- Pronouns
- She/Her
So as some people may know I'm working on a novel right now, (the first week's work being, along with my usual insomnia why I haven't updated quests all week).
I'm not going to talk about what it is I'm writing (yet, it'll probably come up in a future post), so much as to write out the stress and problems of actually writing a novel, the constant worry you're not doing enough, the fear and annoyance and comfort eating of the end, the dirty glass problem where scenes that look good in your head don't look so good when you wrote them down, and generally how I stay productive and the problems I encounter. I don't necessarily want solutions, I just want to record them because fuck getting a blog.
One really annoying thing I've noticed when I force myself to write is that I start to have less and less details, characters discuss things in white room empty rooms which are mostly just dialogue. They fall into the nods grinning school of body language or acquire jokeresk fixed grins. I have a real problem with my writing being too minimalistic, if I forget, it all has to be fixed in editing, which is one reason my edits tend to be longer than my first drafts.
I'm also dyslexic so homophones, punctuation and so on don't come naturally, and I often spot weird problems as I go through.
This all has to be fixed in editing. However editing can introduce its own wierdnesses and editing artifacts into the text, especially when I forget to remove something I wrote and then add another sentence or part of one onto it, creating a tortured linguistic nightmare, a literary chimera who's abominable existence blights the page.
In order to write a lot, I do two things. First I create future scenes of the novel that I want to get too, thus motivating me to push forward. This I'd recommend to all writers. The other thing I do is alter my headspace so what I'm writing is the most exciting thing possible. This allows me to create a vast amount of writing but it also makes me insufferable. I'm quite willing to chatter in the most annoying way about what I'm writing, and needily spam my friends with new graphs in the desperate hope of recognition and approval and that they will feel the same false euphoria over it that I've induced in myself.
You can data dump as much as you want but it's best if you attach it to a character and their internal monologue. You don't need a lot of dialogue for it but you do need a perspective so it's not wierdly free standing. It's still better if you can do it through conversation though, except when you can't. In general the "don't info dump" thing is the worst advice for new writers, especially of genre fic. It's an authorial basilisk hack. If you know it you'll be afraid of info dumping when you need to, but equally if you try to abandon the advice you'll end up vomiting infodump over everyone.
I'm not going to talk about what it is I'm writing (yet, it'll probably come up in a future post), so much as to write out the stress and problems of actually writing a novel, the constant worry you're not doing enough, the fear and annoyance and comfort eating of the end, the dirty glass problem where scenes that look good in your head don't look so good when you wrote them down, and generally how I stay productive and the problems I encounter. I don't necessarily want solutions, I just want to record them because fuck getting a blog.
One really annoying thing I've noticed when I force myself to write is that I start to have less and less details, characters discuss things in white room empty rooms which are mostly just dialogue. They fall into the nods grinning school of body language or acquire jokeresk fixed grins. I have a real problem with my writing being too minimalistic, if I forget, it all has to be fixed in editing, which is one reason my edits tend to be longer than my first drafts.
I'm also dyslexic so homophones, punctuation and so on don't come naturally, and I often spot weird problems as I go through.
This all has to be fixed in editing. However editing can introduce its own wierdnesses and editing artifacts into the text, especially when I forget to remove something I wrote and then add another sentence or part of one onto it, creating a tortured linguistic nightmare, a literary chimera who's abominable existence blights the page.
In order to write a lot, I do two things. First I create future scenes of the novel that I want to get too, thus motivating me to push forward. This I'd recommend to all writers. The other thing I do is alter my headspace so what I'm writing is the most exciting thing possible. This allows me to create a vast amount of writing but it also makes me insufferable. I'm quite willing to chatter in the most annoying way about what I'm writing, and needily spam my friends with new graphs in the desperate hope of recognition and approval and that they will feel the same false euphoria over it that I've induced in myself.
You can data dump as much as you want but it's best if you attach it to a character and their internal monologue. You don't need a lot of dialogue for it but you do need a perspective so it's not wierdly free standing. It's still better if you can do it through conversation though, except when you can't. In general the "don't info dump" thing is the worst advice for new writers, especially of genre fic. It's an authorial basilisk hack. If you know it you'll be afraid of info dumping when you need to, but equally if you try to abandon the advice you'll end up vomiting infodump over everyone.
