Category Archives: The Writing Life

Last year was spectacularly unproductive for me. I started on a roll but the unexpected death of someone close to me left me shattered and barely functioning for the rest of the year. So on New Year’s Eve, I set myself some goals for 2012. I do this pretty half-heartedly every year. After all, nobody ever sticks to their New Year’s Resolutions, right? Only this time I meant it. Really, really meant it.

I had a big goal in mind when I set my resolutions: to finish the current WIP before World Fantasy in November. That meant some serious edits. As of New Year’s Eve, I had a mostly complete first draft. It had issues – some big ones. A flabby middle (which I’ve christened the FM), lack of relationship building between key characters, some subplots were little more than a suggestion. I had two viewpoint characters but most of the manuscript was written from the perspective of one of them. It had been suggested that I needed a third viewpoint character and although I knew exactly what I wanted to do, it was difficult and very unlike anything I’d ever attempted so I had been putting off starting. In short, I had a lot of work to do.

So with the new year, I had a renewed focus. However what bothered me about focusing on edits for the next ten months was that I wouldn’t actually be writing during this time. Although the edits were necessary, it seemed I was facing a year of lots of writing work but few new pages.

So my New Year’s Resolution was deceptively simple: write a page a day. Something. Anything. Even while editing. Regardless of how it happened, I would produce a page a day of new words, be they new scenes in the WIP, blog posts, short stories, whatever. An additional benefit was that I’d be learning to keep two projects in my head at once, which is something I struggle with.

For a 31-day month, one page a day – assuming a standard 250-word page – comes to 7750 words. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But if I could consistently produce a page a day through 2012, it would give me 365 pages of new writing. I figured it was worth a try.

So four weeks into the new year, here’s how my resolution is panning out…

Week 1: Motivation levels are high. I’ve just had a week off work so I’m feeling somewhat refreshed. I’ve achieved my goal of one page a day every day this week. Word count: 3189 words, almost half of my goal for the month.

Week 2: Motivation is still high although I’m starting to flounder a little. I’ve spend some time this week on a new short story and a couple of blog posts. Not as much time on the WIP as I should have. Word count: 2616.

Week 3: This week has been almost easy. I feel like I’m developing a habit and I’ve worked on the WIP every day instead of letting myself get distracted with writing other things. Word count: 2988.

Week 4: Now it’s getting tough but I’ve not missed a day yet. Work count is 1974 and the week isn’t over yet. I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long and am starting to think that maybe I can actually achieve a page a day for the whole year.

Lessons

The big lesson I’ve learnt is that I can write every day, which I didn’t think I could do. My usual pattern is four days on then one or two days off, and I’ve never really tried to push past that before. I might be tired and a bit brain dead or, like tonight, ill and having trouble concentrating, but I’ve found I really can do it if I want it bad enough. And I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a New Year’s Resolution that lasted four weeks. Bring on February!

Okay, ‘fess up. What’s happening with your New Year’s Resolutions?

Mignon Fogarty: Well-Used Words

January 23, 2012

fictorians

A guest post by Mignon Fogarty

It’s a huge thrill for a wordie to come across a particularly well-used word; it’s like a little inside joke shared with the author. It’s not necessary to place these Easter eggs in your writing, but if you can, it’s quite fun for you and a certain segment of your readers.

Take “maudlin” for example. Any of your characters can be maudlin, but it’s a freakin’ home run when a nun is maudlin! The word is derived from Mary Magdalene’s name because in Middle Age art, Magdalene was always portrayed as weeping and downcast. As with so many English words, the spelling morphed over time–from “Magdalene” to “maudlin.”

“Anathema” also has religious origins and is particularly well used to describe something devilish or church-related. Today, anything hated can be anathema, but the word comes from a Greek word used to describe something cursed or devoted to evil. In the 1200s, the Catholic Church had a few different kinds of excommunication, and the harshest–proclaiming someone damned–was called anathematization.

If you write about Medieval times, you may want to use the word “bailiwick.” Today it describes someone’s area of expertise, but in Old English, a bailiwick was something like the bailiff of the village–the overseer.

“Egregious” also has interesting origins; it comes from a root word meaning “flock,” as in a flock of birds. The “e” is a remnant of a prefix that means “out,” so “egregious” means to stand out from the flock, which makes sense when you consider that a disruptive bird would stand out from the flock, just as someone who exhibits egregious behavior would stand out from the crowd. If you can smoothly work “egregious” into a sentence about the behavior of animals (or people) in herds or flocks, it’s a win.

“Galvanize” is related to electricity, “gall” is related to liver bile, “haughty” comes from the French word for “high,” and “inchoate” is related to plow animals. The examples go on and on.

I started being particularly aware of words with interesting origins when I began researching etymology for my 101 WORDS book series. You can develop your own list of words to use in interesting ways by browsing a dictionary or signing up for word-of-the-day lists and jotting down promising words in a notebook or computer file.

Mignon Fogarty is better known as Grammar Girl and her newest book is 101 WORDS TO SOUND SMART (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books–a–Million, Indiebound, Powell‘s)

As the Years Go By

January 20, 2012

Kevin Cioffi

Craft & Skills Kevin Cioffi The Writing Life World-building 3 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of finishing my reading of Brandon Sanderson’s latest Mistborn novel: The Alloy of Law. It was fantastic, full of his snappiest dialogue to date, hilarious self referential jokes and a plot that moved forward with the stunning pace of a bullet train. Taking place some hundreds of years after the conclusion of the original Mistborn trilogy, the world and setting had completely changed, and yet it was at once instantly familiar.

In fact, while the main and supporting characters were thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly hilarious with all of their requisite Sanderson corniness and wit, I found myself mostly intrigued with the setting itself. I was stunned to realize: the setting of this book was just as much a character to me as Wax and Wayne and the rest of the cast. What made that so?

I think, for me, it was the progress, the change and development to the setting since last time I had visited Scadrial in the original Mistborn trilogy. Without throwing out too many spoilers, within the three hundred or so years between books technology had begun to modernize. Trains now race through the city and branch out through the unsettled “Roughs”, criminal and lawman alike have dropped their blades and taken up potent firearms, main characters from the original story have faded into myth, legend and theology. As I said, I found a new sense of conflict and development in the actual world building behind the story. It had become a living, breathing character.

I tried to pin down how, exactly, Mr. Sanderson was able to achieve this, and I think it boils down to the most obvious aspect: the passage of time. In a lot of fantasy stories and series, it is sometimes surprising how little time actually passes. For example, in The Wheel of Time, after twelve exhaustive books, I’m pretty sure only 2-3 years have passed. Sure, the setting might be growing and changing based on the actions of the characters, but profound change in technology, government and lifestyle usually takes decades, even centuries.

That is why after three hundred years or so “off screen” I was fascinated by my second trip to Mistborn‘s Scadrial, and I’m really interested in finding more stories or series in which time and generations can pass, and the setting is able to develop as a prominent character. Another one I can think of off the top of my head is Kevin J. Anderson’s Terra Incognita series. The stories move at a blistering pace and sometimes years pass a decade at a time. The landscape and inhabiting cultures are scoured by war and the vast scope of the story really gives room for the world itself to develop.

Controversy and Consensus

January 18, 2012

Brandon M Lindsay

Brandon M. Lindsay Publishing The Fictorians The Writing Life Writing Tools 3 Comments

Writing is a solitary business for a number of reasons, but there may be times when you want to collaborate. This blog is one such instance of writerly collaboration. The reasons for coming together to create it are numerous: we all have different things to say and different experiences to share, we can distribute the workload of maintaining such a site so that no one person has to do it all, etc. Doing so has allowed us to create a product that helps each of us individually and (we hope) provides a value to the writing community at large.

However, such a joint venture has some limitations. Our more astute readers will have noticed that a couple of recent posts were taken down from our site. They weren’t taken down for issues of quality or anything like that, but were taken down due to the controversial nature of the posts. They were, in essence, declaring a stance that not all of the blog’s contributors shared on a very sensitive topic.

Now, I’m all for taking a stand on hot-button issues. I have no problem with taking an unpopular position so long as it’s one I happen to believe in. In fact, I have a short political satire that I am purposefully not promoting on the Fictorian Era simply because I don’t want to suggest that any of the other contributors want to be even tangentially associated with it.

Which brings us to the heart of the issue. Each of us is an individual with individual views on a variety of topics. A shared project like our website cannot let each of its contributors express himself fully without potentially alienating some other member. That can be a severe limitation for a group of artists, whose main drive in their work is self-expression. This is something that anyone is going to have to consider before joining a group where the task of creation is shared.

However, while it may limit the scope of what the group can do, it certainly doesn’t limit the individuals comprising the group in any significant way. As I mentioned, I’m still writing my outrageous and inflammatory satire, but I’m just not making any of my fellow Fictorians inadvertently promote something with which they may violently disagree simply by promoting our blog. And at least one of the posts taken down has found a home on the author’s personal website.

Shared projects like this one can certainly have value. They may not be able to stir the pot as much as some people (like me) would like, but that’s not generally their purpose-and if it is, it must be understood by everyone involved from the very beginning. Though it may seem like such projects limit you in some way, keep in mind that you are not losing anything by doing it, but actually giving yourself an additional means of self-expression, narrow though it may seem at times. And if it ever seems to confining, you can always just take your own path and focus on the things that truly matter to you.