Friday, November 25, 2005

Bit Down

Bit discouraged today. The first draft of Jess just doesn't seem to be coming together.

I keep writing myself into dead ends.

I swear -- the next story I try to write I'm going to plot it out first. Plot it right to the feather boa and the last dwarf.

3 comments:

  1. Jo, you are the master of crits at Compuserve! I would pay you $400 if I had it for a crit of my novel-that-keeps-getting-rejected.
    You have an agent who loves your book. She'll find you a publisher, I'm sure.

    Cat

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Cat -

    Get a chapter of your WIP to me --- either in the Forum or sending it p-mail -- and I will give it a look and see if there's anything I can come up with that would be the slightest use to you.

    I wouldn't count on my being able to give any useful advice.

    It's pretty basic technical stuff I talk about, as a rule.
    (CAN the writer spell; use correct grammar; recognize a sentence fragment; write marginally human dialog; come up with motivation that doesn't come from the land of the zombies; learn not to load backstory in the first three pages; keep hold of POV; put a lid on her participial phrases?)

    These are all predictable. All early-stage writer stuff. All curable if the writer sticks with it.

    I'm one of many giving advice on this stuff. Good advice, if I may say so, abounds in the Forum.

    You (cough) don't need this.


    The more advanced stuff ...
    (CAN the writer use focus to bring the reader into the scene; suit cadence to pace, emphasis and meaning; control intimacy or 'distance' in POV; write a character not wearily, drearily familiar to us?)

    This advanced technique is hard to talk about. I'm figuring it out as I go along. Lotsa times I'm a shade off on how to do this stuff, or just plain wrong.

    So I don't know how much I'd be able to help you with any problems you may have.

    My own WIPs ...
    Often I have worked out what's wrong with bits of my writing. I KNOW that I don't keep my pacing tripping along at a fast clip. I could tighten a lot of the prose. In ANNEKA I lay the dialect on too think in a lotta places. I get my action plotline all tangled up and incomprehensible.

    I have some notion how to work with these faults. I don't always do a good job fixing stuff, but I'm not totally clueless what I NEED to do.

    But there's stuff I can't SEE myself screwing up
    because I just don't know enough. Stuff I could do better if somebody pointed it out to me. Stuff I'm clueless about. Sigh.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Jo,

    Thanks for offering to look at a chapter. I may just take you up on it at some near future time. I don't want to cut into your writing time, knowing first hand how precious this time is.

    I had to cut back my already limited visits to the forum because I'm trying to get a website up and running. Though I'm not published, I'll have some excerpts of my novels there.

    You're bound to hear good news soon. (Maybe I will, too!)

    Cat (foolishly at times, confident)

    ReplyDelete