Jonas David's Blog, page 64

The night before

 

Time sure flies…. the year is almost over, and what have we done with it? Not much, likely. But hopefully what we did do, we enjoyed.

The older we get, the faster time goes, so let’s take some time this weekend to enjoy our family and friends, while we still have the ability to.

Happy Holidays!

Quantity over Quality

The year is almost over, and it’s going to be the worst year–as far as number of views–that my blog has had since its creation.

Probably cause I went three months without making a post.

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that in the world of unknown writers, quality without quantity is as useless as an army of one. As pointless as a single, perfectly designed, edited and polished shout for help out the window of a burning building.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that quality is useless to worry about at all. Finishing things and putting them out into the world regularly and constantly is the only thing that will get you noticed.

No matter how good your novel is, if you only write one your chances of success are slim.

I’m sure there are millions of brilliant, took-10-years-to-write, life’s work novels sitting unpublished in office drawers around the world out there. Because not every novel gets published. Very few of them do, in fact. And if your odds are so low, why spend 10 years working on it? If you had instead written ten or twenty novels in those ten years, the odds of success would be exponentially higher.

And who wants to write just one thing, anyway? Why not write 2 or 3 novels a year? It’s just words on paper, you can produce those endlessly right? Right. (I say, as I come upon the stunning pinnacle of halfway through one novel in the past year… )

Same goes for blog posts, and short stories, poems, articles, whatever you write. Produce lots of it, or no one will ever know you exist.

If you are worried about improving, though, it just so happens that writing a lot of stuff is the main way to get better at writing. Not, as some may think, sitting around reading about how to write, taking writing classes, and fretting over each sentence until you have the perfect paragraph six hours later.

Write ten ‘crappy’ stories this month instead of one ‘perfectly crafted’ one.  Do that for a few months, then check how good your ‘crappy’ stories are compared to the ‘perfectly crafted’ ones of your past. You may be surprised how quickly you can improve by actually doing the thing you are trying to improve at.

Anyway, my point is, if you are going to focus on some aspect of your writing to improve, your quantity is a pretty good choice.

New experiences = New ideas

If you read the same books, watch the same shows, go to the same places, eat the same foods, do the same things every day–it stands to reason you’re going to think the same thoughts every day.

Thoughts are products of our experiences, a rearranging of things we already know. So if you want some new ideas, you’d do good to throw some new ingredients into the pot. Your characters, worlds and plots are always going to be narrowed to your limited experience of reality, no matter how good your imagination is.

In the 2015 film Room, we see some of the world through the eyes of a boy who’s lived his entire live trapped in a single room. Even with the best mind in the world, being hindered by such a lack of experience would guarantee that any story he imagined would pale in comparison to the reality he has no idea of.

We all live in ‘rooms’ of our own making who’s walls are are the length and width of our experiences. Your characters can never enjoy a dish you’ve never heard of, climb a mountain you don’t know exists, or feel a feeling that you can’t comprehend.

Push your walls back whenever you can. Every new thing, whether you personally enjoy it or not, is an opportunity to expand your capability for imagination.

 

Too big to write

Well, I’ve made it to one of the major scenes that I first envisioned oh so long ago when I first was brainstorming this story, and now that I’m here I don’t know how to start. Will it ever come out as good as it has been in my head all this time? Probably not, and that is a sad realization that I must get over, so I can proceed. Because with so much buildup, it better be good!

So I must go onward and keep telling myself that any finished story is an infinite amount better than an unwritten one.

Mood music

I find that when I’m aiming for a certain tone or vibe in my music, it helps a lot to be listening to music that evokes the same feeling I’m going for. It puts my brain into the right gear and the visions of what I need to write come a lot easier.

What are you trying to write? If you imagine the scene as taking place on TV, what music would be playing in the background? Find something similar, and listen to it while you write. I can bet you it will improve your productivity.

I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for Under the Skin a lot lately. If you listen to it, I bet you can guess what kind of vibe I’m trying to give my story. The music certainly helps inspire ideas. Give it a try!

Silence

Could you live without it? I couldn’t. It is like water for my soul–peace and quiet and room in my own head to think.

Silence after being talked to by numerous people is as refreshing as the sudden absence of pain.

 

 

Iconic scenes in literature

Sometimes, stuff just sticks with you. Over weeks or months or years, sometimes that one scene stays burned into your brain. What is it about these scenes that makes them stay? It can sometimes just be a very shocking scene, or maybe its a certain description that really resonates with you and seems so true to life that you can’t forget it. Or something that makes you feel something so strongly that you feel like it happened to you personally.

Analyse these scenes, find out the secret ingredient that makes them so powerful, then use that new found weapon in your own writing. This is why reading constantly is so important to improving your own writing. Read what you want to write, but also grab a random different thing now and then. You never know what you’ll find out there that you can use.

Syncing Forward by W. Lawrence: I’m sinking, God help me I’m sinking!

I get the feeling that this novel started out as a decent sci-fi novella, then had about thirty thousand words of family drama inserted into it.

I spent a good portion of the first two thirds of this story shaking my head in confusion wondering why I was being told any of this, and the final third yelling at the character for being such an asshole.

Martin James is some kind of internal investigator at a mega pharmaceutical company, who is injected by terrorists with a drug that slows his body down so much that each day flies by in a matter of minutes from his point of view. If you haven’t figured it out from that sentence I just typed, you will most definitely have it pounded into your skull by the end of the novel that THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR TIME FLYING BY AND HOW YOU WILL MISS THOSE PRECIOUS MOMENTS WITH YOUR FAMILY IF YOU FOCUS TOO MUCH ON OTHER THINGS.

For the first two thirds or so of this novel, we watch Martin’s family grow up without him, as he is stuck in his slow moving state, unable to interact with the world. Every so often they are able to ‘sync him back’ so he can be a regular guy for a few hours or days, and over and over and over again we get to see how sad and shocked he is at how much time has passed, and how his baby girls are grown up now, how his wife has moved on to someone else, and how so and so is dead, and he never reconciled, and now his girls are married, and on and on. There are quite a few characters who serve zero purpose in the story other than to make Martin feel sad when they die.

When we finally get to some action, in the mindbogglingly distant world of ONE HUNDRED YEARS in the future. Martin is such an emotional wreck who can do nothing but complain and whine and stamp his feet, despite everyone trying their best to help him, that it’s hard to do anything but hate the guy and hope his life falls apart even more.

It is during this point in the novel that the character says the line in the title of this post. Yes, that is an actual thing he says and is a pretty good descriptor for the whole tone of the book.

I liked the twist on time travel, one I hadn’t seen before. The author also had some pretty neat ideas about the future, and some creative technology, and I wish they’d focused on that more. Instead they spent the majority of the novel building the protagonist into an utterly unlikable twat, so when we finally get to the action it’s not as fun, because we are forced to experience it through his tear-filled eyes.

I wish this book had been utter crap, because then I wouldn’t have had to finish it. But it was good enough to keep me going, wanting to find out what happened at the end. Not recommended unless you feel the need to hate-read something.

Free this weekend only, my novella!

It’s free again starting now! Just the weekend, if you haven’t read it grab it now.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01C4V1V9G

Please remember to leave a review!

Book clubs: how do you do it?

I can’t time my desire to read a book. It’s almost like the books I pick decide for me to read them. So the couple times I’ve tried to join a book club, I’ve always ended up reading something else than what I’m supposed to.

I like the idea of having a discussion with people about the book as we read along, but even if you manage to get everyone reading the book, they won’t read it at the same pace.

Maybe we are aiming too high with the current format, and the book club should be re-imagined as a club for people who read books regularly. Those people are hard enough to find, these days.

I wouldn’t mind having a group where we meet every couple weeks and just talk about what we’re reading currently. It would be a neat way to be exposed to other genres and things you wouldn’t normally read, without having to spend precious reading time actually reading the book.

Reading club? Sounds good to me.