Readin’ and Writin’

Any writer worth their salt will tell you that reading is an important part of the creative process for a writer. In fact, one of the first pieces of advice many established writers will give a budding author is to read, read, read.

I tend to read books in genres other than what I’m writing in. For instance, while working on the Moonstone Chronicles I tend to shy away from reading swords and sorcery or fantasy based adventures. If I was working on the Ardraci Elementals I’d shy away from science fiction.

I read my Kindle while using the exercise bike (so I think of it as reading time, not exercise time) and I read tree books to relax. While I like books in a series, I loathe serials, but sometimes I get caught up in a specific genre and binge read. For instance, I just finished going through a werewolf phase on the Kindle – I read about six or eight werewolf books in a row (although to be fair, two of them were shapeshifting dogs).

I’d have probably kept going with the werewolves, but that was all I could easily find. Blame Book Bub, I have almost 1800 unread books on my Kindle. Now I’m really into this motorcycle club book I’m reading and I expect I’ll be looking for more of those in the future.

While the Kindle reading is a set, daily thing, the tree book reading is a little more problematic. It’s not always easy to fit into my daily routine, but I’ve been making more of an effort lately. And if reading leads to writing, then it appears to be working.

Check out the side bar people – the edits are done and I’m back to adding new words to Wandering Wizards!

I think I was up to around 69,000 words when I started the edits, and I added about 6,000 worth in new scenes, so I probably deleted about 10,000 worth of fluff. While the time line might be a little shaky, I think on the whole what I’ve got is a stronger story and I can’t wait to see what happens next.


Prompts of the Week

Prompt One - words
Quarrel
Bubble
Tidy
Stay
Shield

Prompt Two – archtype card:
Beggar
Light Attributes: Confronts empowerment at the level of physical survival. Awakens the spiritual authority of humility, compassion, and self-esteem.
Shadow Attributes: Dependence on others to the exclusion of effort.

Remember, you don’t need to use the words from prompt one in order, and you don’t necessarily have to create a character from the archtype card, you can use the attributes in the abstract if you like. Above all, have fun with your words, you never know what you might come up with.

Readin’ and Writin’

Short Fiction - 762
Long Fiction - 2043
Poetry - 152
Total Words - 2957
Editing Hours - 0
Paragraphs of Notes - 3

Despite the fact my numbers are higher than they’ve been previously, I have to admit to being a little disappointed. Granted I had a few health issues going on last week, but there were several times when I had a choice between reading and writing and I chose reading. Yeah, I know. Bad author!

But there were a couple of steamy shifter books on the e-reader that were really hard to put down, and I started to really get into Stephen King’s The Dark Half. I love when his characters are writers. And if you’re writing under a pseudonym you really need to read this one.

The good news is, I’ve started a collection of military based romances on my Kindle that aren’t quite as riveting, and I finished The Dark Half and needed something a little more ordinary in the tree book department, so I’m reading a Regency Christmas anthology. Don’t judge. :-p

I surprised myself by not only writing a poem for the Brazen Snake Books prompt, but coming up with it early. The deadline is Friday at midnight and you can usually find me hard at work on it at 11 p.m. But this one was finished on Thursday! If you’re curious, you can read it HERE. And I thought it was pretty ironic that the day it was posted it was hazy in the morning, got hotter by lunch, and then some clouds started to roll in. Of course these clouds just rolled on by and it never cooled down, but still ...

I often get together with a writing friend on Saturday mornings for coffee and a thrift store run, but this weekend we brought our coffee in thermoses and packed a couple of lawn chairs in the car. We parked on the pier and sat in our chairs facing the harbour and pulled out our notebooks to write. I should clarify - Catherine wrote; I kept getting distracted. This is the view I had:

The water was so calm it looked like you could walk on it. There wasn’t even a hint of breeze. It was beautiful. There was a flock of seagulls on the other side of the barrier that keeps pedestrians from walking out to the lighthouse and even they were quiet. Then all of a sudden there was this loud splash as a huge fish leaped out of the water and smacked down again. He did this three times and then moved on to a different spot. He seemed to be making a circuit of the harbour - always leaping three times before moving on - and I couldn’t help but wonder what his deal was.

This was one of those times when I tried to bend the writing to my will, which never works and I really should have known better. I had my heart set on doing a story for the BSB prose prompt, but I could not for the life of me come up with a reason why someone would send hate mail to a weatherman when the weather was good and fan mail when the weather was bad. Of course now I have about three different ideas that would work, but it’s too late. LOL

Anyway, after spending way too much time getting nothing done on that I turned to my own prompt, the picture of the month. And started re-writing the story I’d already started from the beginning. A page or two into that I got a couple of ideas that I had to write down, so I abandoned my story and didn’t get back to it. And then it started getting freakishly hot so we packed it in.

So while I didn’t get the 12 pages written that Catherine did, I got enough accomplished that I don’t feel like I wasted my time. Next time I’d like to be better prepared - maybe with a clearer idea of what I want to work on. I kept thinking I should have taken my Neo with me and next time I will.

And sun screen. Lots of sun screen. ;-)

Details and ReadingFun With Quotes

So how, exactly does one have fun with quotes?
Glad you asked! If you’re like me, you start by exchanging quotes on a daily basis with your Best Bud. But not just any quotes, writing quotes, to give each other inspiration. And then you pick the two best quotes of the week to share with the rest of the world - because ... why not? :-D

I must have a word with Jamie and tell her to stop sending me such great quotes - it’s getting too hard to choose. ;-) However, after much internal debate, I finally settled on this one:

The reason novels were so thick for so long was that people had so much time to kill. I do not furnish transportation for my characters; I do not move them from one room to another; I do not send them up the stairs; they do not get dressed in the mornings; they do not put the ignition key in the lock, and turn on the engine, and let it warm up and look at all the gauges, and put the car in reverse, and back out, and drive to the filling station, and ask the guy about the weather.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Who out there has been guilty of putting in way too much mundane detail? Raise your hands. C’mon, be honest now. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

I get it, I really do. You love your characters and your setting and you want your readers to experience the story the way you see it so you don’t leave anything to chance. But unless you’re participating in NaNo where you’re trying to write as many words as possible in thirty days, don’t. While you do need to use enough detail to make things real, you don’t need to detail everything. Too much detail can be boring and kill the pace of your novel.

Jamie says it best herself: ... everyone knows how things work if a character is driving, right? Everyone knows that if I say the character is doing something "the next day", that he/she probably ate and slept and dressed in between...

You want to use enough detail and description to make the scene feel real and immediate, but not so much that the reader feels overloaded. Give your readers just enough description to fill in their own details. The key is using details that are relevant to what you’re describing, that matter to the story, and that aren’t already obvious or self-evident.

I had some good quotes myself this week, and in the end I chose this one:

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
― William Faulkner

Most writers are already avid readers, but there are some out there who just aren’t interested or don’t feel that it’s important. I know someone like this and her writing is mediocre at best and though she has self-published more than a dozen books, they show no growth, no improvement.

Reading widens your skills as a writer. By reading what other writers have to say, whether they be classics or non-fiction or poetry, you gain a greater command of language, of techniques and craft, of what works and what doesn’t. It gives you an appreciation of style and voice and the unique approach of other writers.

It improves your vocabulary. This is true even of non-writers. It’s proven that children who are read to on a regular basis have larger vocabularies than children who are not. You can become inspired by something you’ve read, it can give you that push you need to move forward with your own writing. It will improve your creativity. It will help you explore and understand the human condition, one of the building blocks of writing.

In conclusion, you need to use details judiciously but write, write, write, and read, read, read to succeed as a writer.

;-)