quote:Welcome to this week's Novel Support Group. Anyone can join. If you're new, tell us a bit about who you are and what project you are working on. Feel free to update the NSG Work in Progress thread with your current projects. Although we can report on any number of things, here is a list of suggestions (suggestions welcomed).
What were your goals last week and did you accomplish them? Describe what you worked on. Set goals for next week. Did you learn something during this week?
Here is a list of things that you can do each week as we work on our novels (suggestions welcomed).
Writing on a novel Characterization World Building Relevant research
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As for me:
Last Week's Goals:
DUAL MAGICS SERIES (THE SHAMAN'S CURSE, THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, BEYOND THE PROPHECY,and WAR OF MAGIC): Nothing this week unless the revisions to the audio book come back. No revised audio files yet.
Refresh existing catalog: Go back through my back list and add the link to BECOME: BROTHERS Started (barely).
BECOME: BROTHERS: Promote on social media. A little.
BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: Get back to work on this one. Not yet.
MAGE STORM: Probably nothing this week. Good call.
Research the best way to return to wide distribution when I can pull my books out of Kindle Select. Page flip is a deal breaker for me. Not really.
Next Week's Goals:
DUAL MAGICS SERIES (THE SHAMAN'S CURSE, THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, BEYOND THE PROPHECY,and WAR OF MAGIC): Nothing this week unless the revisions to the audio book come back.
Refresh existing catalog: Go back through my back list and add the link to BECOME: BROTHERS
BECOME: BROTHERS: Promote on social media.
BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: Either get back to work on this one or choose something else to work on while my enthusiasm for this story rebuilds.
Research the best way to return to wide distribution when I can pull my books out of Kindle Select. Page flip is a deal breaker for me.
Posts: 4633 | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
I rarely contribute to this forum, and on those occasions I have, they were false starts. Mainly story ideas whose time had not yet come. Also, for most of my time here at Hatrack I haven’t been able to actually write – until now. But that doesn’t mean I have not spent a lot of time thinking about writing.
Well, today is my debut participation with an actual story; fully outlined, with additional notes on dialogue, characterisation, and intended tone. This is also my first opportunity to do some proof-of-concept testing of the writing principles I am developing. They seem to be working so far; with a bit of tweaking.
It’s a short story (a very short story) around 1200 words or so I would guess. It is intended to be a satirical look at the concept of redemption – in a Christian context. And it will probably offend some people, poking fun at the act of confession as it does.
Of course, the hardest part of writing a story is finding the right start. For most writers this is a pretty arbitrary choice. We imagine our story and, in order to do that we have to start somewhere. Except that that somewhere will in most cases turn out to be the wrong somewhere. Or it will have the wrong tone or focus.
But we persist in desperately clinging to that start no matter what advice we get. Usually because by the time we realise the start just isn’t working we’ve put in too much effort to change it. You see this all the time in the Fragments and Feedback forums.
Anyway, I have found the right stating place, and tone, for my story’s start – despite a few hiccups. However, I won’t know for certain until I let the story ferment and age. In about 6 months I’ll read it again and see what I think.
Phil.
An update: 461 words in and my damned soul has just met his Arch Adversary. Let the contest begin.
[ May 21, 2017, 07:14 AM: Message edited by: Grumpy old guy ]
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Sep 2012
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posted
Same as last week, I need to send in E-mails and ask for an update on the beta reading Still working on the other novels.
My Hero in the steampunk dragon punk thing is about to be rescued off of a tiny island. which might be the end of the book except I need a report about the dragon he helped. Then I will do that other chapter dealing with him going back home for a visit.
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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posted
Over the last two weeks or so, I've gradually shifted focuses from the novella I'd been poking at to the novel I've been wanting to write for years. The story has defied linear outlines since its inception, so I've decided to take a more character-oriented approach and outline each individual character's arc throughout the story. It's slow going, but slow is better than stalled.
Posts: 745 | Registered: May 2015
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quote:Originally posted by Disgruntled Peony: The story has defied linear outlines since its inception, so I've decided to take a more character-oriented approach and outline each individual character's arc throughout the story. It's slow going, but slow is better than stalled.
Ah. My sympathies. I've battled with one of those stories, too. Glad you found a path for it.
Posts: 4633 | Registered: Dec 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Disgruntled Peony: The story has defied linear outlines since its inception, so I've decided to take a more character-oriented approach and outline each individual character's arc throughout the story. It's slow going, but slow is better than stalled.
Ah. My sympathies. I've battled with one of those stories, too. Glad you found a path for it.
I begin to think all of my novel ideas are those stories. Linear outlines only seem to work with short stories, for me.
Posts: 745 | Registered: May 2015
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posted
If a short story is a thread, a novel is a tapestry. Linear timelines suit short stories more than novels, yet many novels are nonlinear time as well as linear antagonized causation. The latter in another light is how nonlinear timelines arise: chronologically nonlinear antagonized causation.
The start is when the focal agonist realizes a big problem arose earlier in time though was below a realization threshold, is in medias res. Once the realization transpires, those forms loop back to the ab initio, at the start, of the complication, and later, middle, or end catch up to the timeline. Sewing metaphors are apt descriptions for timeline types, straight stitch, buttonhole, zigzag, back stitch, satin stitch, outline stitch, chain stitch, blind stitch, etc.
Figuring out how a narrative's nonlinear timeline impacts its drama and appeals challenged me for a time. Many dramatic motion portraits, and real life, are unamenable to linear chronology, though, if organized in terms of agonism's complications, make more sense, are more dramatic, and appeal the more for it. Rather than per se flashbacks and flash-forward transitions interspersed throughout, these are modular in medias res episodes which establish their setting's time, place, and situation by artful designs if even needed at all.
Nonlinear timeline writers, whose processes I know, storyboard those either by intuition or design, both based upon the standard plot structure: complication incitement, backstory infilled all along in time bubbles in which whatever it is matters most at the immediate now moment, efforts to satisfy the complication, outcome of the complication, even if projected past words' end as an afterstory, more or less open-ended, though inferable.
posted
This outlining experiment has been a lot of fun. An important plot point with one character had cause-and-effect ripples throughout several other characters' timelines. Some of the same events show up on multiple timelines, but that's to be expected. Characters interact with each other, after all.
Posts: 745 | Registered: May 2015
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Linear outlines only seem to work with short stories, for me.
