Sharing Advice
Time has not
been on my side this week juggling work commitments with my burning desire
to spend time writing so that I can reach the end of the first act of my story
where I’m excitedly struggling to keep up with the new direction my plot is
heading off in and my head is spinning around the plot of my story-line.
The best part
about my writing life is that I have so much in the way of resources to work
with. I love books and have many shelves
(and desk space) full of reference books, dictionaries and thesauruses and I
use creative writing books to help myself get through what I term ‘blank spells’. Three particular books that live on my desk
are Outlining Your Novel, by K M Weiland, Outlining Your Novel Workbook, also
by K M Weiland, and a firm favourite is Alan Watt’s The-90-Day Novel.
My wonderful and
necessary collection of dictionaries and thesauruses include an enormous Collins
Concise Dictionary (more often used for pressing flowers than word-searching), my Original Roget's Thesaurus and John Seely’s Oxford A-Z of Grammar & Punctuation. There is also more than sufficient online
resources that I use regularly and refer to often whilst writing which are bookmarked
on my browser for ease of access. Among
these a few of my favourites are:
www.businesswritingblog.com – Lynn
Gaertner-Johnston’s fabulous and comprehensive site for grammar, syntax,
proofreading symbols, and so much more. It
is a business writing site but the writing resource section is tremendous if
you’re looking for specific information.
www.edufind.com – The English Grammar tab
provides guidelines and rule for everything you need to know about the correct
use of English grammar.
www.Rinkworks.com – I can spend hours on
this site. My favourite is the Hobbies
section, particularly Fun with Words and Fantasy Name Generator.
One of the best
writing blogs I've come across and eagerly subscribe to is K M Weiland’s site www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com. Signing up to this newsletter is one of the
best things I've ever done and there are fab resources including a superb Story
Structure Database.
Another
favourite of mine is author Jody Hedlund's blog http://jodyhedlund.blogspot.co.uk
which I find refreshingly honest and often very helpful, written from the
heart of a story-teller.
An aspect of story
writing that I constantly struggle with is avoiding clichés and storylines that
have all been covered before, a million times over, and the constant search for unique
characters, plots, scenarios and narratives can often have the effect of
slamming the creative door tightly shut.
Pursuing Alan Watt’s the 90-day novel (although, in my case, it is
comfortably stretching to the 90-week novel) has opened up the writing
experience for me in so many ways and I have found it to be one of the easiest
guides to follow. The day-by-day tutoring
provides a writing exercise at the end of each section, and at the end of each
week there is homework and a bullet point list of thoughts and reminders.
At first I
struggled with the stream-of-consciousness writing exercises because I have never thought about my characters in such depth before. I persevered, however, and when I found that I didn't have the capacity to write about my characters in relation to the topic
of the exercise I left a space to return to it at a later point, though I didn't like the feeling it left me with because I realised that I didn't know my
characters as well as I thought I did and now had to introduce the complexities
of their natures and personalities.
A defining
moment came when I reached Day 8 of the book and the introduction of the three-act
story structure. I realised then that all
of the guides and advice on story structure and outlining I have read over the
years have never managed to clarify the process for me in the way this book
has. My Day 8 stretched into several
weeks as I poured over my three-act story structure until the final eureka
moment when I realised that I finally had what I’d been missing all along.
Writing the first draft begins on Day 29 and although, in terms of the book, I've only reached Day 36, I am loving writing my story, having only now, five months later, reached the end of act one where I will begin fleshing out the current outline and ideas that lead up to the beginning of Act Two.
