Jim Nelson's Blog, page 14

How Marcia Lucas (and smart editing) saved Star Wars

Marcia Lucas

For most fiction writers, the editing process is notoriously considered drudge work, but revision is where the magic happens. It’s where a struggling, plodding story is shaped into the author’s vision.

Recently I discovered “How Star Wars was saved in the edit”, an impressive and succinct video on the high art of film editing. It demonstrates revision so well, it should be required viewing in creative writing courses everywhere.

That’s right: Creative writing. Even though it...

Sarah Dessen & the Internet’s new literary feud

Sarah Dessen
(Larry D. Moore, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Last week a dust-up swirled on Twitter that grew to a Category 5 hurricane. Young Adult author Sarah Dessen learned her name was mentioned in a small-town university newspaper. The article was a feature piece on the university’s successful campus-wide reading program. One of the program’s student committee members—a junior at the time—told the newspaper

“She’s fine for teen girls,” the 2017 Northern graduate said. “But definitely not up to the level...

Real-life bridge daughters: Miejsce Odrzanskie, Poland

From the Associated Press:

Authorities in the village of Miejsce Odrzanskie, which has around 300 residents, don’t know why no boys have been born there since 2010, but they are beginning to worry about filling farming jobs in the future. …

Community head, Krystyna Zydziak, said 10 girls have been born since 2010.

Skeptics Stack Exchange suggests things are not as mysterious as they appear:

…none of this should be overly surprising. The village is small (current population 272, according to t...

Crappy cover letters

Anne Lamott (Zboralski, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Anne Lamott is the author of nearly twenty books and numerous short stories, but she’s best-known among writers of all stripes for her essay “Shitty First Drafts”. Her pitch-perfect rumination on the writing process captures the messiness of penning books, short stories, plays and scripts, all of which start with a shitty first draft:

This is how [writers] end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. … Almost all good writing begins with terr...

A quarter-century writing in cafes

cafe(友光軒) by voo34oov (CC BY 2.0)

I’ve spent twenty-five years writing in cafes. For a quarter of a century I’ve attempted to produce passable fiction within the thin caffeinated air of Bay Area coffeehouses. I’ve endured countless hours of crummy music blasted overhead by baristas with something to prove—coexisted with hundreds of cafe patrons as neighbors, each with differing notions of privacy and personal space—suffered wobbly cafe tables and seats as hard as steel—and consumed gallons up...

Revision is where the magic happens

“Yorkshire Sculpture Park” (scrappy annie, CC-BY-NC 2.0)

Recently on Twitter I wrote: “Revision is where the magic happens”.

I’m not trying to be mysterious here. I truly believe revision is where a story is honed, sharpened, and distilled. Revision is where the writer’s vision and passion surface after cutting away the dead weight and dead prose. The act of revision is pruning back a bush and revealing the topiary within. Revision is cutting away the stone block to find the sculpture trapped...

Mystery’s 90/10 rule

Detective (hans van den berg, CC BY 2.0)

If there’s one trope of the mystery that stands out among all other types of stories—perhaps the single element that defines the mystery—it’s the solution being announced at the conclusion.

Almost all story leads the reader to a suspenseful ending. The mystery is unique in that the main character is responsible for explaining the prior events back to the reader in such a way as to make sense of them all. There are plenty of poorly-written books that op...

Kurt Vonnegut on story structure and punctuation

Kurt Vonnegut

Previously I wrote on Kurt Vonnegut’s considerable body of interviews, especially his comments on story shape and fiction as a series of experiments.

One fascinating (Vonnegut-esque?) tidbit in his interviews was an offhand comment made during a 1971 profile by Richard Todd (New York Times Magazine):

The class began in a surprising way. Vonnegut remarked that last time they had been talking about form, and he walked to the blackboard and drew there a question mark, an exclamatio...

The Concordance Depiction

While Googling for my own work—yes, I do that sort of thing—I discovered the video “The Concordance Depiction” by Michelle David.

Originally posted in September 2017, “Depiction” is a 1m04s silent video reaction to my short story “A Concordance of One’s Life”.

Her summary:

This video is about the short story by Jim Nelson called “a concordance of one’s life”. I try to depict the brain of the mentally unstable narrator.

“A Concordance of One’s Life” has inspired other art as well. It was t...

Make your phone your next writing notebook

r. nial bradshaw (CC BY 2.0)

Last week I finished my fourth novel and I used my phone throughout the entire writing process: developing, researching, outlining, plotting, and revision, all the way to my final draft. For all purposes, my phone was my writing notebook for this novel.

I didn’t write the novel on my phone. I’ll probably never do that. When I’m writing I want the full typewriter experience, real keys designed for human hands, the tactile sense physical buttons offer, the whole she...