Ready to join tens of thousands of writers around the world and write a draft of your novel in 30 days? November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, and whether you register officially on the website and follow the rules (175-pages/50,000 words) or not, it is a great time to take advantage of collective creative steam. And in order to try, you must truly give yourself permission to work quickly, and messily, through the first draft. Is it a good idea? Yes, if you get the basics of your novel clear first. According to NaNoWriMo rules, you can begin …
Author: Sarah Lovett
Deep Problems, Big Story
When it comes to creating a great protagonist, the character with the biggest, deepest problem wins. In my last blog entry–Does Your Story’s “Equation” Add Up?– I touched on the terms “story catalyst” and “deep-story problem”. I want to discuss them both in a bit more depth because they are crucial to the creation of a marketable story. A truly effective story catalyst (also referred to as inciting incident) kicks off the narrative, hooks the reader, and sets the protagonist on a journey (dealing with the deep-story problem) that will end in a life-changing crisis and climax. Because they are …
Does Your Story’s “Equation” Add Up?
As an author, 2010 is my year of collaboration. I’ve been working with former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson on a female-driven espionage action thriller. At times the process has included input from our two literary agents, select editors, a film agent, and various sub-rights agents on other continents. Needless to say, I’ve had story mechanics for highly commercial books on my mind. In my work as a coach and consultant, I read manuscripts on a regular basis. Often, I can identify what’s working–or not–within the first 20 pages. Assuming you are aiming to sell to a publishing house, your …
Fiction, the Mind, and Ghosts
“So far we’ve looked at two places where you can put the character emotion you’ve stripped out of your dialogue mechanics–into the dialogue itself and into the language of your descriptions written from an intimate point of view. A third place is interior monologue. Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to touch.” From Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King In other words: The fiction writer …
Quote of the Day on Point of View
Today’s quote from Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass: “Point of view is more than just a set of eyes looking upon the world. Those eyes come with a mouth and a brain. Those must come into play, too, or your novel will have the chilliness of a movie camera. There may be times when objective point of view is useful, but by and large it is best to use the singular advantage that the novel has over other art forms: the ability to bring us deeply inside a character’s experience.”
Dreaming Awake
“Creative writers make believe. They train themselves sharply to observe the world around them, to notice the unnoticed. They reach back into their past lives for rich characters, vivid settings, and meaningful events. But at some point, the search for raw material veers toward another source–it turns inward to what isn’t, wasn’t, and could never be, yet somehow seems right, real, and true.” From: THE CREATIVE PROCESS by Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley
Raise Your Voice to Break the Silence
When states in America raise the cry to censor ethnic studies, I shiver and pray that people everywhere raise their voices to louder decibels in protest. We don’t have to look far to find chilling examples of the evils of censorship. The excerpt below comes from Azar Nafisi’s eloquent book, READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN: “Our class was shaped within this context, in an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor for a few hours each week. There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state …
Writing in Time…
Having lost myself in time–for months at a time–I am sharing words of wisdom from Kenneth Atchity and his book, A WRITER’S TIME. “Like everything else in life, the process of revising your view of time begins with a decision. It’s a matter of willing to change your life by starting today to manage your time and understand its relationship to work and personal satisfaction. Here are some starting points, gleaned from my own experience and that of some other time-management experts: *Stop doing things no one needs to do. *Stop doing things someone else will do if you stop …
Of All the Stupid Things
As my friend, writer Alexandra Diaz, celebrates the publication of her wonderful debut novel, Of All the Stupid Things, she also shares some advice and thoughts about the writing life. *What advice do you have to writers? If writing is what you really want to do then keep at it, and keep at it some more. All artists encounter people who tell them that they will never make it, but you’re the only one who can make that decision. *What do you think was the most crucial move you made in your writing life that pushed you toward publication? Whether …
Frosty Molecules of Story
“A shimmering Image is a memory that rises in your consciousness like a photograph pulsing with meaning…” Lisa Dale Norton, Shimmering Images, A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir Photo credit: Danny Lehman