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Category: Tips (Page 4 of 6)

Tips and trip on the craft of writing and how to create quality fiction.

The Art of Agile Plotting using Notecards

May 23, 2006 /

A great resource including printable template:

One of the oldest tools in the arsenal of writers is the modest and unassuming index card. It’s used for jotting notes, sharing phone numbers, creating bibliographies, capturing ideas, making lists, and –heck– even making indices. (Who would have thought?) But one of its primary uses, especially for people structuring stories, is in creating a plot outline. A pen, a table top, and a small stack of cards are all that’s needed to turn a mish-mash of incongruent or half-baked ideas into a plot that’s tight, logical and well-developed.

Have you ever come up with a concept for a story, video or presentation, but didn’t know how to begin?

Read full article at D*I*Y Planner.

Describing Uncontrived Prayer

May 15, 2006 /

I ran across this post from Dave Long on a non-contrived way to describe prayer.

The prayer that follows is in narrative form. This is very important, I
feel. Too often, writers feel compelled to put prayer into dialogue. It
is spoken out loud or in the mind, but it comes out word for word.
Personally, I feel this misses the point of prayer, which isn’t
necessarily the words said, but what is truly meant. Narrative allows
the meaning of the prayer, what God hears, to be shared with the
reader. It’s a nice little trick and ends up sounding less stilted and
more substantial than words that are spoken. See this portion from the
book:

She began at the beginning. She prayed for forgiveness for defying her father in marrying Teddy. Her father loved her, that was all, and he hadn’t wanted her to move so far away. She
had done it blithely, sure her father would come around, but he never had….

This is just a small example. Yvette continues praying, eventually getting to her guilt. Then, the supernatural:

She had just finished praying, still high from Maria-Jose’s Chesterfield,
when she felt at once the heaviness of what she had undertaken to keep
from Teddy, and a rushing upward in the top of her head. She caught her
breath, and looked down, and saw her own kneeling figure at the window
below. She could study the part in the dark hair on the top of her
head: it was a little crooked. She no longer felt the aching in her
knees—she no longer felt anything. She willed her body to look up, but
it stayed in the attitude of prayer, while she floated above.

It’s a small moment, and precisely rendered. The detail of looking at the part in her hair, tells us all we need to know of her perspective. The whole thing lasts a few moments and then Yvette seeks out the Mother
Superior to help her understand what happens. The nun’s response is to tell Yvette never to do that again, which confirms the mysticism of the moment, tingeing it with power and danger. Throughout her life Yvette
returns to that moment as a true spiritual experience.

Full article here at Faith*In*Fiction

Post It Trick

May 4, 2006 /

This is a VERY cool technique to take notes on books without actually writing within the book, dog-earing pages, etc.

Post It Example

I thought I might as well document one of my little “life hacks”.

1. When I start a new book I stick a few post-its on the first page inside the cover. That way there’s always some paper around to write notes on.

2. When I fill up a post-it I move it, either to the inside back cover or the inside front cover.

3. The added benefit of using post-its is that when I come to type up the notes (so I never lose them and can search them), the post-its stick handily to the side of the monitor.

Another trick I’ve adapted to the above is writing the page number on the Post It if there is a paragraph I particularly liked. I’ll sometimes photo copy the pages I note on the Post It after I’m done with the book and file it for reference.

Read more

Book Blogging — The Next Big Thing?

August 24, 2005 /

Book blogging — writing books using the blogging process — is starting to show promise. Note these blog efforts that are making it into print:

Julie Powell’s “Julie & Julia” is the season’s most unusual memoir — a writer’s efforts to master the recipes of Julia Child — and a possible breakthrough for bloggers. Based on postings from Powell’s blog, the book will be published by Little, Brown and Co. (a division of Time Warner, as is CNN) and stores expect strong interest.

Other bloggers with recent deals include Stephanie Klein, who calls her very personal blog, “Greek Tragedy,” and Dana Vachon, an investment banker known as “d-nasty.”

Doctorow E.L. Doctorow’s “The March” is considered a possible breakout novel. “The criteria signing ‘Julie and Julia’ were very similar to what we would use for any book proposal: There was a strong voice, there was a freshness, and a novelty to what she was doing,” says Little, Brown’s Shandler. “This isn’t just a blog that has been printed out into a book. People aren’t interested in that because they read blogs every day. They need to see if the blog can be transformed. You could say that a great blogger is like an excellent guitar player, but the book is like playing piano. Bloggers have a head start because they know music, but they still have to make the adjustment.”

Read more at CNN.com

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