The Lousypoet

Just a quick couple of notes.

On my own writing front, I currently sit at 12,000 words and 40 pages. But the past two nights have yielded some sweet fruit. Talking to Carolyn about the story, between us we’ve come up with some key scenes, a running gag that I think will add some great little laughs for the series, and the grand-daddy end of the whole thing. In all, a pretty good two days’ work.

Now two links that I’m posting for myself and the interest of anyone who cares.

First up is Vonnegut’s Eight Rules of Writing Fiction. Sweet, simple, and so damned to the point that it’s hard to not be inspired by them.

Secondly, a link in regards to Guidelines for writing Young Adult Novels. Since my particular book is currently aimed at this demographic, I found this short, simple, yet informative article pretty damn handy.

Finally we have some writing tips from the Godfather of Horror, Mr. Stephen King. In the ten minutes it takes you to read the article, Mr. King promises to teach you all that is needed to write a novel. And the funny thing is, I actually did…

So I started my book a few days ago. Something happened around page 13, and it forced me to stop and give a bit more thought on how I was going to proceed. It wasn’t that my plot was going somewhere I hadn’t intended, it was that I realised I had no plot. See, what I had, and still have, was a concept. What I’m coming to realise is that in the past when I’ve started a project and never finished it, it wasn’t because the idea was bad, it wasn’t even that I am a terrible writer (though that does have an element to do with it) it has to do with the fact that I come up with concepts and not a story. What I’ve realised is that I can’t just fly all half cocked and expect that a novel will magically appear. So with that, I’ve started doing some research on novel blueprints.

Put simply, a novel blueprint is just that, a blueprint of your novel. It gives you a general sense of what will be accomplished, who is going to accomplish it, who your characters are, and what setting your story takes place in. This is the place for research notes, symbols and meanings that you want your tale to convey.

The good folks over at Writer’s Digest have some great articles. I found a really great, in-depth novel blueprint there. They also link to an example of a novel blueprint filled in, based on the novel I Am Legend. Seeing it laid out in such a straight forward way really made sense. It also made it clear how moving from major event to event still left lots of meat for the author to work on, but the blueprint meant that things stayed on track.

What I discovered on page 13 of my novel was that my main character was going somewhere I had never envisioned her, and that didn’t jive with what I had written on pages 1-12. It suddenly struck me that I had no idea who this girl was, let alone what was about to happen to her and how she was going to react. I figured out that if I continued on in the dark, my main character was just going to be Jekyll and Hyde and constantly transform based on my mood and the situation, which isn’t how people really are. I was going backwards, trying to find out who my character was by pushing her along, instead of creating a true story and plot and then plunking her down and seeing how she reacted.

I found another ten step novel blueprint over at Love Pride Prejudice. I think this one is pretty tongue in cheek, but there is some truth in humour and when you read this ten step novel blueprint you will undoubtedly see some of your favourite books laid out in front of you. However, that’s fun, but maybe not what you really need to get the book flying.

Admittedly this seems tedious. In some ways, I’ve known others who felt too much analysis killed anything that presented itself as art. On the other hand, a story, particularly something as grand as a novel, needs to stand up to some scrutiny. After all, writing in a genre invites serious critical thought and analysis because genre fans seem to feel compelled to do such things. If you can’t scrutinize your work from the get-go and ensure that there is some inner logic at work, then sooner or later, someone will. And when that day comes, you had better hope that either you built in the logic or just got lucky and plugged it in there. Cause otherwise you’re going to see no end of negative rippers on Amazon!

So, I’m going to be spending some time on my novel blueprint and character sheets. If I find a template that is really useful (and original to me) I’ll post it. In the meantime, if I find any other links of use I’ll pass them along.

So i was talking to my wife the other day about the Twilight series. We often do this sort of thing, talk about books, authors, movies, and sort of thing that intrigues and entertains us. In this particular case, it was because my mother had overheard some ladies talking about the series and had expressed some interest in it (Christmas gift for mom… check!).

So Carolyn and I were talking about the Twilight series on the way home. She mentioned to me that she had visited Stephanie Meyer’s website, and was I aware that Twilight had started to be written because of a dream? Well, I was somewhat familiar with that, but I hadn’t known it was a specific scene, nor had I known it was a scene from the middle of the book and that Meyer had started there, finished, and then started from the beginning to get to the middle. I was even more astounded to find out that from point of writing to publishing deal took only about six months!

I was interested, and so I decided to read the story about Twilight’s conception myself (you can check it out here http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight.html). What encouraged me was Mrs. Meyer saying that the only other writings she had were chapters from various other stories that she had never gotten that far with. As I looked through the contents of my hard drive, in particular the folder called “Writings” I realised that I was all too familiar with that sort of writing.

But all this put me to thinking. There’s the famous story of how The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe began with C.S. Lewis having a vision of a little girl meeting a fawn beneath a lamp post in a snowy forest. I’m sure there’s probably a story like thing for most, if not all, authors, and it occurred to me that in spite of all the writing books that tell you that you need to read, or write, or hop on one foot reciting the alphabet backwords, that the true breakthrough book starts with a vision.

What becomes the story is the author’s quest to understand how that vision came to happen, and what happened because of it. That led me to understand that I have yet to have such a vision, which may help to explain why everytime I start to write a story, it doesn’t “feel right.”

To my mind, to become a writer, you need two things; a vision, and to be able to ask the right questions to find out how the contents of that vision occured, and what happened because of those events. I believe it was Neil Gaiman that said something along the lines that an author had to be good at asking questions. His example was, let’s say cats used to rule the world. As an author, you now have to ask, why don’t they any longer, how do they feel about that, and are they doing anything to change things back? Of course, you could go on and on, and you might just have a competent story about cats plotting to take over the world. But it all starts with the vision. From there, it becomes, if this happened, why did it happen? What happened because this happened? Because there were outcomes from that event, what happened from those outcomes, etc, etc.

I will resolve to be patient. I believe it is not enough to just have an idea. There must be a vision that provides a goal and the passion.

So yesterday I wrote about my plunging Google pagerank and wondered what I should do about it. Varsha Vijay wrote a comment on that entry that is naturally very simple, but did get me thinking about this site and what I should be doing with it. He wrote;

Advice ? Write good and people will come to you. BTW your blog name (lousypoet) created the curiosity to come to your site but could not find anything relevant to poem`s.

Now there’s the thing. There is nothing about anything on The Lousy Poet. Currently, this site is a mish mash of my ideas, things I see and do that interest me, and a series of blog posts that only exist to make me a few bucks. While I don’t see anything particularly wrong with doing the odd paid post, there is not enough original material to balance it out. This site is more than just the eclectic place that I promote it as, it is, simply, a mess. There is no balance and no sense of direction. And yes, Varsha, you are right, there is very little here that has to do with poetry even though the name would suggest some connection to the poetry world.

So I spent today thinking about this site. Where it is, where I want it to go, what kind of niche do I want to be a part of. This brought me back to the very reason I started this site to begin with.

About four years ago, I wanted so very badly to be a writer. I had a number of old poems and short stories laying around and so I thought that I wanted to put them in one archive online, that would then serve as the growing archive of my own written work. I thought this place would inspire me and that by now my first book would be written.

Well, here we are today, and I haven’t written that book. I haven’t even written much of anything. The old stories and poems are still here in the writing archive, but they’re just a reminder of what I had wanted to do, and demonstrate how today I am still so far from that goal. So where does that leave The Lousy Poet? Well, like I said, this site has degraded to a general sloppy mess. I haven’t done anything with it to provide it with some purpose because, frankly, I have no purpose. I try to be a good father and husband and employee, but when I sit down on this computer, I really only have a goal to earn some extra cash to keep my websites online and maybe put twenty or so dollars away each month.

So after reading Varsha’s comment, I decided I am going to do the following things. These may not be the only things, but it’s my starting point;

1) I will continue the Word of the Day
2) I will be adding a Literary Quote of the Day
3) I will be adding a weekly feature called The (Not so Lousy) Poet of the Week
4) I will be focusing more on articles that aspiring writers and poets can use, such as getting published, writing cover letters, self publishing versus getting published and more.

These changes will take place over the next several weeks. I’d love to say that they will start tomorrow, but I want to get a few things in order and done ahead of time, so if my schedule gets heavy I can keep things going up on time.

I’m hoping to make this an interesting place to visit. I know that I might not be able to compete with some of the really great literary and poetry sites, but I hope that with these added features and a few other things I have in the works, the Lousy Poet will prove to be a fun, informative and interesting site to visit.

Here’s to better days!

So I was over at Neil Gaiman’s website (a daily exercise for me) and he had a link to SFX with an interview with Paul Cornell. Apparently they have done a few interviews with various authors and at least 1 editor on becoming a new writer. So I figured I’d give them a read. I liked what Cornell had to say and I’m hoping the others will provide some more usefull insight. I’m linking to the articles below so I (and you if you’re reading and interested) can finish reading the rest.

Paul Cornell
Editor Darren Nash
Stephen Baxter
James Wyatt
Editor Jo Fletcher
Liz Williams