Welcome to the first day of the Novel Push Initiative!

I’ll be working on Five Rings.

packsister will be working on her currently unnamed werewolf novel.

And RG Sanders will be working on And the Stars Ran Red.

The goal is to write at least 250 words per day during the entire month of March, and post our word counts in our blogs before midnight.

I’ll periodically be reporting our total progress throughout the month.

If we make it all the way through the month, the least number of words we’ll end up with is a respectable 7,750 words.

Good luck to everyone and have fun!

(Hopefully, I’ll be posting my first word count post later today. … )

Since I don’t actually have better judgment to judge against, I put up a sample chapter. Yes, the actual first-draft prologue of Five Rings is online and available to you right now, ready for perus-ation and scrutinization.

What a great way to kick-off the Novel-Push Initiative, right? Get some of my work out there for curious eyes to see…

I chose to put up the prologue because—as is the very nature of prologues—it’s spoiler-free.

Sure, by sharing my writing, you guys’ll likely find out that I’m in way over my head and you’re all wasting your time here and I’m a total hack. But I figure you’d have found out eventually anyway…. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick check-in to let you know that 5-Rings.com has been updated. As a result, there’s some new links at the top of this page. And yes, I really am thinking about releasing a sample chapter. :P

There’s still time if any of you would like to join us in the Novel Push Initiative.

The Novel Push Initiative:

NPI is a mere four days away.

Packsister and I are going to push our novels’ word counts forward from March 1st through March 31st.

The goal is to write at least 250 words (or half a page) per day. If we miss reporting our progress via our blogs even a single day, we’re knocked out of the event.

If I can’t handle this, I guess I have no business entering NaNoWriMo.

So this is a test for me.

And I’m excited.

And nervous.

The Writing Contest: Read the rest of this entry »

One thing creative writing classes try to teach their students is how to mimic the styles of famous authors.

I think that’s pretty smart. After all, one way to ensure a writer can make informed decisions about the different aspects of their own writing style is to see if they can pick up on and identify the alchemy of other writers’ styles.

I’ve never taken Creative Writing, but I’m taking Lit 110 this semester. As a result, I’ve recently read some short stories that are considered ‘classics’ by the powers that be:

A & P – John Updike
Story of an Hour – Kate Chopin
A Rose for Emily – William Faulkner
A Party Down at the Square – Ralph Ellison
Everyday Use – Alice Walker
Shiloh – Bobbie Ann Mason
Araby – James Joyce
The Man Who Was Almost a Man – Richard Wright
Sweat – Zora Neale Hurston
Good Country People – Flannery O’Conner
The Guest – Albert Camus
Hills Like White Elephants – Ernest Hemingway
In the American Society – Gish Jen
Woman Hollering Creek – Sandra Cisneros
The Red Convertible – Louise Erdrich

I’ll admit I have little patience for old movies and less patience still for old, archaic prose.
To make matters worse, a good portion of the stories featured irritating dialogue, where the writers tried to phonetically transcribe ‘slack-jawed’ or other variant dialect, which made reading them horribly laborious.

But a few were pleasant surprises, such as Araby and The Guest. And every one of these authors had radically different styles, so it was kinda fun to pick up their quirks and nuances while reading.

The point of all this is I tried rewriting the ending to Mr. Updike’s short story, A & P (circa 1930), mimicking his style as best as I could. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a day shrouded in winter.

Talun buried his face in the wool of his hood.

*sigh* They say writers struggle with ‘showing’ instead of ‘telling’ their whole lives. I guess I’m getting better at dodging exposition, but sometimes I’ll write something like the snippet above and have to correct myself.

Then there’s rhythm, clarity, ‘slow death’ control, LS/V, and sooo much more. Paying attention to this stuff is cumbersome, but it pays off greatly in the final draft.

I believe I’ve covered ‘show, don’t tell’, rhythm, and clarity here. But you might be wondering what ‘slow death’ is.

It’s a problem I experience quite frequently– Read the rest of this entry »

A huge element of style is the point-of-view a writer is most likely to write in. Is everybody clear on exactly what ’3rd person limited’ is? If not, here’s a quick run-down of the POVs.

1st Person:

First person’s easy. Your second grade papers were most likely written in first-person.  And of course I’m writing in first person now. In a story, the writer assumes the main character’s (MC’s) viewpoint and writes only what s/he is thinking.

Avoid:
…making the main character psychic. The MC shouldn’t know what someone else is thinking, etc.

The advantage:
It’s immersive. The reader gets into the story by living in the main character’s head, experiencing exactly what s/he’s thinking and seeing.

The disadvantage:
If other characters split up and leave the MC, the writer might have the tough task of showing the reader what happened to those characters. It can be problematic. Should the writer have the characters catch up with the MC later and fill him in? Or  jump into another person’s head for awhile (This method can be used, but it’s jarring to the reader to adjust to a different character in first person)? Either way, it’s difficult to pull off.

2nd person:

Read the rest of this entry »