On Classic Novels
Sam
21:05
I really want to give up with Owen Meany too but I just hate to let books beat me.
It's like an obsession and it's disrupting my studies.
<blank>
21:06
You're right, you should keep torturing yourself with it.
Sam
21:06
But what if it gets really good, fast paced and modern in 20 pages time?
The guy can't spend 600 pages meandering!
<blank>
21:06
I like how you try to read "classic" books and torture yourself with them!
Sam
21:07
Well they're meant to be the best books of their kind. There's got to be something to learn from them.
<blank>
21:07
Nope.
Well. I take that back.
You can learn how not to bore 90% of the population to tears.
On Focus
I tried a different way of working last night. I usually write in the living room, perched on the edge of the settee, hunched over my laptop. I'm doing it right now. It's not particularly comfortable but this is the room I spend most of my time in because it's the warmest and the most comfortable. What that actually means is it's not a place where I can easily find discipline. There are my books, the TV, the internet to distract me. It's easy to slack off. So I made a change.
I took my laptop down to a small desk area in the basement part of my flat. There's no TV down there, it's colder, it's darker and there's too many walls for my wireless to get through. I sat down in a proper (read: good enough) office chair, turned on the music, made a list of things I wanted to get done and worked for two and a half hours straight. I edited two short scripts and wrote up two story ideas (one as pseudo prose and the other purely as notes). My mind skipped across a couple of other ideas in the middle of other pieces and I got a few more hand-written notes made.
So... For all people may talk about their special writing places, how nice they are, how comfortable they feel, how they feel inspired just by being in a particular room. I'm calling bullshit. You don't need to surround yourself with nice things to write. You just need a chair with good lumbar support, a good pair of noise cancelling headphones and to remove from your immediate vicinity those distractions you always find so tempting. Passion, dedication and discipline help too but that goes without saying. You've already got those.
Gravatars
I've tried to add Gravatar support to the theme. A gravatar is a global avatar (linked to your email address) and will appear next to your name in your comments. Feel free to create one before you post.
Don't be surprised if it doesn't show up first time though since I've been having issues with permissions in the avatar caching folder... If it fails to show your gravatar correctly feel free to drop me a message and I'll look into it.
Stories
I spent a good portion of time this evening hashing out a story idea with a couple of friends. It started by me asking one of the guys at work for a story idea. He came up with this...
"What if at night different people came into the office and worked for another company."
...and we ran with it. I won't bother going into the ideas it sparked. That's not the point here. What is important are the two things I realised during the discussion...
1. Collaborative story writing can be really good fun and another person can spin things in a direction you wouldn't even have considered on your own.
2. Doing this over IM can be especially productive as it's easy to refer back to earlier portions of the conversation as well as take a copy of the entire conversation for referring back to later.
One other thing is well illustrated by the following cutting.
<blank> says:
What you need
<blank> says:
is logical stepped out behavior that can lead to a conclusion BASED upon facts accepted as truth. That is true evil.
<blank> says:
When the conclusion makes sense based upon someones perceived reality, and that conclusion is horrible but to them it's the right thing to do.
<blank> says:
That's the crusades and the french revolution and slavery.
<blank> says:
It's -easy- to say people that took part in such things are 'evil', but they were just normal people with rationalization.
The motivations I came up with for the two main characters in the story were not realistic. They read like they'd be pulled right out of a comic or a cheesy movie. Now it's easy to blame that on my influences (comics and movies) but it's something that I need to work on in order to make my characters more believable and make my audience empathise with them more.
Thinking About Writing…
So the more I think about how I should be thinking about my writing, the harder I find it to think about my writing. Does that make sense? Possibly not. Anyway I've decided to just go with the flow. Rather than thinking through every little thing I write I'm going to keep a record of when I write and for how long. When I'm editing I'll keep a record of why I do or don't make any major changes and what people say about my work. That's it. We'll just see how we go. My brain is kind of overloaded with a million and one things I want to do, need to do or feel I possibly should do.
Nearly Done
WordPress really is quite good. The interface is awesome. The templates and plugins available are quite nice. This is before we mention the fact it's faster than Blogger too.
I've pretty much done with the customisations now. I'm quite liking the way the header looks even if it is a bit too bright on a MacBook. The contact form needs a CSS building from scratch on account of there not being a Natural template for it but that's definitely a job for another time.
Other than that I'm considering dumping the links onto a separate page and keeping the side bar for feeds only. We shall see.
Anyway, now that I've got my fancy environment set up with my shiny new domain I guess I'd better go write something...
Session Two
I'm now adding even more to my current workload. The class this evening was about keeping a journal of your writing. Not just that though. A journal in which you track how your writing develops, how you feel about it, what you read, what you write, when etc. I find the whole idea quite overwhelming. But we'll see... I guess the touchy-feely stuff can go in here and my notes on my stories can go in Scrivener...
How do I feel about my writing right now? I feel I want to do some. I feel like I've got a few solid ideas but I also feel like I've not given other ideas enough attention. I guess once I feel strongly enough about one of them I'll get on with it. After editing other people's work over the weekend I feel like I'm getting more of a handle on the whole thing. But I still need to really throw myself into one of my own ideas in order to feel good about my own stuff.
What next? Write up lecture notes. Copy story ideas somewhere sensible. Read script writing book. Write more prose. Write prose as script.
Onward with the reading! The zen stuff is all done. Next up we have Writing Short Films by Linda J. Cowgill.
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Motivations
It's so much easier to create motivations for people when you don't have to make them believable. If you just pick an archetype they come with ready made motivations that your readers are already familiar with and will more readily accept.