I am working on my novel “One Dead Blonde” - mostly translating typewritten pages into a digital format. By the time, this is published, I hope to have moved onto starting “Chasing Ashes”.
One thing I will be doing is using the novelWriter software. So far, I have figured out how to input text; I still need to figure out how to format that text. It always for organizing characters, plot, and themes. How needs to be worked out, too. What I am thinking is it will help me better organize what I am writing. I cannot keep everything in my head. Time and the damage done won't let me do that any longer. I will let you know how it works. From its creator:
The idea to make novelWriter came about because most good software i could find for fiction writing seemed to focus its development on Windows and MacOS. Even those that had once supported Linux, had decided to drop the support.
As a Linux user for many years, this was very disappointing to me, so I started making my own editor, the way I imagined I wanted it. At that time I had mostly fallen back on writing my novel projects in LibreOffice Writer. While it is an excellent word processor that I still use often, it lacked many features I was looking for. I wanted an editor where I could split everything up into chapters or scenes, and move them about as I wanted. I also wanted to have all my notes in the same place, and be able to cross-reference them in my text.
Why I worry about organizing, Part One: How to Connect Plot Points and Keep the Story Moving (Helping Writers Become Authors)
Many writers discover that connecting the plot points of a story is far harder than identifying them. It’s easy enough to name the big turning points on a beat sheet, but when you sit down to write the pages that bridge those landmarks, the story can feel as if it’s stalling in the middle. The real challenge (and the true power of story structure) lies in shaping the in-between sections so they carry momentum. If you want to know how to keep your story moving between the big moments, it helps to look at those stretches as purposeful sequences that grow out of one turning point and drive the story to the next.
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...We can often lose sight of the fact that the real magic of story structure isn’t in the beats, but in the way the sections around them build, shift, and propel us forward. Part of the reason we might fall into this dilemma is that it can be easy to think of a story’s beats/plot points as distinct from the surrounding scenes. The truth is that the beats must be part of a seamless chain of story events, each one building into the next. The beats are distinct simply in that they represent important nodes of transformation.
I may be doing some of the following, but am I doing them well?
Why I worry about organizing, Part Two: how am I dealing with The Midpoint in Story Structure: Self-Recognition and Identity (Helping Writers Become Authors)?In This Article:
“Who am I?” is the question that echoes beneath every character arc. At the story’s Midpoint, that central query rises to the surface. This central beat—this all-important Moment of Truth in story structure—functions most symbolically as a moment of self-recognition. It is a mirror held up to the protagonist, often by the antagonist, that reveals both the Lie the Character Believes and the thematic Truth that can no longer be ignored.
From the perspective of plot structure, the Midpoint functions as the central turning point. Everything in the first half leads up to it, and it sets up all the outcomes that happen in the second half. It is perhaps most potently a moment of revelation. This is true practically in the external plot, in which a Plot Revelation opens the protagonist’s eyes to the true nature of the conflict and what will be required to overcome its obstacles.
This is also true within the character arc, as the Midpoint’s Moment of Truth deepens the character’s understanding of the inner conflict that is both driving and driven by the character’s attempts at forward momentum in the external plot. The Midpoint sets up a critical revelation in which the character clearly sees the value of the story’s thematic Truth—the more effective and/or expanded perspective that will be required in order to finally achieve success.
Why? Because I am neurotic. Because I cannot always differentiate the trees and the forest. Because I worry so much about the content and style of my sentences. Which is why I read Are You Writing Effective Sentences? (Writing Forward). The sentences are trees that make up the forest.
In literature, language is what makes a piece of writing tick. The plot and characters move through time and space on their own accord, but the words you use to tell their story give it rhythm and clarity. That’s why writing effective sentences is paramount for any writer.
Choosing the right words to describe what’s happening in a piece of writing can be challenging. A writer might spend an hour looking for a word that accurately captures the sentiment that he or she is trying to convey. Sentence structure is even more critical. A weak word is like a missed beat, but a weak sentence is discord. It confuses readers, pulls them out of the story, and breaks the flow of the narrative.
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Build your vocabulary: Nothing makes a sentence sing like words that are precise and vivid. Expand your arsenal by building your vocabulary. Read a lot and look up words you don’t know. Peruse the dictionary. Sign up for a word-of-the-day newsletter. Keep a log of vocabulary words and spend a minute or two each day adding to it and studying your new words. One of the best ways to master language and vocabulary is through poetry exercises.
Avoid repetition: Nothing deflates a piece of writing like the same descriptive word unnecessarily used over and over. She had a pretty smile. She wore a pretty dress. She lived in a pretty house. This kind of repetition robs a story of its imagery, making it flat and two-dimensional.
Use a thesaurus: A thesaurus will help you avoid unnecessary repetition. Many writers avoid thesauri, thinking that reliance on one constitutes some writerly weakness. But your job is not to be a dictionary or a word bank; it’s knowing how to find the perfect words and then use them when writing effective sentences.
Read drafts aloud to check the rhythm and flow: Reading aloud is great for catching mistakes and typos, but it can also help you with flow and rhythm. Take it a step further and record yourself reading an excerpt aloud. Does it flow naturally? If you keep tripping over your own sentences, there may be a problem with rhythm. Try alternating sentence lengths, breaking long sentences into shorter sentences, and joining sentences together to fix the flow.
Pay attention to word choice: Why refer to something as a loud noise when you can call it a roar, a din, or a commotion? The more specific you are in your writing, the more easily the reader will be able to visualize whatever you’re communicating. Choose words that are as precise, accurate, and detailed as possible.
Simplify: Run-on sentences and short sentences strung together with commas and conjunctions create a lot of dust and noise in a piece of writing. In most cases, simple, straightforward language helps bring the action of a story to center stage. Use the simple subject-verb-object sentence structure to keep the text flowing and prevent readers from getting confused.
Avoid filler words: I’ve gone back to this article several times since I first read it and have already passed it along to several writers I work with. In short, don’t tell the reader what the character is thinking, wondering, or feeling unless it’s essential to the narrative. Let the story’s action take its course and move the story forward.
Brush up on grammar: Nothing will clean up your writing more than using good, old-fashioned grammar. Pick up a grammar or style guide (a good starter is The Elements of Style) and spend some time mastering the rules. Yes, rules are made to be broken, but make sure you have a good reason when you break the rules, and make sure doing so doesn’t impede the readability of your work.
I ran across The Writer's Workout blog. I have linked to directly on the blog and have saved its RSS feed. Why? Because I feel this need to keep an eye on the basics.
I get the newsletter from Beyond Craft, Joe Ponepinto's Substack. I quote below from one of his posts. I recommend anyone interested in writing do the same.
The “Perfect” First Draft - by Kristen Weber
Because here’s the truth: if you keep waiting for the perfect first draft—the perfect anything—you’ll wait forever.
There is no perfect first draft. There’s only the one you start.
Every published novel began as something far messier than its author will ever admit: tangled plots, flat characters, entire scenes that make zero sense. But that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. A first draft isn’t meant to shine—it’s meant to exist.
Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life by Gerri Kimber - review by Sophie Oliver (Literary Review)
Perhaps, in the shadow of so many stories told about Mansfield, Kimber did not want to risk any falsehoods. Mansfield herself, by contrast, was dedicated to a mix of truth and artifice. ‘I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s real familiar life,’ she told one correspondent in 1922, a year before she died. Mansfield spent her last few months in Fontainebleau, studying (along with Orage) under the mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Long attracted to spiritualism, in her dying days she was still restlessly seeking meaning – another story – to give shape to her life.
Award-winning author speaks at Writer-in-Residence program (Ball State Daily)
One of the main pieces of advice Gonzales shared on campus was to step outside of the box.
“Read lots of different types of books, different genres for different ages,” Gonzales advises.
Gonzales's exploration of genres can be displayed in the vast selection of her work. Her novels The Red Umbrella, Concealed, and the graphic novel Invisible are some of her most popular works that tend to resonate with younger audiences.
“The excitement that they have over stories is contagious. All of a sudden, you realize that your choice of words and ideas can stimulate this reaction within people,” Gonzales said.
I will close out with some videos I have been listening to, lately:
Pine Hills Review
Some cold water from Joe Ponepinto's Beyond Craft How Much Time Do You Spend on Marketing Versus Writing?
... The commercial publishing industry seems happy with the status quo in which social media marketing provides book sales, regardless of the quality of the writing. As long as a book sells it is a good book. It says something about our culture, however.
What can we as serious writers do about it? I am not particularly optimistic here. I know my opinions about marketing, self-promotion, and how the publishing industry ought to work are considered out of date and out of touch. I hold little hope that writers can organize and achieve a level of influence that publishing companies would have to take seriously.
Which led me to William Deresiewicz's How Art Lost Its Way (Persuasion), and back to where I started.
But the audience needs to cooperate. It needs to want to go beyond itself. And that it did, in the decades after World War II, in the midst of the “culture boom,” with the expanding and aspiring middle class. Sure, there was a lot of bullshit there—a lot of status-mongering, a lot of pretension, a lot of middlebrow “art appreciation.” But there was also a lot that was real: a real desire for expanded consciousness, for spiritual depth, for a world made new by art, especially among the young and especially in New York.
And that is what I don’t see anymore. I have no doubt that there is still strenuous art being made, and that it is being received with attention and written about with intelligence. But almost all of that activity, as far as I can tell, is happening in coteries, in social niches and geographic pockets: poets doing readings for other poets, art that isn’t seen outside of Bushwick, critics writing for specialized websites or personal Substacks. What’s gone missing, in a society that long ago excused itself from seriousness, is a broader sense that art is urgent business, that your life, in some sense, depends on it. With that goes the mass audience. With that goes not only the possibility of meaningful criticism, but also its point. No one needs help understanding White Lotus, or Amanda Gorman, or Sally Rooney. For such creations, we can make do with “cultural criticism”—moralistic agendas, topical talking points, biographical chitchat—which is not arts criticism but a simulacrum thereof, and which any self-respecting gender studies major can produce.
Two further losses should be tallied here. The first is that other mediating institution, college. That is where you were supposed to begin your apprenticeship to the idea that there are traditions of thought and expression that it is your obligation to make yourself worthy of. There used to be a teacher at Columbia, an instructor in the great books program, who was famous for including in his final a question that ran, more or less, “Which of the books that we read this year did you find the least interesting, and what failing in you does that reveal?” Now, of course, a work like Moby-Dick is brought into the classroom not to be learned from but hectored. Or would be, if it were even still taught, which it isn’t, because students won’t read it, because they can’t.
What led my thoughts when I was in the deepest throes of my depression was that nothing matter, nothing I did mattered, that the Universe was a grimy place and I went into some of its grimiest corners. What keeps me from going back, to fight against what fed my depression and its attendant nihilism, is the belief that I cannot cure anything, but I can stand against the grimy BS that threatens to swallow us whole. I can do my best to not make things worse.
You may want to take a look at Persuasion, Yascha Mounk's Substack, but that is for reasons beyond writing.
sch 11/08
Heads up! from a Short Story Judge by E. L. Tenenbaum has five tips; the first four seem obvious to me, but this one is not:
5. Solid over Florid
Although many writers try to stand out with clever twists or showy vocabulary, neither can beat a solidly told story of sound structure. As there’s so many entries, there’s some measure of gratitude when coming across an easy-to-read, well-told, tightly written story which relies less on the unexpected (though it may include that as well) and more on solidity. Stories without wasted words, scenes, or characters are impressive for the writer’s skill and craft, and judges take notice.
sch 11/14
Ann Lamott, Writing As A Debt of Honor – a full-length talk by Anne Lamott (yes, another Lamott video because I think her Bird by Bird was one of the books that I found most helpful).
Ooh, key on the verbs.
11/16
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