Doomed Books

How Not to Write a Maid-of-Honor Speech

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:54:00 -0700

Over a year and half ago, I was asked to be the maid-of-honor at my sister’s wedding. Next week I will get to stand beside her and do whatever the maid-of-honor is supposed to do during the ceremony. Hold her bouquet, sign papers, throw things. I’m a little hazy on the details, but that’s what the rehearsal is for, right? The real work will happen later at the reception when, holding a shaky glass of champagne and surrounded by all our family and friends, I will have to give a toast.

What with the bachelorette party, the wedding decor crafting, and the bridesmaid dress shopping, the speech writing seems to have been swept into the back corners of my mind and hung with a little “To Do Later” sign. I suddenly find myself up against a tight deadline and worry that I won’t be able to do justice to the bubbly feelings of happiness I have for this amazing couple. I’ve never had to write a reception toast before and so, needing inspiration, I did what has become so reflexive: I turned to the internet. Through the power of key word searching, I looked for answers among the chaotic flood of all human knowledge.

What have I learned so far?

First, that I’ve already failed. According to most blog posts, articles, etc. the best maid honor speeches should be written at least three weeks in advance, reviewed by at least two proofreaders, scrawled in fine jet black ink onto gold-trimmed papyrus and blessed by at least two different orders of silent monks. Or something like that. I think the important part was that I’ve started everything two weeks too late.

Second, that all my ideas are terrible and cliched. Want to start off with an inspirational quote? Go for it! I’m sure no one has ever thought to start off with a snippet of Shakespeare before. Think a funny story about the bride is a better idea? As long as it doesn’t make grandma faint and the statute of limitations on it has run out, there’s no reason not to, except…

Third, that I am not funny and shouldn’t bother trying. Giving a reception toast will not grant me stand-up comic superpowers. No one will laugh. There will be awkward silences filled only with the shuffling of feet and muffled, asthmatic coughing. This will make me cry, and not in a good way.

Fourth, that all toasts are boring and I’m better off performing a complicated dance routine that I can post on YouTube so that the bride and groom can live off the profits until they are settled enough to invest in some sort of grouchy pet. I’ve called this option my back-up plan.

With this advice in mind, my new strategy is much simpler. It will involve one evening with a large bottle of wine, my laptop, and twenty-seven years worth of memories.

As the eldest of three girls, I was there to watch my little sister grow up into a driven, intelligent, and beautiful young woman. But when this couple first met, I was living on the other side of the country. I wasn’t there to see that first year of their romance. My only clues about this new, wonderful thing in my sister’s life was through Sunday morning Skype conversations and emailed anecdotes. In fact, my first introduction to my brother-in-law was through a Facebook friend request.

Since then, I have been fortunate enough to see, firsthand, their love grow into something stronger and more beautiful than either of them could have predicted from that first date or that first awkward kiss (which I was told, in a detailed email report, needed a bit of a do-over.) Over the last few years, I’ve seen them start careers, strike out on their own, take risks, support each other through tough times, and grow closer.

And even though they are now moving across the country to start something new together, leaving me to rely on Skype and emails once more, I know that I won’t be missing out on anything. Because this is the just the beginning.

Maybe I’ll write something like that.

image: goosefriend/flickr

Russian Nesting Dolls and Lara Croft

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:25:00 -0700

Lately, I’ve caught myself reading in-depth video game reviews despite the fact that I don’t actually own any gaming systems.

The other week, I found myself reading through a lengthy review of the new Tomb Raider simply because I got hooked by the writer’s initial anecdote: as a prepubsescent gamer in the 1990s, she identified with Lara Croft (or at least, wanted to) and developed a taste for the “visceral sense of adventure and danger” afforded by the gameplay. Her relationship with the game also changed as she grew older.

“[Lara Croft] was Indiana Jones, but witty, measured, sophisticated. She shot first and asked questions later. She screamed only when seconds from death. She never, ever needed saving. She could do anything. But something had changed by the time I got my hands on Tomb Raider 2. I had changed. Two things had come into my life in between those games — the internet, and puberty.”

Her review created a story within a story, a set of narrative nesting dolls, as she encased the game’s fictional core in the context of her own childhood memory. And that’s half the fun of stories, isn’t it, regardless of medium? Immersed in a fictional world, we identify with certain characters, cheerfully despise antagonists, root for the good guys, or sometimes the bad guys, or the complex/morally ambiguous guys. We impose our own experiences on the narrative and take from a given story only as much as we’re willing to put in as readers*. Or viewers, or players, or listeners. Better yet, stories change as we do.

Have you ever gone back as an adult to a book you had read first as a child? The results can either be eye-opening as you finally understand all the inappropriate jokes you had missed the first time around, or disappointing as you realize that you may have in fact had terrible taste in books at that age. I was really into John Grisham and Anne McCaffrey novels when I was 11 years old: the former because they always seemed to be scattered around my house in those days, and the latter because I really had a thing for dragons back then. Most girls go through a horse or dog phase growing up. I had a dragon phase. And we’ll just say that phase is past tense rather than present.

I don’t need to go back and reread Grisham’s The Chamber or A Time to Kill to know that my reading now, almost two decades later, will be different. I don’t have first-hand knowledge of courtrooms or gruesome murders (thankfully!), but years of cumulative experience means that I hopefully have more emotional depth to work with and therefore a better understanding of pathos and character interplay. Sadly, my knowledge of dragons stagnated shortly after my McCaffrey period, but the same thoughts still apply.

I love that, in this way, stories can be infinitely mutable. With each re-read, we wrap our own experiences around the core text of a book and make a bigger and increasingly layered whole.

*There is already a lot written about this sort of thinking— also known as reader-response theory, which came out of the hippy dippy 1960s and was sadly overtaken by other less touchy-feely theories. It’s a fascinating subject, but only if you’re already sitting in a classroom with a very large amount of caffeine at hand.

image: kodakgold/sxc

Not Dead Yet

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:37:00 -0800

That’s new my motto. Or it will be if I ever get around to needing a motto. Last post was in April, which I know looks bad. But when your blog’s subject matter deals primarily with the failure to keep writing something, then you have to expect there will be times of posting famine.

You may be wondering what I’ve been up to for the last eight months, which is very considerate of you to wonder. I have been writing! Granted, my words per minute over the past few (many?) months have not been breaking any speed records, but progress is progress. I reached the 10,000 word mark two weeks ago and celebrated by turning up the volume on my terrible laptop speakers as high as their tinny hearts would go and pajama danced in my kitchen to a Snoop Dog ballad or two. We do things civilized around here. I also have a generous and very supportive friend who has promised to bring over half-decent bottle of wine sometime to toast this early success. I’m 13% of the way done, guys!

Since April I have also been filling my time with many new experiences. For example, I started a new fancier position at work, had a birthday, went somewhere with sandy beaches and lots of margaritas, went sea kayaking, convinced myself I was going to drown sea kayaking, didn’t drown, started a herb garden and killed everything but the chives, went camping, was bitten by a tick while camping but didn’t notice until I got home, convinced myself I had lyme disease for a week thanks to the totally medically-sound advice provided by the good copy writers of WebMD, didn’t get lyme disease, and wrote 10,000 words.

What did you do with your summer vacation (and all the months previous to and prior to that)?

(Image: O Palson/flickr)

Making Your Inner Editor Shut Up Already

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:21:10 -0700

I’ve been struggling to silence the little voice in my brain that tells me I suck at writing. This isn’t a new problem, for me personally or for plenty of writers in general. There are lots of posts out there that talk about silencing your inner editor while you write. This is well-trodden territory with winding, muddy footpaths stomped down by plenty of other equally frustrated writers.

I know it’s partly a confidence thing: a lack of trust in my voice, my ability to handle plot pacing and character development, and to make the stories that live in my head come out onto my screen without losing that essential bit of life that made me want to write them down in the first place.

It’s best at night, right as I’m trying to fall asleep — a process that takes at least an hour and lately has required a glass of warm milk and failing that, a dose of some over-the-counter sleeping remedy with some too cutesy brand name. The voice falls asleep before I do most nights, and the stories sneak in after that. But you can’t do all your writing after midnight in a filter-free, drowsy haze, right? And besides, the little editor will still have to read it over in the morning, with a more critical eye after having been duped the night before.

How do you writers silence the voice and get your first drafts out (naturally, steering clear of any solutions Hemingway or Coleridge would have approved of)?

A Bookstore Closing Sale

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:05:33 -0700

I made a trip today to a bookstore closing sale. Always a sad event, but even more so in Vancouver which, in two short years, has become an independent bookstore wasteland after the closing of Duthie Books, Sophia Books, and now Book Warehouse.

Hopping on a bus after work, I fought through the rush hour foot traffic and puddles to see what I could salvage from the shelves, all the while feeling guilty that, even as I had made this same pilgrimage many times before in the years I’ve lived in this city, it was not often enough. Browsing and stacking, restacking and debating the merits of buying far more books than I had planned on, I came away with a handful of non-fiction titles: Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams; Biopunk, by Marcus Wohlsen; The Scavengers’ Manifesto, by Anneli Rufus and Kristan Lawson; and, perhaps most appropriately given a little gender-bending, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, by Allison Hoover Bartlett.

I am indecisive to a fault (though given that indecisiveness is probably a fault already, that expression isn’t terribly descriptive, is it?), and so I also left half a dozen books behind unbought and undoubtedly feeling very ill-used for having been so roughly browsed, carried about the store under one arm, and then unceremoniously reshelved in a fit of frugalness. I would apologize, but they are, after all, just books and don’t actually care one way or the other. Sometimes I forget that.

image: roland/flickr

Happiness is a Good Story

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:01:00 -0700

A Conspiracy Theorist in the Making

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:06:00 -0700

I’m terrible at coming up with new ideas for stories. This is probably not something I should be admitting, given my ambitions as a writer, but it’s a confession I’m willing to make. Free writing has never worked me either. I’m not an off-the-cuff type person. Given a blank sheet of paper, a pen, and nothing but my wits, I will inevitably end up writing a very detailed record of that morning’s breakfast and my tentative plans to take a nap that Sunday afternoon.

So instead I read a lot of news and keep a folder of articles, blog posts, and photos that would work as story starters. And given how many blogs I have streaming through my Google Reader, there’s no lack of folder fodder. It’s like my kindling. I take in enough information from disparate sources, let it mix in my brain, and eventually something will spark. I’ll rush back to my handy folder, pull out the articles that created the spark, try to coax the spark into a blaze, and then follow that signal flame into the story.

I like the weird stuff best: The article about the perils of shrimp factory farming; a post about the biofuel black market of restaurant grease; another about nano-robots capable of herding of live bacteria. Since I’m drawn to writing science-fiction more than other genres, the weird stuff works best for me, which will be convenient if I ever decide to take up as a hobby conspiracy theorist. The shrimp farms are obviously a front for the biofuel black market. If only I could figure out where the nano-robots come into it, I’d be able to blow the whole operation wide open. Wide open, I tell you!

image: kori monster/flickr

The Good Old Days of Wooden Planks Covered in Wax

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:00:00 -0700

In a recent NYTimes artcle, “Finding Your Book Interrupted By the Tablet You Read It On”, a Letter to the Editor was posted that I found completely amusing, and may have led to some spontaneous fist-pumping. While the article itself argues that reading on a tablet is distracting to the point of, well, pointlessness, the Letter suggests otherwise:

Reading the real-life printed version of your paper and immersed in your article about the distractions found on electronic devices that prevent us from finishing a book, I was annoyed when I reached “Continued on Page B2.” On my way to B2, I got lost in three other articles before remembering my original destination.

Don’t blame electronic media for following in the footsteps of their analog ancestors.

Mainly, I liked the reminder that, however advanced our reading tech becomes, it’s inevitably built upon the foundations set-out by its predecessors. Heck, even the word “tablet” harkens back to those clay and stone slabs that were once used to carry around our words. Add to that the act of “scrolling” (as if our screens were made of papyrus, not pixels), and you can have fun with the idea that the 21st century reading experience really is the culmination of all that came before it, making all this e-book/tablet fear-mongering a tad silly.

image: muffet/flickr

Hitting the Books: A Plot vs. Story Deathmatch!

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:05:00 -0800

Out of the big pile of books that I brought home from the library, Jane Vandenburgh’s Architecture of the Novel had the prettiest cover, so it gets the distinction of being the first book covered in my highly strategic course reading list. Lucky for me, Vandenburgh’s handbook on writing and revision turned out to be an excellent way to start my self-education on writing theory.

In Scene vs. Summary of Scene

“We prefer sounding as if we know what we’re doing, so we naturally try to fabricate something overarching and thematic…We think we need to be creating beautiful language instead of creating scenes, when the vivid specificity of scenes is the only place the story actually exists.”

“Scene before summary, we all explain, and yet we all feel we need to explain what a scene wants to be before we allow it to go ahead and demonstrate itself.”

Seeing as I will be starting my second draft from scratch, I liked Vandenburgh’s insistence that your provisional draft (i.e. early, crappy draft) needs to be written entirely in scene, as if you are a physical witness to the events that are happening in the story, rather than as a summary of scene. I know this is something I struggled with in my first draft. I would get so impatient telling the story, wanting to rush so that I hit all my plot points and fit everything in, that I started writing passages in which story events read like newspaper accounts.

The Story vs. The Plot:

“If story exists in the rooms along the hallway, those rooms in which we’re going to eventually find what we’ve been looking for all along… then plot is the order by which we come upon our story’s rooms. This means a novel’s structure will consist of the manner in which you set out its story’s narrative sequence.”

Vandenburgh not only differentiated between a novel’s story and its plot, but hammered home her point throughout the book in a bunch of different (and generally helpful) ways.

I hate repetition; I don’t need you tell me something and then tell me that same thing again only pages later, but in reading this book, I realized how my background in literary criticism is a bit of a hindrance when it comes to my own writing. It seems such an absurdly basic point to make, but literary theory and writing theory are not the same thing. I’m used to analyzing books as finished products, not seeing them as works-in-progress where the plot is still in flux and malleable (and contrived and awful, if we’re being honest here). Vandenburgh makes it clear that a story is linear, each cause followed by an effect, each scene leading to the next, but plot is crafted. Flashbacks, pauses, twists, embedded and impacted memories are all devices that belong to the plotline, not the storyline.

Definitions Galore!

The other thing I like about this book? The giant glossary of terms that makes up the latter half. Anyone who’s ever lusted after a copy of M.H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms (you know who you are) will appreciate the detailed definitions for narrative parallax or authorial intrusion. So sexy!

I promised you a deathmatch in the post title, didn’t I? Well, let’s just say, plot is a sneaky motherf***er. Plot is abstract and, in a novel, it can be darn right intimidating with its twists and turns and internal logic. But story and plot aren’t necessarily at odds with each other: “[P]lot and story are already in league together; they’re already double-teaming us, and their joint aim is to win. They’re going to need to defeat us, at first, for our book to be any good.”

My Plot Muscles are Puny and Weak

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:10:00 -0800

Lately, I’ve been trying out some new podcasts. My first entry into podcast listening began with Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe a few years ago, which, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure, is some good ol’ heart-warming, wholesome fun. Seriously, I’ve been known to get weepy on public transit listening to those Vinyl Cafe stories, it’s embarrassing. I’ve since branched out into other shows and nerdier fare like Boars, Gore and Swords (a Game of Thrones podcast that is neither wholesome nor heart-warming, but damn funny), and the Nerdist Writer’s Panel, a show that brings together well-known TV writers to talk about their craft.

It was a recent episode the Writer’s Panel (12/01/2012) that got me thinking about writing theory. Sarah Goldfinger, a co-executive producer on the show Grimm, made a comment about how most people who are starting out write from character, and plot is more of a learned skill set. And I can’t help but agree since almost everything I’ve attempted to write up until now has been borne out of a need to delve more deeply into some character I’ve created rather than a need to tell a particular story. I’ve never bothered to learn much about the mechanics of story structure, and because of this my plot muscles are puny and weak.

So I’m building myself a book list for a self-directed crash course in the art of writing fiction. The order in which I wade through this list will depend mostly on which books I can get my hands on easily, and I expect the list will grow as I stumble across new recommendations. I’m going to try to stick to books that form part of the writing theory canon (there’s always a book canon) and will stay away from any book that promises to help me write a bestseller or claims to possess secret magic/miracle writing techniques.

Getting Back to Basics: Doomed Books Required Reading List

Architecture of the Novel, by Jane Vandenburgh
The Writing of Fiction, by Edith Wharton
The Art of Fiction, by Ayn Rand
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
How Fiction Works, by James Wood
Aspects of the Novel, by E.M. Forster
The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers , by Christopher Vogler
The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Anatomy Of Story, by John Truby
Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, by Christopher Booker

If you have any other suggestions, shout ‘em out and I’ll add them to my list.

image: Maximus_W/flickr

Morning People Baffle Me, or Finding Time to Write

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:02:00 -0800

I am not a morning person. This fact is confirmed each time I get stuck in the elevator at work—before my first cup of coffee—with some poor soul who actually is a morning person. It’s never pretty. Because of this unfortunate flaw in my genetic make-up, I do my writing at night, after I’ve gotten home from work, made dinner, and done any number of other grown-up type duties. Not surprisingly, prodding my foggy brain and tired fingers to tap out fictional masterpieces at that late hour is never my first choice of leisure activity. This is the rock and hard place that belong to most writers who work full-time at non-writerly jobs.

Aside from a brief editorial internship after graduating, I have never been paid to write. I’m not sure I should even count the internship as a paid writing gig, given that the honorarium brought in a whopping $1000 for four months of full-time work; an hourly wage of $1.56 doesn’t exactly inspire bragging, except in a self-deprecating sort of way. But what that internship didn’t provide in bling, it made up for in brutal life lessons. Much like my undergraduate job placement in a biotech lab convinced me that I was better off majoring in English lit, my magazine internship made it clear that freelancing as a writer should be struck off my list of career options.

Basically, I lacked hustle. I’m not saying that I couldn’t meet deadlines. Ask anyone, I am a deadly deadline assassin, capable of meeting any time-sensitive challenge with a startling one-two punch. Instead, I discovered that when it came to pitching my own articles, I had all the conviction of a beached whale.

Beached whales invoke pity, they may even provoke people to form emergency teams that arrive with buckets of water and firehoses, but a beached whale will not be articulate enough to convince her editor that a piece about guerrilla gardening is a good idea.

Thankfully, in the years since that particular life lesson, I’ve had time to gain confidence and hone my presentation skills, all while collecting a regular paycheck and stumbling on a career in marketing that I enjoy quite a lot. But that squeeze for time continues to be a problem.

I know my time troubles don’t even compare to writers who work, write, and have kids. Those of you who manage to pull off that hat trick must either have very diligent, easily manipulated clones, or else access to some highly classified DARPA time travel tech. As a kid-less adult, I’m already ahead so long as I manage to keep myself reasonably clean, clothed, fed and housed.

Lately, the library has been my writer’s den. I go for the terrible internet connection (that makes even checking my email a slow and pointless process), and stay for the hard-back chairs that do wonders to keep me awake and typing when I’d rather be on my couch watching reruns of Doctor Who until I fall asleep. It works for me.

What works for you?

image: bennyseidelman/flickr

Coffee and Fairydust: Setting Some Writerly Goals

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 06:02:00 -0800

Even though I may have outlined in general terms what this blog is all about (i.e. I’m attempting to write a book and then get it published), without some concrete goals and a timeline, there isn’t much point to all of this. I could just keep writing and editing forever and forever without an end in sight. And then I’ll have another doomed book on my hands. No one wants that, right? Exactly. So I think it’s time I set out some ground rules for this project. It’s goal-setting time!

There are basically two types of goals you can make. Okay, there are probably loads more, but for the purposes of this post it’s convenient to divide everything along clean lines. There are goals that you have complete control over, and there are those that require outside help in order to get them done. Writing a book is something that I can start and finish all on my own, assuming I stick to it. But getting that book published afterwards is going to be a mix of a whole lot of variables, some of which will be out of my hands entirely.

For now, lest I scare myself into a state of paralyzing fear by setting lots of lofty goals all at once, particularly ones that involve rejection letters and drippy tears, let’s start with the goals that involve a minimum amount of random chance:

Goals That Will Be Strictly Enforced With an Iron Will and Lots of Coffee:

Get the manuscript fully written/edited/spit-shined by September 1, 2012.
I’ll be shooting for around 75,000 words total. God, that sounds like a lot now. This goal will likely involve a lot of panic in late August. That should be fun.

Write two short stories, with one polished enough to send out to journals, by the end of the year.
I’ll likely have a better chance at publishing a first novel if I already have some publishing cred from the magazine/journal set. And as my current cred is at least five years out of date and mostly involves an internship where I wrote about upcoming concerts and suburban restaurants, I may need to do some work here.

Okay, those are two very practical, but boring, goals. I think I’m ready for some loftiness now.

Goals That Will Likely Require Lots of Stamps and a Fairy Godmother:

Publish a first novel.
Now, where does one find a fairy godmother these days?

Publish a trilogy.
Because trilogies are awesome. I may need more than one fairy godmother. Maybe she has a sister we could bribe somehow.

Get a short story into Analog SF magazine.
Aside from the fact that this is undeniably a very nerdy goal, it has also been on my list since I was 12 years old and my dad gave me his entire collection of 1970s paperback sci-fi novels. Some of my favorite books in that collection started out as either novellas or short stories in Analog SF.

Attend a writer’s festival as a writer (rather than as a volunteer)
This goal may sound a bit silly. Volunteering at a writer’s festival can be good times, I know. But there is something to be said, while sitting in the writers’ green room during your shift, waiting to usher Ms. X or Mr. Y to the auditorium, about wanting to be part of their club. To want to wear one of the blue namebadges instead of one of the grey ones.

What are some of your goals this year? Let me know in the comments.

image: DubRoss/flickr

Rewrite or Rework: Making Your Second Draft Less Awful Than Your First

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:02:00 -0800

I’ve always found this to be a thorny question, particularly when your first run at a manuscript is lengthy. Is it better to scrap your first draft entirely and use it only as a rough outline for your second draft, or do you work with what you’ve written so far and rework/expand/trim/etc. as needed from there?

The first draft of my novel weighs in at just over 90 pages, or 27,000 words for you word-count sticklers out there. This makes my draft a novella, rather than a fully grown novel (at least according to the gods of the Nebula Awards, and as they’ve been around for ages, they likely know what they’re talking about). With this draft, I’m also at only one-third the page count I’ll be shooting for in my final manuscript.

For some people, 90 pages would still be short enough to merit a complete rewrite without much hesitation, but I am a notoriously slow writer. Anything longer than a tweet is cause for celebration, and these particular 90 pages were written under extreme circumstances; namely, a three-day coffee-fuelled haze of unbridled panic (more on that in a future post). That kind of triumph, and terror, is hard to just toss aside to start anew. But there are definite points in favour of a clean slate.

With a rewrite, you’re not shackled to those story arcs or plot points that you found problematic in your first draft. You can more easily ditch what didn’t work and try something new, all without having to worry about continuity issues cropping up later on.

While I’m leaning toward a rewrite, I may have to have some sort of farewell toast for my first draft novella, to make its burial a little easier on both of us: “My boat is on the shore, And my bark is on the sea: But, before I go, First Draft, Here’s a double health to thee!”

image: kennymatic/flickr

Currently Reading Roundup: Heartbreak & Ginger Hair Edition

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:02:00 -0800

As much as I love writing, I love reading even more. So much less effort! The words are already laid out for you, ready to be sucked up into your brain like lovely, wordy brain candy.

But I also get distracted easily, which means that I’m likely to be reading half a dozen books at any given time. I flit from one to the next, leaving them strewn face-down throughout my apartment like so many dead bats. Okay, so my metaphors need work today.

Submarine, by Joe Dunthorn

My brain tells me this book is excellent, but my heart wants to throw it across the room and give the protagonist a good slap. I’ve always had trouble with delinquent book characters. Exhibit A: Catcher in the Rye, which I’ve tried reading at least three times, never getting past the first few chapters because I find Holden so goddam annoying. I’m such a phony, I know.

My Booky Wooky, by Russell Bran

I’m over halfway through Brand’s autobiography, but since he and Katy split, I just don’t have the heart to finish it, which is too bad because it was actually pretty entertaining.

How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

I only started this one a few days ago, but boy is it ever full of science-fictiony goodness. There’s a neurotic computer (think less Hal à la 2001, more Marvin the Paranoid Android), time travel, an adorable non-existant dog, and a whole lotta family drama pathos.

The Wealthy Barber Returns, by Dave Chilton

What can I say? I’m Canadian and I need to know what on earth to do with RRSPs (the equivalent of a 401K for any American readers).

Anne of Avonlea, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I don’t know how I missed out on reading this series when I was growing up, but I’m making up for it now. Anne of Green Gables was lovely, though I was stalled on the chapter titled “The Reaper Whose Name is Death” for obvious reasons. But Anne and I are past that now, and I believe we have our eye on a certain local boy named Gilbert.

5 Tools to Unjumble Your Thoughts and Get You Writing

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:02:00 -0800

When you’re starting a new writing project, there’s almost nothing scarier than those first few moments when all you have is a big, blank page staring back at you. Writing without a plan, without an outline or notes, is unbelievably hard.

Generally, I’m a reasonably organized person who likes to plan ahead. I mean, I don’t go around organizing sock drawers by color or alphabetizing my books, but I do like outlining story arcs and creating detailed character sketches in order to make the actual writing process as painless as possible. As a sucker for shiny new web apps, I’m always downloading new writing software and tools to try out, and as you would expect, some work out better than others. I’ve listed my favorites below.

WorkFlowy

It’s almost embarrassing how devoted I’ve become to this simple web app. Basically, WorkFlowy is one-page, no frills list-maker that promises to help you “Organize Your Brain.” And it’s true, I’ve slathered my brain all over my own WorkFlowy page, which you would think would leave rather a large mess, but no! The beauty of the hierarchical list structure is that, as tangled as my neural pathways get, my notes and to-do lists always stay easy to navigate.

Evernote

Lists are great, but when I started pulling together research for my book, I found that I needed more of a curating tool with a few bells and whistles. In Evernote, you can pull material directly. I have ‘Notebooks’ devoted to Characters (and then pages for each individual character detailing physical stats, motivations, back story), Outlines (for both overarching story arcs and chapter-specific outlines), and Research, so that I can easily reference back to that article about bacteria-herding nanobots or spray-on skin cells.

Write or Die

Sometimes I feel that I would be more prolific if only I had someone standing behind with a pointy stick while I write, ready to poke me whenever I start to nod off or wander onto YouTube to watch baby animal videos. Write or Die is a less violent alternative to the pointy stick.

You set either a time or a word limit, pick your mode of punishment and then start typing. If your word output starts to lag, you get punished with either a pop-up alert or an annoying sound. There’s also kamikaze mode, which will start to delete what you’ve written if you get distracted. While Gentle and Normal mode are both effective writing prods, Kamikaze mode nearly gave me a panic attack; those who prefer that level of punishment are undeniably more into the masochism than the art.

Scrivener

You can’t talk about writing tools without mentioning Scrivener. It’s pretty much a blogging law. Luckily, I’ve had the chance to try out the program for myself since software creator Literature and Latte finally released a Windows version this past fall (Scrivener had previously only been available to Mac users.)

So far, all the glowing reports about this program seem to hold true. Basically, Scrivener is an authoring tool that allows you to organize complex writing projects. Modelled on the three-ring binder, text files can be organized in folders and moved around as needed, letting you chop up big scary projects into bite-sized pieces.

Unlike the other programs mentioned above, Scrivener isn’t free, but the $40 it will cost you is super reasonable considering what most people shell out for word-processing programs like MS Word.

yWriter5

yWriter5 is often cited as a free alternative to Scrivener as it lets you break down your novel into chapters and scenes, move scenes around as much as you want, and save snapshot backup versions your files. Everyone is going to have their own preferred method when it comes to outlining and drafting a novel, and so yWriter5’s interface may suit you better (or not as well) than a program like Scrivener.

What kind of tools do you use? Let me know in the comments below.

image: nkeppol/flickr

The Bluebeard of Novelists

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:02:00 -0800

I realize that Doomed Books is an odd title for a blog about writing. Let’s be clear: I am not a natural pessimist. In fact, my disposition tends toward cheeriness more than anything else, but when it comes to writing novels, there is a precedent of doom that must be acknowledged.

There is a saying that you come across fairly often as a writer when talking about novels. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote in his On the Art of Writing: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

William Faulkner’s equally popular quote, “In writing, kill your darlings,” basically carries the same sentiment. Unfortunately, I have honoured this advice much too thoroughly over the last few years. I am the Bluebeard of novelists, and my hard drive is lined with the corpses of at least a dozen murdered novels.

Each novel was killed for a different reason; some never made it past the first chapter, while one stalwart little fellow made to completion, even made some rounds querying literary agents and publishers, only to be put out of its misery in the end. Despite this history, I am determined to try again.

I have a shiny new first draft ready, which was finished this past summer and has been aging like a fine cheese on my laptop, waiting to be rewritten, edited and polished to within an inch of its life, and then sent whirling through the obstacle course that is mainstream publication. And I want you along for the ride, to share in the highs, lows, and general nuttiness of this process. Here we go…

image: katerha/flickr