bookmark_borderJust writing moments; Doing the 3 Day Novel

Over the September long weekend I did the 3 Day Novel. I don’t want to write about that experience so much (though if you write fiction and have never tried it, give it a go!) but I went through a new, for me, writing experience in the process.

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bookmark_border“and the waiter asked if we needed a refill …”

A writing craft technique has appeared on my radar.

When building a scene you need characters and a setting. Plot is nice too. But often in a scene, especially one with heavy or important dialogue, the characters and dialogue will take over. As a writer you get into the scene, feeling the emotions, focusing on the back and forth, pulling the characters’ backstories and agendas over your own head like a bank robber with his nylon stocking, living the role.

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bookmark_borderReview and thoughts: The Surrendered

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately and not much writing. One of the recent reads is “The Surrendered” by Chang-rae Lee. As is always the case, I’m writing about it not for a scholarly review but to note “writerly” aspects that I’ve thought about.

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bookmark_borderReading, rather than writing

I’ve been a little annoyed / concerned about my lack of writing over the past few months, but then I realized that I’ve been doing a lot of reading.

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bookmark_borderWriting review: The Hunger Games

My writing reviews have been focused on fiction, but in this case I want to look at “The Hunger Games (Book 1)“, not so much the novel as the movie version. I read the book recently and then saw the movie this past weekend. As always there are the issues of discomfort over what is left out of the novel when it is turned into a movie, but for me in this case I wasn’t too concerned; the novel was borrowed so I speed-read the novel in 36 hours total time, less actual reading time when you deduct 8 hours for sleeping and 9 hours for work and so on, so my memory for the details was not precise to begin with.

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bookmark_borderWaiting to start again

The past month has been no writing. Some fiction reading, some learning from “The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing”, but no writing. My brain has been in a fog, uninspired, drained by a month spent moving from one house to another. If you’re moving, take my advice; don’t try to do it slowly. Too much wasted time and effort picking and choosing what to move first and last, too much panic at the end scrambling to throw the last bits into something and get it moved.

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bookmark_borderSewing together a new first draft

One of my objectives of having a blog is to track the learning experiences of the process of learning to write fiction so this particular entry is an attempt to log some of the things that I’ve noted recently. Currently I’m working on a second version of the first draft of my 3DayNovel. I don’t consider this to be a second draft as I’m not revising much of what has already been written; this is a second version of the first draft. At least that’s how I see it.

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bookmark_borderPost-NaNoWriMo 2011, or, Begining the second version of the 3DayNovel

So I didn’t make the 20,000 words in eleven days to total 50,000 for my manufactured NaNoWriMo for this year, but I did manage to come up with close to 15,000, and have kept at it since then, though at a much slower pace.

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