Tag Archives: craft

Mignon Fogarty: Well-Used Words

Craft & Skills Guest Posts The Writing Life 6 Comments

A guest post by Mignon Fogarty

It’s a huge thrill for a wordie to come across a particularly well-used word; it’s like a little inside joke shared with the author. It’s not necessary to place these Easter eggs in your writing, but if you can, it’s quite fun for you and a certain segment of your readers.

Take “maudlin” for example. Any of your characters can be maudlin, but it’s a freakin’ home run when a nun is maudlin! The word is derived from Mary Magdalene’s name because in Middle Age art, Magdalene was always portrayed as weeping and downcast. As with so many English words, the spelling morphed over time–from “Magdalene” to “maudlin.”

“Anathema” also has religious origins and is particularly well used to describe something devilish or church-related. Today, anything hated can be anathema, but the word comes from a Greek word used to describe something cursed or devoted to evil. In the 1200s, the Catholic Church had a few different kinds of excommunication, and the harshest–proclaiming someone damned–was called anathematization.

If you write about Medieval times, you may want to use the word “bailiwick.” Today it describes someone’s area of expertise, but in Old English, a bailiwick was something like the bailiff of the village–the overseer.

“Egregious” also has interesting origins; it comes from a root word meaning “flock,” as in a flock of birds. The “e” is a remnant of a prefix that means “out,” so “egregious” means to stand out from the flock, which makes sense when you consider that a disruptive bird would stand out from the flock, just as someone who exhibits egregious behavior would stand out from the crowd. If you can smoothly work “egregious” into a sentence about the behavior of animals (or people) in herds or flocks, it’s a win.

“Galvanize” is related to electricity, “gall” is related to liver bile, “haughty” comes from the French word for “high,” and “inchoate” is related to plow animals. The examples go on and on.

I started being particularly aware of words with interesting origins when I began researching etymology for my 101 WORDS book series. You can develop your own list of words to use in interesting ways by browsing a dictionary or signing up for word-of-the-day lists and jotting down promising words in a notebook or computer file.

Mignon Fogarty is better known as GrammarGirl and her newest book is 101 WORDS TO SOUND SMART (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books–a–Million, Indiebound, Powell‘s)

Pacing: A Literary Strip Tease

Craft & Skills Jason Michelsen 4 Comments

I love the way a good book will spoon feed me interesting tidbits, stringing me along like a drug addict flipping pages from fix to fix. Getting to the end of a chapter and realizing I can’t stop there, that I simply must continue reading, that my life will be a little poorer until I find out how the hero is going to free himself from the rock that has him pinned to that hard place there is an awesome feeling.

With epic fantasy and the cast of hundreds some of the successful series wield (i.e. A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time), it might actually be a chapter or two if not a hundred pages before you get back to said hero stuck in said predicament. The challenge the writer faces is making sure A: the continuation of the storyline you’re slavering over is worth the wait, and B: the intervening storylines and their characters are not only necessary, but interesting enough not to lose your attention in the meantime.

Of course, the pacing you use will vary depending on the format of what you’re writing. The pacing in a short story is quicker–for obvious reasons–than in a novel, and a 150k novel will have different pacing than one of the 450k word tomes Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss and George R. R. Martin publish. Likewise, it will vary depending on the genre. If you like writing YA, your story will definitely have a quicker pace than a story written for a more mature audience.

I aspire to write epic fantasy, and often find myself struggling with my own pacing. Like so many of you, I’m a product of this current age of instant gratification.  We want what we want, and we want it now! But with literature–as with just about any form of entertainment–a good percentage of the enjoyment we derive from it comes from sheer anticipation. How often do you see the monster in the horror movie before the second act? Very rarely.

And while I love that very same anticipation when reading a book or watching a movie, when I’m actually writing, I wish I could write ten times as fast. As the author, I know what’s going to happen next. I know how awesome I think it is, and how badly I want my readers to get to it so they can revel in its glory right there beside me.

Somewhere along the line in the writing process, I typically lose my sense of pacing and begin revealing things far too quickly. The big secret which is supposed to be revealed at the climax suddenly makes an appearance in the prologue. Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but this most definitely is one of my weaknesses as a writer. As such, it’s one of the things I always ask my alpha readers to focus on.

Anyone have any tricks for how they deal with pacing in different forms of fiction? Since I’m writing epic fantasy, it helps to tell myself it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Burst Writing

Craft & Skills Frank Morin The Writing Life 4 Comments

This is not a new term, but the concept is new to me this year.  In a nutshell, it means writing as much as possible in a concentrated burst, like a sprinter in the 100-yard dash.  You can cover a lot of ground this way really fast.  It’s a lot like the November NaNo challenge, only even more intense.

It’s extremely productive, so why don’t I do it all the time?  Two reasons:

First, it requires setting aside a block of time in which to burst-write.  This is challenging in our hectic lives and limited vacation time.

Second, we need to be prepared.  You can’t sit down at your computer at the beginning of a burst sprint and ask yourself, “Now what should I write about?”  It would be like trying to sprint through a bamboo forest.  You won’t get very far.

A successful burst sprint is the culmination of a great deal of prep work.  Just like an Olympic sprint, which may only take a few seconds, can only be successful after months of preparation by the sprinters.

I have historically written more like a long-distance runner: slow and steady.  Depending on my work schedule, I might get to write once a week for a couple of hours, or not at all.  I’ve pushed myself to write daily, and for a few months this year I managed to do it.

I tried burst-writing this year for the first time.  I set aside a week in March and physically removed myself from all of the normal day-to-day distractions and just write.  For the first time, I’d developed a detailed outline of the story I wanted to write.  I had already written the first few chapters, soI felt like I had the character voices down pretty well, and I had a plan in place.

In one week, I wrote 52,000 words.  See my full blog post about the event here

Major success.  I completed about half of my novel.  I am currently working on the second draft of that same novel.  The burst was the culmination of several months of worldbuilding, brainstorming, planning, and outlining.

Lessons learned from the writing burst:

  1. Plan well.  I did have a pretty good outline, but I hadn’t addressed a few key concepts in the book, and I’ve had to go back in the second draft and revise.
  2. Don’t need an entire week.  Out of that week, I was most productive over a four-day period, averaging over 10,000 words per day.  It was hard to set aside an entire week, but it would be a lot easier to take a weekend and hide away somewhere for two or three days.  I could reasonably expect to complete at least 25,000 words in that timeframe.  That’s pretty good.  Outside of a burst-sprint, it can take weeks or even months to write that much, depending on my schedule.
  3. Don’t edit while writing.  To crank out that many words, you have to trust the plan and let your fingers fly.  Just write and keep pushing through the story.  This is where a weak outline will kill you because if you hit a snag or don’t know what happens next, you’ll totally lose your momentum.

One of the greatest benefits of burst-writing is seeing solid progress in a short period of time.  It’s exciting.  Sometimes the slow, plodding pace I’m forced into can be a little discouraging.  I start wondering if I’m ever going to finish.  Burst sprints help re-vitalize my enthusiasm and keeps me focused on the project.

I am gearing up for another burst-writing session, probably 3 or 4 days in length.  I was hoping to do it in November as part of the NaNo challenge, but the timing didn’t work out.  I’m still editing this story, and my outline of the next novel is only about 70% complete.  I’m hoping for a small burst sprint in December, with a longer one in January.

Until then, I look for one day a week where I can mini-burst:  at least 3 hours of dedicated, focused time.  Sometimes all I get is an hour, but longer periods are so much more productive because I can get in “the zone’ and stay there, cranking out the words.

For me, a two-hour minimum block of time is most productive.   What have other people found works best for them?  Have you tried burst-writing?  Has it worked for you?

Understanding your own Writer’s Block

Craft & Skills Frank Morin Writing Tools 5 Comments

This is a topic I’ve been thinking about lately, and is similar to the recent post from Kylie on Unleashing the Muse

Although the topics are similar, I’m taking a slightly different approach so hopefully it won’t seem like overkill.

I recently watched the movie “Stranger Than Fiction” with Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson.  If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.  Very funny.  Emma Thompson is a novelist who kills her heroes, and somehow Will Ferrell becomes her next character and can hear her voice as she types and prepares to kill him.  Fascinating concept, moreso for the fact that Emma Thompson can’t quite figure out the right way to kill off Will Ferrell.  She gives a brilliant portrayal of a less-than-stable author suffering from writer’s block.  She goes to some amazing extremes in her attempt to get the right idea.

The following clip shows just how far she’ll go:  to an emergency room to view injured and dying patients to get real-life inspiration.

Stranger Than Fiction clip – Writers Block

As the clip so wonderfully portrays, some writers struggle mightily with writer’s block.

Do you?

What do you do about it?

I don’t suffer from writer’s block very often.  I spend lots of time in the early stages of story creation planning, considering different ideas, and fleshing out exactly what I want to achieve with the scenes, the characters.  Once that basic framework is nailed down, the actual writing of the story is pretty straight-forward.  The big exception is if a new, unexpected idea hits me while I’m writing a scene.

So am I just lucky?  Inspired?  Or do I not push the envelope far enough?

I believe that many times writer’s block is a symptom of one of these deeper problems:

  • Lack of clarity of a story’s mission or concept
  • Lack of understanding of the correct plot framework the story needs to build upon
  • Incomplete worldbuilding
  • Weak or inconsistent conflict
  • Trying to force a story down a direction that just doesn’t work, which the author may understand at an instinctive level, but lacks enough mastery of the craft to consciously identify the shortcoming and therefore begin the process of correction.

When have you run into writer’s block?  Is it at a particular phase in a story every time, or does it happen at random intervals?  How do you find ways around it?

As mentioned in Kylie’s previous post, one approach that often helps is the BIC_HOK (Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard) approach:  force yourself to work, to type, to drive yourself into “the zone’.   This actually works for me.  Sometimes playing the right music as I try to get into “the zone’ helps a lot.

Another way to help explore options is playing the “What If?” game.   Back up to the last part that worked in the story before you hit the snag that’s holding you up and start asking “What if?”.  Search for the most surprising, craziest possible twists you could add.  Or look at the scene and consider if anything similar has ever been done before, and then ask “What If?” you took the opposite track?

The worst thing you can do is just give up and say “I’ll write tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll feel like it then.”  ;or blame it on a Muse that just isn’t talking today.