Writing

Outlining

I see my story as a movie. That’ s just how my imagination works. I see scenes from camera angles and imagine the little black blips that pop up on the movie screen at the theater. And it always tends to be like a trailer from the beginning. You know what I mean, two minutes of the best scenes mashed together with big, bold words cut in between. You see a dozen of the movie’s best lines, three or four amazing actions scenes, all narrated by a gravelly voice. I have always been a sucker for a good trailer. And that’s how I see my story. I see all my favorite scenes, the ones that are the reason I’m writing the whole book to begin with, where the tension is at its height and the most memorable events happen. But a good story is an undulating wave of tension. It…

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A Conversation With Stephen King

I wrote that title and realized it looked like I had a conversation with Stephen King. Damn, I wish. I would give my left arm to do that. On Writing changed the way I thought about writing. Stephen King isn’t my favorite author, and I hate some of his stuff, but if there is one thing I can say about him, he is unique. He takes risks, he is unafraid to be criticized, and he writes. And writes. And writes. And…well, you get the idea. What it really is is the video below. Whether or not you like his work, there is a ton you can learn about writing. Around the fifteen minute mark he talks about how he came up with the Green Mile and Cujo. Holy crap. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, at least watch that.

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On Using Distractions

I was reading through some of my blog posts from the old Story Arcs and I saw one about writers block. In particular, it was about how one of the things I did to work through it, cutting through distractions. First, I’d like to say that a lot of people say there’s no such thing, there are just writers not writing, allowing things to get in the way or too afraid of “messing up” to put words on paper. That’s not important, not to my point anyway.  It surprised me because things have changed bit since then. Eliminating distractions is often essential to getting things doen, but for a while now I’ve actually been using them. My favorite way to write at the moment is to put Netflix on one side of the screen and Word (or WordPress at the moment) on the other. Then I burn through some TV…

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A Novel In How Many Days?

While I was on hiatus, I read this series of posts by Dean Wesley Smith. The link just takes you to the first day, there are nine more and each one is more valuable than the last. Basically, he writes a full 70,000 word novel in ten days and documents his progress across each day. Ten friggin’ days. I remember when I first started writing, spending months on a single chapter. Don’t look at me like that, I was fourteen. I thought the struggle was part of the process. And that’s part of what is so great about Mr. Smith. I don’t agree with everything he states about publishing, but he serves as an essential counterbalance to everything else you hear in the industry. He is all about debunking the myths of writing and publishing, to the point he has a book called Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing, much of…

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