Brian Yansky's Blog, page 31

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...

wear a helmet & kneepads

"You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down." Annie Dillard.

Sometimes you have to do this in writing. You can plan all you want but if you're writing from the place I believe you should be writing from-- that place deep within you and below your conscious mind which is all too interfering in the intuitive connections stories require—then you will be jumping off some cliffs and building your wings on the way down.

Good luck.

Wear a helmet and kneepads.

tension

What makes people tense? Lots of things. But what makes them most tense is when they're unsure about something. For example, they think they might know that their boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife is having an affair, but they aren't sure. Once they're sure, one way or another, they might feel a lot of things but the tension is different. I could be wrong about this but I think the peak of the tension is not knowing.

When your goal is to intensify tension one of the best ways to do t...

WADD

Along with this notion of the necessity of writing nearly every day for some length of time should be my confession that, however long I sit at my desk, I am writing during much of the day when I am away from it.

It's a kind of disease or illness that can certainly lead to trouble for the writer. I've got a name for this disease. I call it WADD: Writers' Attention Deficit Disorder. How many of my brother and sister writers out there suffer from it? Very many. Perhaps most.

Here are some signs...

writewritewrite

I read Stephen King's book on writing not too long ago. I admire his work ethic as a writer and his struggle to write the best he can. He says a writer should find three or four hours a day to do some combination of reading and writing. Of course, he doesn't have a day job, so it may be that your job stops you from finding that much time. Some days mine does.

But you do need to find time to write. In my opinion it needs to be almost every day, even if you only find thirty minutes to write. E...

Sooner is Better

One thing that my last manuscript taught me is something I had heard Kurt Vonnegut say and something I'm trying to do in my new WIP.

Tell everything you can as soon as you can. Don't hold back. Don't try to keep things hidden in the hopes of adding suspense. Okay, there are plot points you may eventually realize can be hidden and their press against the story will help in terms of tension BUT too often we withhold because we think something is cool and needs to be set up with a lot of events...

delusion

Delusion can be a good thing for a writer.

You have to fool yourself into writing. If we didn't fool ourselves, we would never start in the first place. You have to fool yourself when you're a novice that you're writing good fiction when, most likely, you're struggling to find your way, learn technique, learn what works for you and what doesn't. And every first draft, whether it's the writer's first novel or fifth or beyond, requires that the writer fool himself into pushing on. In a first dr...