Glenn Mori, crafting with words, notes and thoughts
Fiction, jazz, and other stuff!
It’s fun to be inside the world of a novel.
I haven’t been this far inside the creation of a new novel in a very long time. Around 2013 I started to focus on improving my prose which led to shorter works. At the time I had a novel in the works but I had difficulty with the ending so I put it aside. Last spring I picked it up and finished it, but finishing an old novel was a different experience than the creation process that I’m in now.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently published an article I wrote: “We Let Our Father Die”.
Looking from inside the character or story and trying to see what’s next can be difficult. Trying to visualize what is going to happen or what needs to happen based on tensions and history and theme is a lot like method acting except that the author has no script to follow. And yet as a pantser this is what I try to do to forage ahead in a story. Continue reading “Cheating Writers’ Block: Getting the Story Un-Stuck by Seeing Outside the Box”
Some claim writer’s block doesn’t exist. If you go all Zen it doesn’t exist but then neither does the writing.
Here’s a unique site I keep in my writing bookmarks.
If you don’t keep typing it will erase what you’ve done. If you hesitate, the font turns reddish-brown and fuzzy but it returns to normal if you begin typing again. If you don’t start typing as it is becoming fuzzier, a popup blocks you from adding any more words.
There a group of sites that I frequently use as thesaurus alternatives. They’re all created by the same person and use the same broad structure.
There was something in Mary Karr’s “The Art Of Memoir” that stuck with me.
I listened to this as an audiobook from the library so it’s difficult to quote exactly but the specifics are less important than the process. She mentioned searching for a scene from her life that showed an example of her father and, something. How he loved her or some other other characteristic.
What are your strengths and weakness as a writer?
You might look at:
Here’s how to make your computer help you find grammar and line editing problems. Awkward phrases, missing words, repeated words in close proximity, and repeated sentence length will be much more obvious and easier to identify to fix.
Continue reading “To help you edit, reverse your sentence order”