Three years (or so)

Time is the enemy

noreply@blogger.com (donmonty) — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 06:42:00 +0000

Hard to believe it's been oh, about four months since I last updated this thing...my appologies to anyone who's dropped by hoping for an update. Unfortunately the refined art of book writing is a bit harder to learn than I'd expected; next time I'll be more focussed, more organized, not so concerned about getting the language just right the first time. Hard to admit it, but it's a hard lesson any writer needs to learn: doesn't matter what you've written, rewritten and rewritten again, no matter how perfect you think your prose is at the time, there's another way to write it, a better way to write it, a faster, less wordy way to write it.

Ahh, if only I hadn't thought of a new plot twist that just has to go in, which means a substantial readjustment in the manuscript. We're talking surgery from chapter one. But it does give my main character a little more substance, and he's finally making the much needed shift from passive to active. Good and bad, I suppose.

Which finally brings me to the subject line. Time really does slip away too fast; you get caught up in real life so quickly, so absolutely, that you blink and all of a sudden it's almost next year. Hell on the writing process. But that's not a bad thing either. As a writer I think it's absolutely crucial to remain grounded in the real world, we do, after all, write about human emotions and experience. Doesn't matter what the setting is, time period, theme, subject: any narrative that involves people must be inhabited by real descriptions of people. Otherwise they're window dressing and as about as deep as a puddle.

Just means I have to find more time to write, use my time more effectively, and continue to slog away.

As for everyone out there, happy slogging to you too; as much as it sucks, someday it'll be over. And then you'll have a book.

Second rewrite

noreply@blogger.com (donmonty) — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 06:21:00 +0000

So...I finished work on my manuscript back in January. Completed the storyline and tied up a few of the loose ends which were still stubbornly hanging around after two years' work. From January until about the middle of this month I was busy rewriting the entire thing, tying up the rest of the loose ends and otherwise making my prose readable.

At least that's what I thought.

Turns out, after completing the first rewrite and trying to read the story again, I've decided it needs a second workover to tie up the loose ends I created by, you guessed it, tying up loose ends. It's so ironic and sad I could cry. Oh, and lets not forget that I've decided that my previous style of writing was a little too jumpy and unfocussed; needs a little sharpening on the details and, well, so forth and so on. In other words, now that I've finished my book for the second time, I've started on round three. Since I won't consider this monster done until I can read it from start to finish without having any questions or issues with the plot, language, style, pacing, etc, it looks like I'm going to be at this for a while.

Word of advice: Don't spend the money printing copies of your manuscript until you are SURE, and I mean SURE that it's good enough for someone else to read. Otherwise you end up with a mountain of extra paper that you can't really send to anyone. Yay for me...

Still, in case you're starting to wonder, I can't help but love the writing process. That process has a steep learning curve, and as much as it might be described in writing guides, by other authors, by teachers or whatever, not one of those sources is as powerful or as worthwhile as learning it on your own. As hard and tiring as it is, it's still rewarding every time I accomplish something, even if I'm the only one who knows about it.

Quick note

noreply@blogger.com (donmonty) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 01:09:00 +0000

New day, new blog template and new look. Thanks Foxy, for making it work.

Finally focussed

noreply@blogger.com (donmonty) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 03:38:00 +0000

This blog started as a brief and failed attempt to write about anything and everything that popped into my head. Not surprisingly, I've been fairly vacant for the last three months. Make that entirely vacant. So, I've decided to delete the random posts I've already made, and redefine this little page's purpose. I am and shall remain an unpublished author for a substantial period of time. Anyone who's told you writing a book and getting it published is difficult wasn't lying. It is an ASTRONOMICAL amount of work. Sure, the writing might be fun, even interesting, but to make any story good, you need to painstakingly research the topics you're discussing and examine and justify each character's actions and reactions to specific stimuli and plot points. You do this in order to connect with your readers in some basic, gut level way and, naturally, to make your story realistic enough to suspend disbelief.

Now, by no means last or least of the challenges every writer faces, especially the first time around, is the rewrite. I'm talking the months of soul destroying work that goes into taking a draft (which when you first finish it figure it's about 75% done) and turning it into something legible and, hopefully, interesting. The initial estimate of 75% is about 74% too high, because you will find that several things changed over the course the writing. First is style. If it takes you a year or so to pound out 500 manuscript pages, by the time you finish you'll have (hopefully) grown in some meaningful way. That means your perception of what is good writing and what sucks is going to change, and all those really good sentences you thought were in the first draft turn out to read like 3rd rate garbage. Second is the direction of the story, the themes, the embedded message as it were. As you change, so does your perception of the world around you, and that must be reflected in your writing. Whoever said a real artist puts nothing of themselves into their work was an idiot and, obviously, not a very good artist. Art is the exploration of self, the culmination of an individual's emotion as translated into another medium. Whatever medium that turns out to be, be it paint, sound, film, verse, movement, etc., affects how that emotion is protrayed, received and processed. If you want to be a writer, in my limited opinion, you have to consider how your words are going to affect your reader.

That means meter, among other things. Every sentence in English, every word and sound produced, conforms to certain conventions. Instinct tells us how many syllables we should use, which words should go next to one another, and which constructions we should avoid at all times. Like the lyrics of your favourite song, prose has to flow a certain way, otherwise it doesn't read right and it certainly doesn't sound right when you try to vocalize it. In other words, if you can't read one of your sentences out loud without stuttering, struggling or leaving off with the wrong intonation (command v. question, pause v. bridge), you're probably looking at something you should re-write. Less is more when it comes to prose, a rule I seem to have broken here. I could go on, but I think I'll save a more in depth exploration of the above noted problems for another time.

Also, you can look forward to hearing from me about plugging plot holes, because that one's a bitch and a half.

Later.

Thoughts on a bridge

noreply@blogger.com (donmonty) — Sun, 07 May 2006 17:54:00 +0000

Fictional Origins

noreply@blogger.com (donmonty) — Sun, 07 May 2006 17:23:00 +0000

Chapter 1 of the continuing saga

Three years ago I was living in the town of Cinder Forte. I'd just graduated from university and, typical of the time, hadn't really thought about what to do afterwards. In debt and with little to no prospects, not to mention working a dead end job at an evil and overbearing retail establishment (although 'establishment' tends to confer a bit more respect than I'd like), I approached an old mentor of mine and asked for his advice. It was a bit of a long shot; I hadn't ever been a particularly involved or dedicated pupil, but he did, in fact, have a few ideas. One happened to be the prospect of doing graduate work in a faraway place, a kingdom of sorts in the region of Moth Nail. If I managed to convince the instructors there to take me in, I'd have to travel cross country, through a great many strange and hostile places; at my disposal I would have only a small amount of money, gifted by a well to do, if miserly, father, and my limited knowledge of several languages. I should mention that two of those languages happened to be dead and gone a few thousand years. There would be no place to live upon arriving in Moth Nail, no prearranged contacts and little to no resources. Perfect. Not really, but I hated where I was sufficiently, it seems, to have agreed. Whether my mentor felt it was time I pass one last test before throwing me outright into the world, I don't know. All I knew was that I had two weeks to convince those instructors to accept me.