Leigh Bardugo's Blog, page 282
March 23, 2016
radbuggie:
I BET THIS IS JUST THE FORST OF THE 290323 THOUSAND...
I BET THIS IS JUST THE FORST OF THE 290323 THOUSAND EDITS I’M GONNA BE MAKING FOR THE SIX OF CROWS SERIES
also, thanks to @wylanvanwrecked bc without you i’d still be procrastinating
March 22, 2016
heyheyrenay:
cassandrashipsit:
giwatafiya:
sourcedumal:
deepseed:
blackfemalescientist:
Just...
Just read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and I’m just sitting here like “fuck, now I’m going to have to buy every thing N.K. Jemison has ever written” and who has the time.
She got you too, huh.
Yep. Get that Dream Blood series.
Yeah yo. Her shit is the shit. She working on a new book too. She was talking about it on FB and I cannot fucking wait for whatever the fuck it is because the title alone had me.
She is also a DA nerd and contributed to enabling the Hamilton/DA crossover.
N.K. Jemisin Fan Club
Hello, L-Bardugooo! How do you know when your MS is DONE, and ready to query? I've done about 574389 rounds of revision spanning like 5 years, and have sent it to different people after each round of critique/revision, but these readers still mark the WHOL
Oh man. This is a hard one. Look, as an author, you’re always going to be walking a line between humility and delusions of grandeur. It’s how we roll. We need to be able to hear critique with an open mind, but we also need to trust our own voices and give primacy to them when necessary.
It’s possible that you keep looking for input on this project because you still feel it isn’t where it needs to be. But it’s also possible you’re psyching yourself out. Have you read it out loud? How do you feel about it when you do? If you like where you’re at, how about sending it to just a few agents and seeing if you get any interest?
In the future (if you’re doing this already, feel free to disregard), give some guidance to your critique partners or beta readers so that you can get the most from them and hopefully avoid getting derailed. Examples:
“I’m looking for feedback on logic issues. Does the magic system make sense? Are there sections where you’re confused?”
“I want to make sure the emotional beats work. Did the romance feel earned? Did any of the dialogue fall flat?”
“I need a close line read. Don’t worry about copy edits, but please call out prose that is or isn’t working for you.”
I hope that helps! (And hi Chloe! Always nice to hear from you :)
Hi! It's possible that you have already answered this, but how long will the Six of Crows series be?
Two books for now. It’s possible I could come back and write twelve in the future, but my next project won’t be in the Grishaverse.
Hi Leigh! You mentioned how you started with a 30K first draft of SoC, then added more in your next drafts. I want to try it with my next WIP and I was wondering how you went about it/ what you included in that first draft. Main scenes, snippets of dialogu
Okay! Let’s talk zero drafts.
The zero draft is for no one but you. It’s where you get to tell the story to yourself. Infodumps? YES. Trite dialogue? EMBRACE IT. Weird little placeholder notes like “Insert Awesome Scene Here” or “How the hell do they get to the quarry?” BY ALL MEANS.
When I wrote the zero draft of Six of Crows, I had already written a proposal. It described the plot, the characters, and the world, so I had a good sense of the shape of the story and the kind of story I wanted to tell. (When you sell a book on proposal, it’s not a strictly mechanical thing. That proposal has to have a voice and that can really help you get a handle on the feel you want from the book itself.) In addition to the proposal, I usually work from an outline of twelve beats. If you guys want to know more about that, I can get into it in another post, but that lays out the big moments and turnarounds in the story (prison break! ambush! betrayal! and so on).
Then I attack the draft. Yes, the SoC draft was written in different POVs and those POVs were determined by that initial outline—I hadn’t assigned them, I just thought, “Okay, I know we need X from this big moment, so who has a lot at stake here? Who can tell us what we need to know?” The process was weirdly organic. I would move from one scene to the next and it was as if each character stepped forward to get his or her two cents in.
Some scenes/chapters were very short. I’d just write “fight scene” or “moment of catharsis” and move on to the next thing I knew. Others had fully realized descriptions of the Barrel, big chunks of dialogue.
I definitely diverged from my original outline. The goal is to maintain momentum and find the things that give you pleasure in the story. The zero draft is about discovery.
From there, each draft got longer as I filled in more of what I knew, tackled the scenes I really didn’t feel like writing, and got a better handle on my characters. This is the way I always work. I write a skeleton and then put meat on its bones. (The exception is my folk tales which I write without an outline, often by telling them to myself in the bathtub. Highly recommended. Use a storyteller voice. Great acoustics.)
But to be clear: This is what works for me. I know many wonderful authors who work without an outline, or who revise what they write as they go, or who write long and then go back and cut. There is no right way to do this and one of the hardest parts of being a writer is figuring out what your process is.
I wish you all the luck and please let me know how it goes!
March 21, 2016
toxicrain42:
ace-artemis-fanartist:
Jesper and Wylan from Six...
Jesper and Wylan from Six of Crows.
Holy crap this is adorable!!!!
It IS adorable!
