought to remind me how long ago elementary school was. While I wasn’t in that particular fourth grade section, I had both the others.

When I saw them (and it took a little bit for us to recognize each other), I remembered how many stories I made them sit and read through in my journal at the time. I always wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t understood to me at the time that I was a writer – one who writes. I filled the journal even then at different paces, some days filling in pages with my messy scrawl and others barely the minimum requirement. I don’t think they watched me too much on the minimum. I’m glad I got the chance to thank them for reading all that stuff I was so intent on spinning out.

Have you thanked a teacher lately? Especially one who took the time to encourage you when you were younger and make sure you weren’t so overwhelmed or lost that you gave up entirely? I know a lot of people think about teachers not as people but as little units of things that ought to get done. Perhaps it just seems that way during union talks or when there are cuts or something like No Child Left Behind. (Don’t get me started on that one.) Are there teachers out there you remember who helped you out? Who gave you something interesting to look forward to?

They hadn’t heard I was a published author now. Sometimes word travels slow, even in the small towns where I once attended a school that only seems familiar to the locals. Perhaps they’ll carry the word onward to the others who might have taught me. My former classmates got to see The Art of Science, too. Some of them have kids that age already, which is hard for me to imagine, since mine are 2.5 and forthcoming.

I’m really glad I went to the reunion. Despite my missing classmates, I did get to catch up with a few I really wanted to see. And here’s to all the rest who perhaps missed me there, and maybe I’ll catch them in another five years or more.

Posted on by ransomnoble 0