Profanity in Writing
Keith Cronin wrote a great post on Writer Unboxed (that I just now caught up to on Feedly) about profanity in writing. It covers most of the bases, but I had some thoughts to add as well. My writing has some language in it, the f-bomb or damn most often. It’s a part of my character. He is a man of the world and has a temper that often times gets the best of him. That’s part of this character. But he is also from the South, and he’s well educated. There is a time and a place for language, and that plays into the when he says what. He doesn’t cuss around women, most of the time, because that’s how he was raised. He doesn’t use the Lord’s name in vain (Because my mother and mother in law are reading this) because he grew up Catholic and that influenced…
The Writers’ Union of Canada Votes to Admit Self-Published Authors
Pretty big news from our neighbors to the north via Passive Voice. Unsure of the demographics involved here (Canadian authors, self published authors, residency requirements on all of that) but it sets a solid precedent for the U.S.
Mythology
Below is one of my favorite posts from the old Story Arcs. Enjoy! I was looking for something to blog about today and couldn’t think of anything. Than got me thinking about this weekend when I was trying to work through a story component and couldn’t move any further. In the end, I solved it because I started thinking on certain things and that led to some story ideas that I had been pursuing and before long I was ping ponging between plot points, ideas, and myths until I had the whole scene figured out. Now, what was I thinking about? Mythology. What kind? I’ll get to that in a minute. The first point I want to make is the value of those stories that came before us. Way before us. Everything from Beowulf to to fairy tales to Olympus. A lot of these are tales we’ve been telling for…
Writing Progress 06/11
Didn’t write last night much, about a thousand words after getting home from an MBA class. I liked what I generated though. I’m kind of in a weird spot right now and having a hard time pushing through this part of the story. It was a moment where things just kind of jumped off the rails (literally, actually) and now I was driving the story in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. With a character I hadn’t planned on. But this is how it always is for me when I’m creating new content. Transitions are difficult for me and are usually doe on the second run through, like seams. Dialogue, much to my shame, is also a difficult part to handle in these moments, especially when they’re are more than two characters. That’s something I’m trying to work on as an author as a whole. So now, I’m just writing the…
Outlining
I see my story as a movie. That’ s just how my imagination works. I see scenes from camera angles and imagine the little black blips that pop up on the movie screen at the theater. And it always tends to be like a trailer from the beginning. You know what I mean, two minutes of the best scenes mashed together with big, bold words cut in between. You see a dozen of the movie’s best lines, three or four amazing actions scenes, all narrated by a gravelly voice. I have always been a sucker for a good trailer. And that’s how I see my story. I see all my favorite scenes, the ones that are the reason I’m writing the whole book to begin with, where the tension is at its height and the most memorable events happen. But a good story is an undulating wave of tension. It…