So instead of doing a normal post in the writing your novel series, I’m going to let you ask questions.
What bedevils you about writing a novel? What do you need to know? What advice have you gotten that hasn’t worked and why? Do you think you misunderstood something? Etc. etc. etc.
Hit me with questions, and I’ll answer when I get to a place with internet connection. (If nothing else tonight.)
Go on, ask.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Today is Crazier Than Usual”
What bedevils me? Writing openings that are hooky.
What else bedevils me? Not putting so many ideas into a short story that solving it becomes a novella/novel. (I have to thank Steve Diamond for explaining that the reason short stories metastasize is “too many ideas.” Yep, that’s me all over.)
What really, really frustrates me? I want to switch effortlessly between genres like you and Dave Freer. I want to be able to write all over the place with all different elements like Roger Zelazny. I want to make the intricate realpolitik of human societies so easy to read without dumbing it down, like CJ Cherryh. I want to work religion into the story with the depth and brilliance of Bujold’s Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. I want to write characters who come so alive to the readers that they don’t say “the characters were good”, they say “I love X, and Y was awesome when he…”
But what I really want…
“What did I want?
I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword,. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get u feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a like wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prestor John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be–instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road
I remember being entranced by that passage back when “Glory Road” was first published. It was exactly what I wanted from my reading, and something I find harder and harder to find as I get old – though I have a whole collection of old favourites which still deliver when I re-read.
I have to admit though that I’ve never known where the Nancy Lee comes from – all the other references were familiar on first reading, but for that, even though it sounds so familiar.
Maybe the song The Wreck of the Nancy Lee?
https://tomlewis.net/lyrics/nancy_lee.htm
Or “The Wreck of the Athens Queen”.
Quieter emotions are the ones that plague me of late.
Wrath? I can do wrath. Hot emotions are easy. Well, they’re not terribly hard, let’s say. A good redneck “aw HELL NO” moment tends to take command of the narrative, and off it goes.
Grief, loss, and pain, terror, tension- those I go okay-ish on. Horror writing taught me a few tricks. At least, those seem to get better reactions from the readers.
You don’t find much peace and contentment in my writings. I get that ratcheting tension, trials, and setbacks go pretty good in pulp. But the thing is getting long enough now that it needs some breathing room in between the frenetic combat.
I’ve done shared meals. I’ve done a bit of introspection. My intuition says start exploring character depth and development more.
Hmm. Choices to make…
Making butt in seat time and using it for writing instead of something else.
Trying to figure out why I want to do this instead of something else with my free time.
I think the thing I wrote was because I was in a bad spot at the time and it was a way to process it, but right now I just feel more like a battery with no charge. Just don’t know where or why to go from here, I guess.
What bedevels me?
Marketing books.
I see small boosts in my sales when Great Aunt does her book promos and the occasional flogging on Facebook and such.
Right now, I’m just looking at biting the bullet, setting up a Facebook Ad account, and see if I can get a decent ROI on a small ad buy.
Marketing I could probably stand to learn more about as well.
How does one know when one’s characters sound stupid? Being not particularly clever myself, are there any tips for helping my characters seem cleverer than the dolt writing them?
A link, from a long ago MGC post that helped me:
My dialogue still needs work, but it’s less made-of-pine-trees now and more awkward-nerd-with-no-social-skills. Progress!
In the article, she talks about constantly analyzing story structure and dialogue etc. while watching TV shows and movies. I get it! It’s gotten to the point where I can see what the writers of Star Trek are doing in many episodes (and this past year I’ve started spotting filler: they had 34 minutes of show and needed something for those last 8 minutes). I love writing dialogue and a lot of my serials are dialogue-heavy (the first one is high schoolers and they’re verbose, and the upcoming spin-off is college students and they get mouthy, too). I can only hope they don’t sound like morons!
What doesn’t need work? I have a first novel that I need to find beta readers for. I have to then figure out how to publish and market it. I’d really like to be able to just hand it off to someone and concentrate on writing but I’m not even sure how to do that! But at the same time I’d like to get further along with the sequel so I have more than one book to publish.
Speaking of my WIP, I’ve been stuck for a while on it. Trying to plot it out and figure out where I need to go, and I’ve gotten a little further that way than with my normal discovery-writer style. But plotting feels unnatural to me. I’m ninety percent sure that everything, except maybe the first half of the first chapter will end up having to get tossed.
I fell out of my practice of writing first thing in the morning. (Technically third. Brewing coffee is first followed by cat feeding or I’ll never hear the end of it) I need to get back into that schedule. I really started getting serious during NaNoWriMo 21 and can tell that I’ve really improved but still need to work on describing movement and setting. My dialogue isn’t that great and I have issues with new characters popping up and insisting on being added.