Mike Crowl's Blog, page 18

Better late than never

This post, which first appeared on Jason Goroncy's blog, should have been copied here at the time...for some reason it got lost in transit, and has only surfaced four years later. Better late than never... 
Some moons ago, I posted an interview with the Dunedin author, composer, and musician, Mike Crowl, in relation to his book,  Diary of a Prostate Wimp . Mike is a good friend who has, besides his literary foray on his surgical experiences, published two fantasy books t...

Abstract and concrete

The initial letters technique (ILT) that I used recently on Vassar Millar's poem, Morning Person, worked well with that piece. I think this was because the poem is quite 'concrete' in the sense that there are lots of images throughout, and it's all very active. 
This may be the reason ILT works well with playscripts. A few playscripts have speeches that are fairly abstract, but for the most part, dialogue in plays is more active and is about specific things and events.
I've learned se...

Darwin's Secret Sex Problem

Darwin’s Secret Sex Problem: Exposing Evolution’s Fatal Flaw—The Origin of Sex, by F LaGard Smith.  For many years the thing that seemed to me most unanswered in the evolution 'history' - even more than how the eye could have evolved in such complexity by chance - was how a male and female could suddenly appear together at the same time, out of the blue, within the same part of the world, and thus set humanity on its course. There seemed no possibility that all the complex requirements of...

Testing the new technique

Vassar Millar
A couple of posts ago I wrote about experimenting with using the initial letters of a piece I wanted to memorize. The initial letters act as a kind of code for reminding you how the words run in the piece you’re learning.
I wasn’t greatly impressed with the results, but I felt I might have done the system a bit of an injustice, so I tried a different piece this morning – a poem: Vassar Millar’s Morning Person, which is about the Creation.
Some years back I had some problems with t...

Working with Psalm 119

Back in March 2013 I mentioned that I was (yet again) beginning to learn Psalm 119, that largest of all the Psalms. In it the same theme is worked over time and again - making it extremely difficult to get your head around which line belongs where.

During 2014 this was almost the only thing I tried to memorise, and I got it under my belt completely. But of course, as soon as I left it alone, it would disintegrate, and all my hard work seemed to be for nothing. 176 verses of two lines apiece do...

Trying a new memory technique

In my last post I talked about a nonfiction book idea that I'm now pursuing instead of the children's fantasy I'd been writing. It's going to be focused around how we memorize text, such as poetry, chapters of the Bible, playscripts and more. In this post, and future ones, I'll be exploring some of the ideas that will go into the book. 


I’ve been memorizing poetry and Scripture for several decades now, and am always interested in hearing about alternative methods of memorizing.
Recen...

Death of a story

Some sad news...for me, if not for the few readers who actually read my kids' books. I'm abandoning book four in the Grimhilderness series. Something's just not happening, in spite of all my efforts, and I can't even blame procrastination anymore.

My 'sounding board' person stated about my idea of bringing back characters from the previous three books: 'I think it's fraught with pitfalls.' Not a bad sentence in itself, and maybe worth using somewhere.

Though that pronounced sentence sounds like...

Write Fast (er)

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
My last two posts have both basically been about procrastination. It's a word you'll find a lot if you search this blog.

When procrastination (a word I apparently can no longer type at the first attempt which may indicate that I'm trying to avoid it in yet another way) is the modus operandi then you go looking for all sorts of ways of overcoming it, in a kind of back door fashion.

Perhaps I should really, really try outlining. Reads books on outlining.

Perhaps I need to...

Laziness

Stuck with a big hole in my plot/structure/whatever. I have a vague idea what should happen, but how everybody gets to that point is another issue.

So what happens when I strike this kind of a point? I read books on writing. Does that help? Oh, yes, it helps the writer who wrote the book on writing by providing him with a royalty, and it helps me to procrastinate, and it helps me to think about how other books are structured and why their plots work so wonderfully...

What it doesn't do is help...

Save the Fantastic Cat

I've been re-reading Blake Snyder's excellent, Save the Cat, as well as reading for the first time his third book, Save the Cat! Strikes Back. They're extremely encouraging for writers, whether screenwriters or novelists, or storytellers of any kind. They give a means to work out structure far more satisfactorily than any other 'system' I've come across, and they offer ways to go back over your work and find flaws, and work out how to fix them.

My mode of operation, however, tends to be t...