Like Caroline, for me a big part of revision is paring down the words. I trim as many as possible, until all that’s left is what’s strictly necessary. Th process can be grueling, but it’s so satisfying to achieve a great turn of phrase with an economy of words.

However, I found that writing a massive Choose Your Own Adventure (or to be precise 6 separate-but-linked Adventures) was a whole heap of fun, and – although it needed masses of planning up front – it was really nice to know exactly where each scene had to start & end.

Life, of course, conspired to throw things off track, so now it’s time to pay attention to work, family and the small business of moving house..!

Well done Wrimos – it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts, as someone once said…

Congrats to everyone that won, consoling words and chocolate for those that didn’t, and thanks to everyone that encouraged/put up with me on twitter.

Loved the episode though. It spoke to exactly what I’m going through right now, stuck and finding out that I need to rewrite a whole lot.

Loved the thought on action. Sometimes when I’m stuck I just write the first action that comes to me and see where it takes me. I don’t often use the action itself but I’ve used the result more often than not and gone back and fine tuned what needs it… If that makes any sense. Most notably is a subplot involving a cow that I wrote as a joke and ended up being very important to the story. So there’s that.

So I’m back at square one now with my story but I’ll be using large chunks of what was already written and keep writing everyday and hopefully in a few months I’ll have a solid first draft to work from.

Love the podcast people and thanks for the help. Good luck with your projects.

There may be exceptions, but, in general, Jim is right.

For my current Nano, what happened was I wrote a lovely prologue and two very talky Council scenes in the Brian Michael Bendis sit-around-a-table-and-talk school of writing. The backstory was necessary for setting up who the players are and why my main character is the eventual choice, but the way I was conveying it was *boring*, especially two chapters in a row. This situation lines up with what I mentioned in my comment/question. It’s an either/or a lot of the time for me – heavy on exposition or heavy on dialogue. One of the tips/suggestions I’d received was having characters do something while they’re talking so there’s a better mix and I fail miserably at it. There’s very little action/movement when they’re talking. I solved my quandary by actually junking a good chunk of my talky scenes and *gasp* starting over. I know that doesn’t work for everyone.

I’m still about a day behind in my writing but I am feeling better about the approach.

I’m finding my preparation was a bit off this year; I invested heavily in the plot, but very little in the characters, so I’m only really discovering what they are like now. Didn’t like my protagonist for the whole of the first chapter, but I’m making him a bit more rounded now.

Stick with it, WriMos – Week 2 might get a bit hairy! ;o)

Good luck everyone; i wish you the best.

It looks like the Writing Buddies bit of the Nano site is still offline, but if you would like to be my buddy for mutual support, my username there (and also on Twitter) is ceekayell

I blogged a bit about my Nano experiences and some advice. I’ll echo what Kelly says about the wordcount/ Excel spreadsheet. It’s wonderful for tracking how you’re doing and where you need to be. I’ve done the catching up after a day off — it isn’t pretty, folks, but it can be done if you hack away a little at a time. I tend to need to write something early in the day, even if it’s just a few hundred words, so I’m not trying to do everything when I get home from work. Depends on how fast you write. I have also been known to ignore the “don’t edit” suggestions — if some scene/line is stopping you, cut it and try again. Sometimes you just need another approach.

I am very happy to offer moral/cheerleading support as well on Nano site or twitter. The community aspect is a reason I love both Nano & Deceptionists.

loved the show gals and dude. whats the topic for next time?

PS: Jim, not sure if this will help, but when it comes to reviewing…I wouldn’t worry about the conceit of coming off like the “voice of God” or whatever. Reasonable readers understand that reasonable reviewers don’t think of themselves as perfect. I understand that a lot of reviewers want to err on the side of caution and stress their own subjectivity, but oftentimes I find that those reviewers can go overboard. If you’re concerned about focusing on your own subjectivity and fallibility by reminding people that many things about art are relative…you can end up not saying anything at all. If I read a review that starts off with a sentence like “This was a horrible book”, then — even if I myself liked the book — I’m actually NOT going to automatically think that the reviewer is a judgmental jerk; more often than not, I’m actually going to think “Hm, interesting. Let’s see what this guy has to say to back up his dissenting opinion. What might he have noticed that I overlooked?” And, for reasonable people, the difference between someone saying “This was a bad book” and “I THINK this was a bad book” is almost non-existent. If someone just says “This was a bad book”, we KNOW that’s “just” their opinion. What matters is what backs up the opinions, responses and opinions; when the focus of a review becomes the reviewer’s focus on his/her own subjectivity, it’s like beating around the bush.

I just wanted to comment on, or echo, a common theme that seemed to be floated around, in that crime, more than any other fiction (or maybe just more obvious) is about the problem. Not in a, Put the pieces of a puzzle together sort of way. But the problem of the protagonist, or antagonist, which ever you may be focasing on. ( or better, both) I enjoyed a lot of what Jay had to say on the subject. It’s clear that he’s given the matter a lot of thought, about it being used as a study in scocial behavior. About what makes people do what they do and why. His idea of explaining how you come up with a character, then a plot, then find out how these characters react, which in turn informs where the plot goes, seems insetuous but it’s the best explanation I’ve heard on story development.

As always, I enjoyed the episode. I’ve been listening sense episode one and will way past 2013 i hope. Sorry if the post went long.

Jim, I hope to hear the rest of that story someday.

btw, I’m a seat of my pants kinda guy.

Also, I feel like I implied that I don’t think there are women who play an important role in the modern military, which of course isn’t true.

I laughed at “conservation of matter in Harry Potter” (because personal pet peeve: one of my favorite comics is about alchemists and they always talk about equivalent exchange but as far as I can tell THEY NEVER ACTUALLY EXCHANGE ANYTHING; I am pretty sure this is the same principle).

Also, ha ha ha, Webelos. I was going to say ‘I’ll put Webelos into my prompt’ but since I’m writing romance that might raise some inappropriate age issues.

That’s a good point about the miller’s daughter. Honestly, she was one of the figures that just sort of slipped in while I was writing. I don’t know what would happen in another draft — I’ll give that some thought. What I DO like about it is that Needle is so caught up in the Importance of Things, that he completely fails to notice her obvious affection. I like that bit, so I’ll have to think about how that plays into the overall tale.

My second Nano novel was set on the Moon. I downloaded a load of Moon/lunar related tracks from iTunes (Steve Jobs loooves me!) and then divided them up according to mood (Scary, Action, Romantic, Cool, Melodic etc), so I could get into the right vibe depending on the kind of thing I needed to write. There was a lot of soundtrack stuff in there (Clint Mansell’s ‘Moon’ soundtrack was essential listening, naturally!), and also quite a lot of jazz: Tord Gustavsen and Esbjorn Svensson.

I’m ambivalent re: the lyrics/no lyrics debate. I don’t think I find them a distraction, but I recognise that I do listen to more instrumentals when I’m writing than I do the rest of the time.

Also, this was a great podcast, full of a lot of great writing advice that i hope to apply to a story i’m working on. Thanks again.

http://studio.louderplease.com/2011/05/06/deceptions-challenge-music-prompt/

Great job, guys!

That offers up a whole different question of how to approach flash fiction versus something more open-ended.

As far as writing contemporary fiction, that’s a harder call — I think it depends on what the setting is doing in the story. I was probably thinking on the lines that “this is a story where it really doesn’t MATTER what you mean when you say bar, or restaurant, or living room.” But it’s probably true that it’s a good ALWAYS a good idea to look at where the story is located and come up with something specific to ground it in. If nothing else, it’s practice in noticing details of your everyday places that can eventually come in handy. (On the other hand, if I never have to read another pseudo-clever description of suburban blandness, I will be A-OK with that, but I suspect that’s a different kind of privilege issue.)

The main chapters were all typed out on the computer directly. I also had a number of Interlude Chapters (roughly one for every two normal chapters). While most of the book is third person, the interludes are all first person, self-contained bits of flash fiction, each giving a different window to the horror setting, but only loosely tying into the main plot. I wanted the interludes to sound different from the rest of the book. So, (along with coming up with voice quirks for each interlude) I made sure the first draft of each was written out by hand, as a sort of mechanical way to make them feel different.

Whether it was a successful experiment or an excuse to bleed a little fountain ink, I do not know.

Regarding the choice between handwriting and typing, I tend to do most of my writing on the keyboard (I type much faster). But I still keep my stack of journals, notebooks, and two fountain pens. It’s self-indulgent writer romance, but it’s very self-aware romance, and why not add a bit of romance to the process? Sometimes filling a pen with a particular color or quality of ink is a nice way to start a project (an absinthe-addicted protagonist — green ink).

Most of my writing still happens on the computer. The notebooks I tend to fill with notes, bits of dialogue, research, and free-writing fragments (none of which falls out of my head in any proper order). Let’s call that part of the process Grave-robbing, collecting bod parts and materials. When I have enough moldering, mis-matched pieces, I go to the laboratory (usually the program Scrivener), and go through the process of stitching it all together in some kind of order. Then I feed the creature lightening and it clumsily comes to life, and sometimes it behaves, and sometimes it busts out and devours a few villagers. Redrafting and editing consists of grafting on new appendages and refining the beast, making the stitches less apparent.

I’m a shameless recycler, though. That Oz fanfic I wrote got turned into the story you most recently beta’d — not in ANY of the details, but in the emotional engine.

This isn’t my *first* choice of venue, by any means! But I have two school-age children, and my partner and I homeschool them. On my days off, Wednesday and Thursday, I am teaching school, taking kids to karate and circus and the YMCA. I am cleaning my house, doing the dishes, walking the dog, paying the bills. I am grading math problems, scheduling the sewer snaking, and looking worriedly at the ice dams. my breaks at work, on the other hand, are MY time.

I take my breaks in a long, narrow room crowded with chairs too rickety to be used on the control room floor and table too battered to be used in the conference rooms. Each day when I arrive I find an open chair and set up my netbook on a table. The fluorescent lights shed a greenish pallor over everything. There are, at any given point, two to thirty other people in room — typing, watching movies, talking, paying their bills, eating lunch. When I’m on break I put on my headphones and do my best to ignore everyone around me.

On Saturdays I catch up on movies and television shows I couldn’t watch during the week. On Sundays I write, mostly. On Mondays I do Fantastic Fangirls stuff and watch a movie. On Tuesdays I write, mostly.

When I am *writing*, I listen to music without words. Even words in another language, like operas, will jar me out of what I’m doing. When I am researching or outlining I listen to whatever I feel like.

A question that I’d be really interesting in addressing in a future podcast — one that only recently occurred to me in quite this form — is ‘what percentage of the stuff that you think of do you USE?’ I often feel like a minuscule amount of the stories that I work on in my head do I actually even ATTEMPT to put down on paper. Then there are the story ideas I end up telling to another person but not following through with, and finally the ones that I take the time and energy to even start writing down, much less finish, revise and polish. There are various reasons this doesn’t happen — sometimes the feeling that it’s not good enough, it would be too hard, it’s too self-indulgent, it wouldn’t be entertaining to anyone but me — but also sometimes it’s a story I’m perfectly happy to keep telling in my head.

I wonder if others have a similar experience or if I’m out of left field. It seems I hear so much talk about ‘where do you get ideas?’ but much less about what you do with the excess ones. (I still ask “where do you get GOOD ideas?’ but that’s somewhat of a different question.)

Keep up the good work all!

love the show btw. listened to them all. it helps get me motivated, so thanks for that.

The future tense doesn’t seem to lend itself to happy things, does it?

You will sit in the tub for hours, letting it fill and empty, fill and empty, turning the temperature knob back and forth each time in an endless cycle of extremes. Water so hot it burns, water that makes you sweat, water that leaves your legs raw and red, will be replaced by water so cold you’ll be shivering a minute after the first rush of relief and moving to turn it hot again. You will control the sharp metal lever with your big toe and watch each bath in turn swirl down the drain, eddying around your heels, its last dregs pooling behind you and clinging to the small of your back. Your pale calves rising above the heel-eddies will be prickled with tiny black hairs and you will think about shaving, but you won’t reach up to the razor hanging on its hook high above you. It is not the kind of thing you should be holding.

Thoughts will cross your mind about water conservation, about pollution and global warming and seagulls strangled by plastic soda can rings. You know you should stop refilling the bath. But if he were still there he’d be taking a bath too, leaving his own ecological footprint to match or exceed your own. He loved water. He loved it more than he loved you. You can double your share in the absence of his.

The tub, like everything in his apartment – no, your apartment – is small, and when you slide down deeper into the tub your broad shoulders will jam against the porcelain sides, pressing your arms tightly against your body and leaving you keenly aware of the too-solid bones beneath your thin layer of skin. You will think about the movies where women much smaller than you with much bigger bathtubs sink down until they’re almost drowning, hair swirling beneath the surface like halos, their knees and noses the only parts visible from above. You know you could never drown in this tub, and so you will sit up with your head against the wall, the apartment-standard tiles cold and hard even through your half-wet hair, water rising only as far as your belly.

When you cry, you won’t be surprised that the tears mingle with the bathwater until they’re indistinguishable, leaving diluted salty traces in the manufactured freshwater lake of the tub. You have cried in water before, in baths and showers and down at the beach when sudden oncoming waves stung your eyes. But when you sob, head in your hands, great gobs of snot and mucus bursting from your nose and coughing up from your throat, you’ll be surprised by how well they, too, slip between your fingers and dissolve into the water, leaving it just as even and transparent as before. You will remembers that human bodies are 57% water and wonder if he started dissolving, too, in the days after he stepped into the ocean and before the police with their nets and their scuba gear dragged him back onto land. You will wonder how much of the vast, undifferentiated Atlantic is now made of the man you loved. And then you will fill the bath again.

“Pantser vs Plotter” by Chuck Wendig – http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2011/03/02/pantser-versus-plotter/

“Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood – http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/endings.htm

I highly recommend both of these pieces.

Also, Kelly Link is amazing and her site is here:
http://kellylink.net/

I figure folks can track down “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Say Anything” on their own.

I recall (but cannot locate) a podcast story read by Frank Key which uses second person future–that is, ‘imperative’ tense. It might have been in Hooting Yard. The “story” is a set of instructions which become more and more bizarre as they continue. “On the bridge, you will find a pair of blunt, rusty scissors. Pick them up and carry them somewhere that they will not injure you, such as jabbed in the belly of the inebriant you will find in the trunk of your car.”

In my own genre (erotica), there’s a lot of material written in second person. “I take you by the hand and lead you to the living room, where we find the cushions from the couch laid out in a circle, with blankets laid over them to make a cozy little next. Before we can cross the edge of my magic bower, however…”

Anyway, the second poem on this page is what I think of when I think of second-person future tense

http://www.webdelsol.com/LITARTS/laux/dl-part3.htm

Lovely show, and great reading by Kelly!

http://pucomic.com/davidbcooper/?p=109

Either I would write a sentient space-faring pickle race, mighty among the stars in war and peace, or I would write a pornographic bit.

:looks at replies:

Yep, that’s my head, right there.

When I was a composer, I stopped and started and vice versa way too much in an effort to live up to some ideal of perfection that simply didn’t exist.

Where the idea of perfection falls short is that it forces you into an ideal that doesn’t – and will never – exist. Perfection to one person is not to another, and so on and so forth.

Like I said, just because I say perfection doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim as high as possibly can – not for some ideal that doesn’t exist, but because you take pride in your work. You just have to know when enough is enough and it’s time to put it into the world.

Maybe I should have been more clear in the piece – but I say “No” a whole lot more than I say “yes” to ideas.

On the one hand, I really want to embrace this idea and run with it. I feel like if I could, so much more would get done because I would be turning my brain off and just letting the creativity and ideas go and do what they’d like. However, I feel like that streak of perfectionism is an important filter. It let’s you try and weed through the ideas that are just silly and ridiculous and lets you try and focus on better things.

Granted someone can make the argument that those silly and ridiculous ideas might be the best ones but, like I said, I can’t decide how I feel on the whole thing. It makes me want to have thinky thoughts and I am not entirely functional enough to have them.

I may pass this article around and see what I can get out of the people I know. I’d be curious to gauge people’s reactions to the idea presented and see what they make of it.