Brian Yansky's Blog, page 30

Process

Okay the old "to outline or not to outline" question came up at a recent writerly social event I was at. I've heard many writers on this subject. Sometimes writers get very adamant about their position. They point their pens menacingly and say, OF COURSE YOU SHOULD OUTLINE. OR--OF COUSE YOU SHOULDN'T OUTLINE.

There are various degrees of outliners. Some say they just put down some vague notions about plot and character knowing they will change as they write. Just having them down somehow ma...

WI

POSTED (Albert Einstein was definitely a big brain kind of guy but as a young man he responded so slowly to questions that his parents and teachers suspected he was mentally disabled. Also, he did poorly in school and failed his college entrance exams the first time. Go figure.)
Most writers are smart. Yes. But how smart? Are they, for instance, the smartest person in a room of people? Depends on the room, I suppose. If the room is The Poodle Dog Lounge on an all-you-can-drink-for-ten-dollar...

Wolves and Sheep

My sheepdog is 105 pounds but looks even larger because of all the hair. In the winter, we let it grow long, let him get back to his primitive self. That hair was supposed to help protect sheepdogs from the inevitable wolf bites when they protected sheep. Naturally, when you're protecting sheep, you have to expect to meet some wolves.

This makes me think about the wolves and sheep we contend with in our fiction. What I notice some writers doing and what I've done myself is sometimes allow a...

conversation

Sometimes it's helpful to listen to other people's conversations. Of course, you're not going to try to transcribe them. You're going to listen and mark interesting phrases or turns of phrase or parts of conversation and use them sometime down the writing road when you're in a scene. Most likely you'll use a reasonable facsimile of them. I heard two teenage boys talking at the pool the other day. Not that I was purposely listening, but there I hanging onto the edge of the pool and they were t...

Happy World UFO Day

HAPPY WORLD UFO DAY:

According to Wikepedia: June 24th was selected as World UFO Day because the first UFO report that was widely reported took place on June 24, 1947. This UFO sighting was reported by Kenneth Arnold. He spotted nine unusual objects flying in a chain near Mount Rainier on that day.

I begin some novels with characters and some novels with situations and some novels with voice. I began ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES with a situation. I decided that I wanted to have a va...

why write?

This is from an interview over at Editorial Anonymous http://editorialanonymous.blogspot.com/. If you've never looked at this blog, you should. This anonymous editor has some interesting things to say about the business of publishing and writing. Sometimes she has interviews. She had one recently with Adam Rex whose new YA novel—coming out this summer—is titled FAT VAMPIRE. I haven't read it yet, but it sounds great.

Anyway, towards the end of the interview, E.A. asks him if he has any advi...

verisimilitude

Sometimes it feels like we walk through life half-asleep much of the time and then something reminds us we're alive. What wakes us up?

What wakes you up?

For me it's all kinds of things. Sometimes it's just a sentence I've written or one I've read. Sometimes something someone says. Martial Arts did when I was doing those. Various passions. Issues I care about sometimes will wake me up. People wake me up ETC…

When it comes to fiction, I come back to an idea I've heard expressed different ways...

kill your darlings

When you're deep into a manuscript, maybe working through it the first time after the initial draft, there are scenes you love and points of character and plot that must change even though you don't want them to. A first draft is going to be full of wrong turns.

What I found myself doing as I was reworking a manuscript, or I should say caught myself doing, was trying to keep something that happened to a character and that revealed character because I liked it. I think I knew, deep down, it w...

writing and canine criticism--year one

In honor of my first year of blogging. Here's my first post.

Last week my Old English Sheepdog, Merlin, pulled some of the manuscript pages of my latest WIP from my desk and began to eat them. Merlin, like most dogs, is adept at non-verbal communication. Of course he is also, another noble trait of the canine, notoriously good-natured and non-judgmental. I wondered what could have driven him to such uncharacteristic and extreme criticism.

After I managed to wrench the somewhat chewed but readab...

revision--chapter summaries

In my last manuscript, Alien Invasion & Other Inconviences, I struggled with several plot points. My editor did something I'd only tried once. That time it hadn't really worked for me. This time it helped a lot.

She did an outline of each chapter of the novel (there are about fifty so this was no small thing). It wasn't a detailed outline. She just wrote a few sentences explaining what each chapter was about, the major points. (It really needs to just be about two or three sentences for each...