The Best Thing You’ve Ever Written
Photo © 2006 Churl Han CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Yesterday, I posted a status on Facebook about my new novel I’m working on: “This is a tear-jerker. Possibly the best story I’ll have written so far.”
That got me to thinking whether I’m conceited or deluded, to say that I’m now writing the best thing I’ve ever written. After all, who am I to say that anything I’ve written is worth anything?
Well, years and years of experience might have something to do with it, including all those stories I wrote that turned out to be utter crap. Enough people tell you that they really enjoyed such-and-such a story or such-and-such a book or such-and-such a blog post, and you begin to see the patterns that work and those that don’t.
But what if you don’t have those years of experience?
I believe that even if you’ve just started writing, you should be able to say that you’re writing “the best thing you’ve ever written.” Because everything you write should be better than what came before:
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10 NaNoWriMo Tips
National Novel Writing Month rolls around every November. And I usually don’t participate, although I may this year. (I threatened to last year, but those plans fell through.) My beef is that a writer should be writing all year round, not just during the month of November. In general, I see little to be gained by cramming a lot of word-generation into 30 days, when it takes so much more to create a viable novel.
On the other hand, NaNoWriMo is a fun event for many people. And it spurs some to become writers, rather than just talking about maybe writing someday. And it does increase the efficiency, and even the efficacy, of some writers. Because NaNoWriMo imposes a deadline, as well as social pressure to meet the deadline. Both of these can be very effective.
The thing you have to remember is that NaNoWriMo is a sprint, as opposed to a marathon. It’s a lot of energy, a lot of speed, dumping a lot of words, fast, for a short period of time. And it doesn’t encompass the whole novel-writing process, either. There’s a significant amount of planning you should do, which you ideally should be almost finished with by now. And afterward, there’s at least one editing pass, maybe two (story revision and line editing).
So in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, here are a number of tips for completing NaNoWriMo, taken from my own experience as a writer and culled from other writers around the Internet:
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I Wanna Write like Nora Roberts: 7 Tips for Prolific Writers
© 2008 Ed Yourdon CC BY-SA 2.0
As you may know, I’ve never been able to get through a Nora Roberts novel. I’ve always gotten bored or otherwise lost interest. So then why would I say that I want to write like her?
It’s not a joke. I seriously admire Nora Roberts as an author, even though her fiction is not for me. Here’s why.
Look at Nora Roberts’s history as a writer, even from the very beginning. She got started in 1979, when she first put pencil to paper, literally, to write a novel:
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Finding the Right Word: 7 Unusually Useful Online Word Tools
© 2008 Manuel M. Ramos CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Because I’m a writer, when one of my friends can’t think of the right word for what they’re trying to say, they turn to me. “You’re a writer. What’s the word I’m looking for?”
Hell if I know. What do I look like? A dictionary?
God’s honest truth: as a writer, I can never find the right word. This may surprise you. I know it surprises many of my friends. Well, you’d think I would know the right word for each job, judging from my writing skill. But in reality, my vocabulary sucks. I usually know the right word exists. I know I’ve heard it before, or read it before. It’s on the tip of my tongue. But I simply can’t think of what it is.
This is as true of English as it is of other languages that I (almost) know. I usually have little trouble with grammar, even in foreign languages, because grammar is based on a relatively small number of general rules that apply to most words and phrases and sentences, with only a few exceptions. But vocabulary, that’s 228,132 exceptions (and no real rules at all).
No wonder I never write unless I have a thesaurus on hand.
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Book Review: The Ruby Key by Holly Lisle
A couple weeks ago, the Little One and I finished The Ruby Key, a youth fantasy novel by Holly Lisle. As you can see, we gave our paperback quite a workout; it was brand new when we started. She—that is, the Little One—then collected 10 items from of the story for a “Book Bag,” a show-and-tell project she and her classmates do in school.
(Her 10 items, in the picture from upper-left to lower-right: a dog, a cat, a vial [partially hidden below the yellow plastic container], a red key [inside the yellow plastic container], a walking stick, the moon, a bell, a giant worm with sharp teeth, a boot, a backpack.)
The Little One’s classmates enjoyed her presentation, and one even asked to borrow the book. But apparently, she didn’t make it very far through. In any case, here are our online reviews of The Ruby Key.
(See especially the Little One’s review, which proves that, yes, I am really smarter than a 5′th grader!)
-TimK
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Literary Rambles: An Interview with Writer-Blogger Casey Mccormick
I was touched by this short interview with Casey Mccormick, the author of Literary Rambles, a blog about writing YA fiction.
The interview went up a month ago at Beth Revis’s blog Writing It Out. In it, Casey talks about her blog and the features she provides through it, including a weekly “Agent Spotlight,” which features profiles of a children’s-fiction agents, including “the genres they represent… known sales and whether or not they’re editorial.”
But what really struck me was what Casey said about what it’s like to be a blogger, especially about how much work it is. This is something I need to occasionally hear, to let me know that I’m not out of my mind. Keeping a blog going really does take a significant, sustained effort.
Click here to read the interview.
-TimK
Online Story Tuesday: Ilker Drennan
Formerly “Online Fiction Tuesday,” I considered renaming it “Online Fiction (and Truth!) Tuesday” so that I could include true stories, too. But since that’s so long-winded, maybe “Online Story Tuesday” would be just as apropos.
Doesn’t matter, as this post’s subject is a fictional story, “Ilker Drennan” by Donna Gagnon, posted recently at Every Day Fiction. This is a story about a depressed widow who is just barely making ends meet.
I’m doing this post in a new format, an experiment. We’ll see how much I like it and whether I do it again. Every other week (at least that’s the plan), I’ll post a link to an online story. Then I’ll give a free, unsolicited mini-critique. Why? Because I used to critique stories on the online forums, but I got tired of people asking for my free advice and then promptly ignoring it. (I’m not upset with them, because I used to ignore their advice about my stories, too.) But at least this way, when they ignore it, at least I’ll be expecting it.
So click here to read Donna’s story. And then you can check out my comments below.
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Interview with Humorist Kevin Cummings
I have the pleasure of welcoming humorist Kevin Cummings to BeTheStory.com today.
Hello.
As you can see, what I’ve written is in italics, and what he’s written is in normal type.
Today, we’re going to talk about humor, about writing on a schedule, and about his new book Happily Domesticated, just released and hot off the presses.
So, Kevin, I understand that, even though you’ve been blogging only since 2006, you’ve been a humorist for quite some years.
If you define “humorist” as “smart aleck,” I’ve been a humorist most of my life. I’ve also been a writer for pretty much the same time. In elementary school I loved to write stories. Since I was a science fiction fan, I wrote a lot of really awful, derivative science fiction stories.
At the same time, I’ve always been big fan of written humor. I grew up reading Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry, and Pat McManus. When I was in college I dabbled in some humor writing, mostly leaning toward broad parody. As far as I knew there was no market for that kind of material, so that was just something I wrote to amuse my friends.
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Online Fiction Tuesday #2
I did one of these a long, long time ago. Now that I’ve been trying to post more, in general, on a number of my blogs, I thought I’d try again.
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Just Write Blog Carnival
Quick note: The Just Write Blog Carnival is up, which features one of my posts, as well as 9 other posts about books, writing, and stories.
Catch it at Missy Frye’s blog, Incurable Disease of Writing, at this URL: http://www.missyfrye.net/Blog/?p=1896.
-TimK