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I was researching Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King) for a roleplaying game yesterday, and one of the things he said was he reads 4 hours a day and writes 4 hours a day. I'm going to try this for a while and see how it works.
Posts: 334 | Registered: Sep 2003
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Might be nice if you can block out that much time that straight. I suppose for a professional, it can be done...us part-time writer amateurs have to grab what time we can, for reading and writing, in between making a living and sleeping.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I tried to do that for a while before I had the baby. (I've ben writing "full time" since I got married.) Trouble was, if I was reading a good book I tended not to want to put it down and it I was in a flow I didn't want to stop writing. Turned out for me it was better to alternate days for reading/writing unless I got stuck in my writing or unless the book was just beggint to be put down.
Now, like most of you, I no longer have 8 hours a day to devote to reading or writing. I get 3 hours of writing tasks in during baby naptimes (this includes critiquing and the business end of things). I read a bit each evening.
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I'm a SAHM of four kids ages 2,6,8 and 10 plus I homeschool the older three and still have to keep house, cook etc. My time for doing any writing or reading is either before they get up or after they go to bed. Neither is exactly prime for me as I'm extremely tired in either case. I find if I'm writing I'm not reading and vice versa. Very frustrating! Although, I do read to my kids so I'm at least able to study children's liturature.
Posts: 92 | Registered: Aug 2006
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I wish I had that much time to spare - with work, training the new pup and kids, life..but I make do with what time I have and usually write during my normal sleep periods..somtimes dozing off (I have woke up with at least one hundred or so "e"s).
Posts: 287 | Registered: Jul 2006
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cll: I say screw the house. Get a maid. Or at least a roomba.
I have robots that take care of the vacuuming, mopping, and lawn. I keep up with the dishes and laundry. My husband (supportive of my writing aspirations) helps me with the bathrooms and dusting. And once my son gets old enough, I'm making him help too!
It's never easy to find time to do the things you love, but what else is life for? Family comes first, then you. Housework is definitely at the bottom of that list!
[This message has been edited by Christine (edited August 18, 2006).]
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Unfortunately my DH thinks my writing is a pipe dream and as such everything else should come first. Now... he takes entire days to go fishing but would never even consider let me take an entire day to write. But I love him. The problem is he's not a reader and can't fathom the "writing thing". He's forever telling me he doesn't see what's so hard about writing my novel. I should just be able to sit down and whip it out in a few days. I think when I present him with a finished manuscript he might at least take me a little seriously, though I would never ask him to read my work. He wouldn't do it. He might listen to me read it out loud. He has been listening to me read the Harry Potter series to my kids and has been enjoying it. Although I hate it when he tells me he liked the movie(s) better. Urghh! Payback is that my oldest loves to read and write. She is forever asking for a new book and will spend hours in Barnes and Noble or the library with me.
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Vent all you like! I feel so lucky that I ended up with someone who loves to read (he couldn't write to save his life though) and who thinks I've got promise. He was one of rhe first people to read my stuff and he is always honest.
The thing about writing, IMHO, is that it's about more than getting yourself published. Some people like to shop, others like to read, some like to fish or hunt or play golf or go bowling or play bridge. There is no reason why any of these is more important than any other. We do these things because we enjoy them, because they are a part of who we are, and because we want to become better at them.
If bowling was your thing, would your husband not take you seriously because he didn't believe you would make the women's bowling circuit and start making thousands of dollars? Do you not take his fisghin seriously because he hasn't been able to join fishing competitions and make money?
Money is not the end all be all of life and it is not what's important to me. I want people to read ane enjoy my stories and I want to get better with each successive attempt. Very few writers get rich off of it. That doesn't mean it can't make us happy.
I know a lot of people don't have families supportive of their dreams in this area and I don't understand why it's so different from anything else. My dad's a golfing nut. My mom likes to cook and cross stitch. My husband tinkers with robots. All these things are important and I hope that everyone can find a way to make the things that make them happy a part of their life -- especially moms! I, for one, want my son to see that he can and should do the things that make him happy.
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I'm hoping to get some books on CD that I can listen to while I do housework or exercise. I used to be dubious of them, but I really enjoyed listening to Life of Pi like that. There were parts I wanted to review. I wound up listening to it a second time.
Posts: 334 | Registered: Sep 2003
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Four hours of sleep a day is workable if you only count level four sleep. Otherwise, you should probably do seven hours of sleep and one hour writing. You might not write as much, but it will be better writing. And I wouldn't bet on that thing about it not being as much, either.
quote:He has been listening to...the Harry Potter series.... I hate it when he tells me he liked the movie(s) better.
I'm going to state this as a simple matter of fact, which it is.
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I would think so too if I believed Survivor and had only watched the movies. They were terrible. Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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tcher, the books are really, truly, deeply terrible. The movies aren't brilliant or anything, though Prisoner of Azkaban is actually pretty good.
Rowlings spins a pretty good yarn. I'm told that the story in the books is deeper and more complex than what's in the movies, and I'm willing to believe it. But the fact remains that I'm never going to make it all the way through any of those books, and I was able to watch the movies (except for the fourth one, I'd made the mistake of forcing down an entire chapter of the fourth book beforehand, so I wasn't able to tolerate anything associated with it).
That might be a subjective judgement, so let us confine ourselves to clear facts. When you look at issues of actual fact rather than subjective judgements, it is clear that the movies are "better" in every objectively measurable catagory.
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Well from a filmmaker's standpoint, albeit an amateur one, the movies are terrible. I don't think they would be successful at all without the intense backing of millions of fans and readers.
The biggest problem with Rowling, that I can identify, is a lack of consistancy. The magic lacks cost and lacks rules, therefore the entire setting and story is in danger of zipping any random direction at any given moment. The funniest part is that this wild-randomr oller coaster effect, graphically similar to drug heights, is very addictive and enjoyable to the vast majority of persons. I myself have read the books and, mostly, enjoyed them. Not without a gripe here and there, however, her tremendous success and fanciful but fun stories have put smiles on millions of kids faces. Even encouraged a few to develop a taste for reading. Since tehre is no true scale that I know which identify's a book as good or terrible, I don't agree that the books are "deeply terrible." I think the plot is flawed and on a technical level the books are deeply imperfect. However, it is clear that enjoyability wins out over craftsmanship, and since she so strongly met her onjective of creating an enjoyable read... well, on this scale I have to admit the books are good, clever, and of course ridiculously successful. Not randomly either.
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Three and four were better than the books. I thought the first two were good until I saw the third one and realized just how many opportunities Chris Columbus didn't take advantage of.
The trouble with Rowling is her tendency to ramble. She's spent chapters going on about adventures that went nowhere to benefiting plot or characterization, and by the time they're done, I'm often left wondering why I spent that much time in those chapters. That's been the biggest improvement from the last two films, getting rid of the useless sideplots.
Regardless, they're still one of my favorite series and I'm eagerly anticipating the concluding volume. And with the costless, ruleless magic, who cares? This is necessary in stories where magic exists in a non-magic world, but since Harry Potter takes place in a magical world, it's accepted as the regular way of life. In fact, using this logic, using non-magical items in a magic world should have its cost and rules.
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While I do think that stricter rules for magic would benefit Rowling's world, I am willing to forgive this in a series designed for immature readers and just have fun. That's really how I feel when I read the books -- they're fun. I think it is important not to expect YA literature to adhere to an adult standard. They have their own standards -- not lower just different.
I'm not sure what scenes and adventures didn't go towards plot and or characterization, though. I guess I had fun with everything so maybe I just didn't mind or notice when they happened.
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I'm as willing to go off topic as much as the next guy, but...Good God, aren't there enough "I hate Harry Potter / J. K. Rowling because..." threads around already?
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:...aren't there enough "I hate Harry Potter / J. K. Rowling because..." threads around already?
No, there's enough Harry Potter / J.K. Rowling threads, period.
As far as the price of magic goes, I was just pointing out that in non-magical settings, magic is more demanding to the user. Either it requires some sacrifice in order to work, or it affects more than one person or place, or it alters the user when used too long.
In Harry Potter, the price has a real-world focus. In the real world, everything we do exacts a price. If we want to build a car, we have to have the knowledge and the resources to make and operate it, as well as time and physical labor. And in the HP world, they have to do the exact same thing. If they want to make a potion, they need the knowledge, resources, time, and labor. It's a mundane price, but then, the magic is just the setting, not the story.
My point was that in a magical setting, it may be possible to let the price of not using magic be a bit heavier, like using magic in the real world often demands more of its user.
I'm probably overthinking this, though. I'm in the camp where Harry Potter is just a fun series to kill time with, after all.
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Hey, I like the movies, and they've made a lot of money. Of course they wouldn't exist but for the success of the books. But the same comparison could be drawn between...well, let's not offend anyone
The entire reason that we say that magic should have costs and rules is by comparison to the non-magical world we know. The appeal of magic is our naive belief that it might be free of those constraints. But if you try to write a story where magic is free of those constraints, you inevitably end up with a linear plot or one that is utterly incomprehensible.
Whether or not the universe as a whole is really orderly or we merely impose that paradigm on our experience, we can't tell interesting stories in which things happen arbitrarily. So though our longing for magic is based on our desire to "get something for nothing", the magic in our stories has to be of the "no free lunch" variety.
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Unless you want to tell a story where magic has no rules, and the conflict the heroes have is to put constraints on it.
Posts: 329 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Actually, I've been "reading" Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It starts off a little strange, but got pretty interesting.
I put down both Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix after a couple hundred pages. The first because I lost interest and the second was too whiney. It is apparent to me that liking Harry must require having read earlier books. And yes, I've already had the discussion with people about depicting teens realistically. Well, I hope he and Voldemort are able to put each other out of their mutual misery.
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To throw another work on the "magic and mundane" file...Randall Garrett's "Lord Darcy" series postulates that magic is like any other science---just awaiting study and codification, like chemistry or physics. (Also it postulates an alternate history where the Plantagenets never lost the thrones of England and France, but that's another story.)
As near as I interpret that, it means that magic and everything else still works. The laws of physics and chemistry and biology (presumably as affected by magic) still work. You could build a steam engine [and railroads are present in the series] and it would work as a steam engine would work. Presumably its action could be affected by magic as it could by anything else, say, by casting a spell to prevent the boiler fires from lighting.
I think there's some confusion between magic on the one hand, and miracles on the other hand. A miracle would have no constraint...magic would need rules and need to be codified.
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No, a miracle proper is generally accepted as following certain metaphysical rules. It is a "demonstration" of some underlying principle of reality ("Our God is real, yours is a sham" or something like that). So miracles need to make some kind of sense.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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I haven't been sticking to this resolution too well, but it has been getting me reading more, which I think was a major weakness on my part. I guess I'll try to read one book a week, and also spend some time writing each day.
Sometimes I like to write in the morning and sometimes I like to write before bed.
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I'll resist the urge to defend the HP books until the cows come home, but I will say quickly that I absolutely HATED and LOATHED the movies with every fiber of my being.
I, unfortunately, am one of those writers who usually- but not always-hates movie adaptations of books. I'm a pretty detail-oriented person, and in film there just isn't enough time to outline everything that I think makes the book as great as it is. I'm also not fond of the liberties that directors and screenwriters take with a writer's "baby," if you will. Anyone who has seen the LotR movies and read the books will see various and sometimes blatant changes between the two. I enjoyed the movies, but I will admit that I had a hard time sitting through "Two Towers" without cringing a little. Arwen's storyline made me mad, too; she was NOT that important in the books for a reason. Grr.
As for the 4+4 idea, I try to do both reading and writing at once. (Yay for multitasking skills!) I will work on my story for a while, and then when I get stuck on a scene I'll pick up a book and start reading until I have my creative "oomph" back. Then I'll switch back and forth between reading and writing until it's time for me to put it aside and do the things I should have been doing hours before. Like homework. Or yardwork. Or sleeping, which is something I don't do a lot of.
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Just out of curiousity...what kind of roleplaying game involves research into Stephen King's alter-ego?
Posts: 50 | Registered: Jan 2006
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Oh, it was going to be a mafia game, but only 5 players have registered so it's probably not going to happen. I guess a lot of potential players find the scenario (of a writer's workshop turned murderous) intimidating.
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posted
The 4 + 4 thing might work for me (if I could arrange my time that way, of course) if I were to make the four hours of reading my reward for four hours of writing.
I sort of tend to do it that way anyway because if, like Christine, I get started reading anything really good, I don't want to put it down. It's better for me to do my writing first.
Also, writing first helps me feel that what I'm writing hasn't been influenced by something I read just before I started writing.
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If I'm deeply interested in a story, I'll make myself stop in the middle to go write. The built-up tension from whatever I've been reading converts into some powerful creative energy.
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Hmmm...a murderous writing workshop. Intriguing...However, if Survivor's in the storyline, I just may be too scared to play.
Posts: 50 | Registered: Jan 2006
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The touble is for this to pass as a classic cliche murder story Survivor's name gives him away. He survives, there's no suspense there. Unless of course he's the murderer. But then does that mean the rest of us lose? Or does he go to jail? He could survive and still be behind bars.
We could call the story "Survivor Behind Bars, and the dark days that brought him there"
Or I could shut up, yes, I suppose I could do that.
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