Behold! The game is afoot, and The Second Draft loometh ahead, apparently precipitous but in reality more easily ascendable than its predecessor. In this, my most excellent beta reader = Mom = my climbing buddy, having scouted ahead and come back to me with a report of the obstacles and pitfalls I shall face. And so, knowing that forewarned is forearmed…
This Creative Writing Exercise calls for market research: Choose the target audience for a work-in-progress and evaluate the document against its expectations.
All this talk of document structure has me thinking back on some of my older projects. As I said in yesterday’s article, the series I’m working on now is highly structured — every book packed with three acts, five chapters per act, two scenes per chapter.
My older work isn’t really like that, though. My first effort at including any sort of structure in a story was King Jason’s War, and that was my fourth novel. I wonder what I’d find if I looked really closely at Taming Fire, or even The Poet Alexander….
When I was in third grade (or maybe it was second), I wrote a poem about sunset, and rest. I did it in number 2 pencil on a sheet of wide-ruled paper torn out of a 78-cent spiral notebook. I illustrated the edges, with an angry sun and an optimistic moon, and my best effort at a seagull. I can remember this in such clear detail, because I’ve still got that page. It’s creased with folds, and the pencil’s faded, but I’ve still got it, tucked away somewhere. The meter is awful.
Later this week, I’m going to spend a lot of time talking to the creative writers about poetry, and on Friday they’ll get to write sonnets. I wouldn’t expect sonnets out of my technical writers, but I still recommend that you take the time to read Thursday’s article, when it comes around. Poetry is language distilled, and technical writing is all about efficiency, brevity, and impact. The approaches are different, but the destination is the same.
So this week I want you to be poetic, too.
Julie read my whole novel, and told me the female character was flat. Five hundred pages of adventure, magic, politics, armies at war and dragons in the air, and all she wanted to talk about was the love interest. The girl barely had two dozen pages! She barely had a backstory! But that’s all Julie wanted to talk about. I rolled my eyes at my “feminist friend,” but her comments bugged me.
You’ve heard it before, in any writing class you’ve ever taken. You’ve heard it from Nathan Bransford and Writer’s Digest and from me. You know it, you’ve always known it, but you’ve never really been able to follow through. Still, the fact remains: if you want to get better at writing, you need to practice writing every day.
Sit down at the poker table with four of your characters — whether you make up new ones for this assignment or mix and match from your works in progress. In 300-600 words, tell us about one hand, maybe just one round of bidding, but make it intense.
Tweet Or perhaps I should call it a Character Description. Whatever the case, I’m proud to announce UnstressedSyllables.com’s newest contributing author, Courtney Cantrell. Courtney is the co-creator of our Facebook writer’s group, Mightier than the Sword, and one of my dear friends. Though we’d run in overlapping social circles for years, I met her through […]
Tweet You had to see this one coming! After a week spent discussing introductions, it’s only logical to make that the assignment. But, more than that, it’s fun. Today you get to start a story you’ll never have to finish. Give it flash, give it bang. Promise big, and use up your entire special effects […]
