I’ve recently redesigned the toolbar at the top of the blog, All your favourite features remain (presuming you have favourite parts of the blog of an obscure writer/reviewer, which I can only assume is the case).
I’ve added a review section, to help you look through the things I’ve reviewed, and find something you’d be interested in.
I’ve been working on a little scifi project, which I’ve vaguely hinted at in a previous blog post and will write more about soon.
As this was always intended to be a blog about writing, I’m adding two new sections to be regularly updated.
I’m going to talk about the projects I’m currently working on, and the state of the progress of each.
I also intend to keep a day by day diary of the different types of writing I do.
I’d imagine both of these will become more interesting if I finally reach the stage where I become a writer of note, but it’s there if you’re interested.
Basically I’ve decided that I envy the types of writer who spew out every thought they ever have, and have decided to become more like them.
Not the most fascinating post, I admit, but my hundredth in total, and hopefully helping to mark a new, more prolific era here on the blog.
As you’ve probably seen, the new year has just begun. It’s been mentioned in the news once or twice, as well as on some calendars. I’m not totally sure where all the time zones start and end, but as we’re now almost 120 hours into the New Year in Greenwich Mean Time, I think everyone’s made it across.
The tradition is to make resolutions, to look at things in our lives that need changing, and come up with a plan to make that change. Most of my bad habits (the ones I care about, anyway) are linked to my inconsistent writing habits.
So I’m going to do something I did briefly 13 months ago – a writer’s contract, a public commitment to do a few things that will get me writing on a consistent basis.
Practical tip – it’s hard to sign a contract when you have no table to rest on, and also a pig is trying to seduce you.
This is my second entry as a member of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group.
I started this blog, fourteen months ago, with the intent of using it as a tool to keep me writing on a regular basis.
However, the blog and the opportunity to write more widely for the internet have proven distracting themselves, as more and more of my effort has been poured into the blog, and other writing intended as motivation, rather than my fiction. I’ve recently seen another blogger voice the same concern, and I’d expect it’s not a rare problem. Continue reading “A High Writing Workload – Motivating or Paralysing?”→
This is intended to serve as my introduction to the Insecure Writers’ Support Group – a group ran by Alex J. Cavanaugh over on Blogspot, to give other writers and would-be writers the support we need to get past our debilitating and often idiotic insecurities.
I’ve written a few times in the past few weeks about my often irrational insecurities, so it’s something that definitely makes sense to me.
I’ve wanted to write fiction as long as I can remember, and even started writing a few scifi epics when I was a kid. Even back then, I don’t think I was great at keeping my focus all the way to the end. Though it may be because back then my plans had the habit of expanding much faster than I could write – as a writer’s hint, the other way round works better.
Somewhere along the line, I’ve gotten into the habit of beating myself up when the quality of my writing doesn’t meet the standards I want.
The characters don’t ring true. I’ve not set the scene properly. The plot doesn’t make sense.
While all of these are valid problems that need to be fixed (or compensated for with other strengths) for a long time I’ve allowed them to paralyse me. For instance, I’ve had an idea for a series of space opera short stories that I keep abandoning, and a sitcom pilot script that I’ve returned to again and again but never finished.
I’ve written a few short things of course. There’s a couple of thousand-ish word short stories here on my blog (under Read My Fiction); flash fiction; and short things for various competitions. There’s even been a couple of times I’ve started to write a novel chapter by chapter. My hope was that, by not being weighed down by the theoretical potential of the stories I’ve invested a lot of time and emotional effort into, I’d feel freer to write what came to mind.
Unfortunately, this idea didn’t really work out.
I’m much better at plotting than I am at actually writing, using formats like Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet and the like, and a piece of software called Anthemion Storylines to plot out a fairly detailed story structure. (If you’ve ever seen stories plotted using a series of post-it notes, or little pieces of paper attached to string, that’s basically what Storylines is. But it has the added benefit that the notes don’t fall off the wall.)
I’d even been using a character building idea to put together a detailed picture of each of my main characters.
So by November, I had a detailed story arc to follow, and I knew a lot about my characters, ready to use NaNoWriMo to get this thing finished.
Though the plan was in place, I actually waited until November 4th before starting. Because, as I’ve detailed above, I’m an idiot.
However, I take exception to this. My backside is fairly intelligent.
But, I got underway, finding the time to write, sometimes as much as 3,000 words in a single sitting. For those with more consistent writing habits that may not seem like a big deal, but to me it is.
I got close to the end of the first draft, over 20,000 words, after three weeks, but left it another week before going back to finish it off. That instinct inside of me, that says all my cool ideas should be left alone in case I ruin them, just wasn’t giving up.
But, at the weekend, I returned, adding the few more details needed to the end. I then went through, rewriting what I’d done, and finding myself pleasantly surprised at the quality of what I’d written.
I now have a 28,000 word short-story, and I think it’s pretty decent. There’s a central mystery-action story, character conflicts, betrayal and deceit, enemies being forced to work together, moral dilemmas, a dramatic confrontation at the end.
I don’t want to get big-headed, but I think this story’s pretty decent.
It’s something that infringes on a number of copyrights, so it won’t be publishable, but it’s good to at least have written a coherent story from start to finish.
However, I actually think that this may be the longest piece of fiction I’ve written from start to finish for over a decade, so I’m pretty chuffed about that.
Once I find the time, I’m pretty upbeat about the next story.
PS To anyone from the Insecure Writers’ Support Group who’s found their way here – I may be away from my desk for a large part of Wednesday. Apologies if I don’t get round to reading many other posts on the day, but I promise I’ll read and comment on the blogs of anyone who posts here!
The neurotic author is so much of a familiar idea, it’s became a stereotype. The writer self-conscious about sharing their deepest, most innermost thoughts. Despite it not being as much a stereotype, I’m pretty sure the same applies to non-fiction as well – at least it does to me.
I’m getting to the stage where I feel like I’m hitting brick walls, or writing things to no real effect. There is, for whatever reason, a strain of both ‘what do I know?’ and ‘what’s the point?’ invading my thoughts as I sit to write.
Writing non-fiction means writing things that address the real, wider world (by definition) and so there’s a more than decent chance that there’ll be a lot of people out there who both know the subject better than I do, and will be able to point out numerous flaws in my writing.
I write a regular ‘Lower League Week’ feature for Bornoffside.net, which concentrates on the events surrounding the clubs in League One and League Two.
I think it’s a niche that’s underserviced, but i do feel at times that I’m not doing the subject matter justice, or that this time will be the one that I trip up and say something stupid and plainly false.
And there’s also the feeling that I’m running up against brick walls – no-one has yet seen fit to offer me money for the kind of things I’d write, meaning that, to a certain portion of my mind, the things I produce are valueless.
Of course, there is value beyond money.
And reducing all value to financial value is foolish and quite dangerous.
But it’d be nice to know that the things I create help bring in an audience, who bring in advertising potential, and that my work alone has enough value to justify giving me a few coins in return for what I’ve done.
I suppose it’d be different if I were writing in my day job, developing my skill and seeing it appreciated even if on mundane topics. But as it is, the skill which I think of as being my best, has very rarely been rewarded.
It’s only natural that this gets frustrating after a while.
In addition, a lot of the time, when what I write has been checked over and submitted, I get a sense that it’s ‘over’.
I would love for my writing to have more of a regular audience, to actively feel that my things are being put into the public domain, that they are not just technically out there, but actually inspiring discussion and debate.
Of course, particularly when writing about football, there’s the tendency for people to look at anything even vaguely critical of their club and see it as trolling, biased, or clearly wrong, without justifying why this is the case.
But a well-written article placed in the right place, can become almost a living thing, an embodiment of an idea or ideas, that prompts others to gather round it, take in the ideas, mutate them into something slightly different that the responder believes to more closely resemble the truth…
I’d quite like to be the inspiration for that kind of reaction.
Civilised debaters congratulate an opponent on a point well made
This has sort of happened to me, once – in around January. I wrote a piece for Denofgeek, about the glut of Sherlock Holmeses, about them being different aspects to the classic character.
Unfortunately for whatever reason I wasn’t able to log into my account with the site at the time, so I couldn’t properly respond and join in the discussions below the piece.
(As I remember, what I read was almost entirely good-hearted as well, which makes my inability to join in all the more frustrating.)
But I think, essentially, my problems stem from not producing things on a regular basis.
I need to get to the stage where people can think to themselves, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the site that does the plots of movies, according to Blake Snyder’s thingie’.
I need people to come in, like what they see, and feel confident they can come back later for more of the same.
There will be plenty of writers of non-fiction who feel that they get back more than they put in. The access to creatives and sportsmen, the ability to talk with those ‘on the inside’. Talking with a stranger, whether in real life or online, who read the argument you put together, and have them tell you they thought it was wrong, but thought-provoking, and thank you for writing it.
As it is, right now I’m pretty much nowhere. I intend to get somewhere, to at least reach the point where I feel like I’m getting more back, in terms of the energy I receive as a result of my writing, than I put into it.
So, what am I doing wrong?
It sounds incredibly unromantic, but I think that a great deal of success as a writer depends on being consistent, reliable, giving people some sort of fixed, scheduled, reliable product. I need to do that more – here on the blog in particular. I do intend to return more often to ideas I’ve started to play with in the past.
Of course, as well as being reliable, there’s an incredible amount of room for creativity, wit, invention and subversion inside of that.
But it all starts with showing up.
I’ve been writing something for NaNoWriMo.Although I’ve been plotting and doing background work on character motivations for a while, I started actually writing quite late. It was the 4th (Sunday) when I started, and I feel like I’m picking up a little speed in my overall daily word count.
I do get bizarrely self-conscious in my writing, and, though it’s a cliche, it makes next to no sense. It’s something I enjoy, messing around in created worlds with created characters is probably my equivalent of gaming. (I’m atrociously bad at games like Skyrim and the like – in two different games in the past few months, when attacked, I’ve accidentally managed to switch camera angles when trying to hit back. It’s not a very effective fighting method.)
The format won’t end in a 50k novel at the end of the month; more a series of short stories based on an existing fictional world. (Classic Simpsons did it with movies, West Side Story is based on Romeo & Juliet, so I will accept no criticism of my plagiarism.)
I think I’m writing about 1,000 words a day now (albeit not all of them originally mine), and with a bit more focus, sitting down to speed write for half an hour or an hour, I’m sure I can up this.
But the little bit of nagging remains – that what I’m doing is daft, a waste of time. But I’ve already written one scene – entirely my own – that I think is pretty cool, and I’ve got a couple more that I’m excited to get to.
Writing is fun. That’s pretty much the most important thing to remember.
Writing – tis an act which brings great happiness and much joy
When I started this blog back in November, I wanted to do so in a low-key way, just in case everything fell apart and I ended up making a total fool of myself. (The key to success is negative thinking – it keeps you hungry.)
I’ve not been promoting the blog properly in ‘real life’, so if you just know me casually, there’s a good chance you won’t know I’ve been writing, both on this blog and other websites.
I’ve also picked up a few new followers over recent weeks, so it’s as good a time as any to go through the different things I write here.
For a short breakdown of the different Categories I’ve used, see the Navigation bar above.
There. That’s pretty much it, end of post. How about we discuss the topical issues of the day – errm, politics?
Those swords definitely aren’t compensating for anything.
It’s been a week since I last posted, but I’m intending to write more in the coming weeks.
First of all, there’s been one BornOffside link I’ve not posted. Last week’s Lower League Week was a double edition, focusing on the conclusion to the Football League season, and the Conference playoffs.
Meanwhile, I’ve been intending to do more in terms of analysis, thoughts on various programmes/films, and general silliness, which hopefully should arrive in some form in the next couple of weeks.
I’ve been working on a script for a deadline next Monday, so after that, I should be able to find the time to write something worthwhile for the blog!
Something I intend to do more of during the next year, is read more books. That feels like it’s an obvious thing for an aspiring writer to do, but I have a bad habit of getting distracted by television, internet and news sites.
It’s easy to think of news articles and TV programmes produced the previous month as being more relevant to my life than a 19th century book about 17th century French soldiers.
But I find books more absorbing and, as a result, a superior form of escapism. Unfortunately, they also demand more, compared to vegging out in front of the telly or laptop, which are essentially passive forms of entertainment.
It seems I’ve let things slip a bit on the blogging. I started off relatively well, but fell away after a few weeks – before this post I’d not written since December 9th.
I’ve not just been sitting on my backside staring out the window though – at least not all the time – I’ve been looking into writing for a few different sites.
If I say this is me in real life, will my hit numbers increase?
SciFiFootball 