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Now get busy!
Until recently, I never really considered the value of counting the total words I write each day. As a writer, I tend to revise as I go. Since my goal, even while drafting, has never been mainly to get new words on the page, I always suspected if I actually kept a running count I would come away feeling like I wasn’t making an real progress. Of course, new words do get added, but plenty of other words get changed or moved around along the way.
Instead of counting words, I’ve always measured my writing progress in terms of completed chapters. When my non-writing friends (the few who I’ve been brave enough to actually tell I’m writing a book) ask me how my writing is coming along saying, ‘I’ve finished drafting chapter 12′ goes over much better than, ‘I wrote 1,200 words today. Good ones, too!‘. The latter typically results in blank stares or a friendly but abrupt observation about the weather.
Nevertheless, I recently started tracking my total word count and have even gone so far as to add a word count widget to my blog. I’m still not sure how much it will help me in the long run, but here are some of the benefits I can already see for those who do it.
If you’re interested in setting up your own and your progress bar and you’re using WordPress you can get the plugin I use at http://jasonpenney.net/wordpress-plugins/progpress/. There are other options which work on all platforms such as http://www.writertopia.com/toolbox/meters. These don’t require WordPress at all, just simple HTML which can be placed on any blog anywhere.
What about you? Do you track word counts? If you do, do you find them to be discouraging or do they actually help?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you’re anything like me you’re constantly looking for little snatches of time to write whenever and wherever you can find them. Since we can’t always be in our preferred writing space when time for writing presents itself, or even when inspiration strikes, we make due as we can. During her Harry Potter days, J.K. Rowling even once resorted to writing on the back of an air sickness bag!
While there are any number of ways to take notes on the go, for me the challenge has always been in how to effectively bringing everything back together later. Retyping handwritten notes can be time consuming, as can copying and pasting notes from one disconnected electronic location to another (email, text files, USB drive, etc.). For the most part, anything that isn’t about just getting the words on the page can feel a lot like wasted time. Time that would be better spent actually writing.
Enter . . . Dropbox!
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Since some people have asked, if you’d like to read my entry for this year’s NPR Three-Minute Fiction Contest leave a comment below or send me a message using the ‘Contact Me’ link at the top of the blog and I’ll email you the post password. The contest deadline is 11:59 p.m., EDT, on September 26th. I plan to submit my entry on Friday, September 24th.
Thanks for your interest!
This is a draft of my entry in this year’s NPR Three-Minute Fiction Contest. If you were interested enough to request the password for this page, please take a minute to leave me some feedback too. I’m planning to submit my entry on Friday, September 24th. (Contest submissions end at 11:59 p.m., EDT, on September 26th.)
Per the contest rules the story must begin with the words…
and end with the words…
UPDATE: Per the entry guidelines the story could only be 600 words and required a title. I’ve called it “The Gift”.
“Some people swore that the house was haunted,” the woman behind the counter insisted. “Everyone who’s ever bought it has brought it back.”
I eyed her skeptically. Haunted? I always heard hauntings occurred in places of terrible suffering where spirits of the dead lingered when they couldn’t escape their pain. Not that I believed in ghosts, but even so, how could a dollhouse be haunted?
The old man beside her lovingly patted her wrinkled hand. “Never mind that, sir,” he said, smiling at me. “She’s got a bit of an imagination.”
“It’s no imagining! The little girl in the family that returned it told me so herself.”
He smiled gently in reply. “They told me they returned it because the rooftop latch is broken and they couldn’t open the dollhouse.”
“So it has been returned before?” I interrupted.
“Only once,” he corrected. “I’ve been meaning to fix it.”
I nodded then made a show of examining the rest of the dollhouse, intending to negotiate a reduced price. In truth, I’d made up my mind to buy it as soon as I entered the shop. My daughter’s birthday was the next day and as usual business travel had made this a last minute effort. If I picked something up today I could still get it to her by overnight express since I wouldn’t be returning home myself until the end of the week. Besides, it seemed to me a nice dollhouse was just the thing any little girl would want most for her birthday. Determined to keep my lunch appointment I turned to make my offer, but the shopkeepers had stepped away. I almost called them back, but I didn’t want to appear too eager. So, I contented myself by really looking at the dollhouse while I waited.
It was a beautiful, two-story colonial model, painted white with black shutters and a red door. I’d glanced into a few of the downstairs windows before I finally noticed them. Magazine clippings of assorted pairs of men and women had been glued to the walls in every room, and between each pair was a cutout photograph of a brown-eyed little girl. All three were staged in various activities together: eating, playing games, reading stories. The girl’s clothing varied, but the uneven cutting showed the same tattered patch of wallpaper behind her where she’d posed herself for each scene.
A heavy, sinking feeling filled my chest as my eyes slowly passed from room to room. The last room, which I somehow knew would be the master bedroom, had a black curtain hanging in the window. I couldn’t see inside. My chest tightened and my hands began to tremble. Full of a sudden, overwhelming dread, I knew I had to see what was inside that room. I fumbled with the rooftop latch, hoping to see inside the room from above. Someone had glued the rooftop down. Without thinking, I seized the rooftop by the eaves and wrenched it free from the dollhouse.
The bedroom below was empty.
I stood panting from exertion and spent emotion. It was true. The dollhouse was haunted. Its ghosts were the scenes this little girl had created for herself of the one thing she wanted most in the world but couldn’t have. Now they haunted me too. I paid the shopkeepers for the ruined dollhouse and then tenderly laid it to rest in a dumpster behind the shop. I drove straight back to my hotel, checked out, and booked the first flight that would get me home to my daughter before morning.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
This week’s YA Highway Road Trip Wednesday asks bloggers to share their favorite posts from their own blogs. For some this might be like trying to choose their favorite children. But not me. I’ve written some truly embarrassing blog posts and would be more than happy for BPS (Blogging Protective Services) to come and take them away. Nevertheless, I have written a few I don’t mind having my name attached to. So here are a few of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them too.
Most Popular:
Most Commented:
Most FUN!:
Most Thoughtful:
YA Specific:
Road Trip Wednesdays:
Poetic (aka actual poems):
And of course since this is for YA Highway I have to pimp my very own YA Highway post from back in the wee early days of the “Highway” when the uber-thoughtful Kirsten Hubbard invited me to share a guest post because I’d played so nicely with the other bloggers. :)
Finding Your Voice (on YA Highway)
Most writers’ initial forays into fleshing out characters in their shiny new WIPs involve pages, sometimes entire chapters, of disposable drafting. While it’s true some of these words might find their way in as backstory (provided it’s handled appropriately) this early writing is mostly a tool for the writer in getting to know his or her characters. Here’s a writing exercise which might be helpful with early character development and even make your initial WIP drafting more efficient.
Invite your characters over for dinner.
Out here in the real world a simple and fun way get to know someone better is to share a meal with them. So why not do the same with your new characters? While your at it why not invite all the characters from your current WIP over at the same time? Instead of just dinner, hold a banquet!
Once you’ve made the decision to play host and the imaginary invitations have been sent out, the real work of character observation begins.
Here is a list of some things you’ll want to pay attention to as your fictional evening unfolds: (more…)
In a recent blog post, Dawn Metcalf posed a question about what makes good guys in fiction into “great” guys who do more than serve as a mirror for the heroine of the story, but who are strong in their own right.
I thought I’d give it a shot.
A strong “guy” character in fiction is one who is confident in who he is (which doesn’t mean he’s not vulnerable), he has a distinct personality of his own making him interesting in his own right, and he doesn’t become someone else with the introduction of a love interest. That’s not to say that falling in love (like having children) doesn’t push people to be better versions of themselves for the sake of those new relationships. It certainly does! (Or at least it should.) What it DOES mean is that a strong character (male or female for that matter) is one who doesn’t stop being the person they are – the person the other character fell in love in the first place.
I’ve always believed a healthy relationship is built around two people looking together in the same direction, not two people (or even just one of them) looking only at the other. For the story to carry on after the romance ensues, strong characters are those who expand the scope of their own interests, even their lives, to include the other without completely trading in their independence for dependence (or even worse, co-dependence). It’s a delicate balance.
Nevertheless, each of the characters had a life before they met and each needs to continue to have a life after they meet, albeit an expanded one. After all, where’s the excitement, or the conflict (fictionally speaking), in a relationship where one partner is merely hanging on the heels of the other doing nothing but waiting to be needed? Without that underlying, ongoing tension which keeps them independent yet together, the romance is over. Even if the characters themselves don’t appear to be bored with each other, the reader almost certainly will be.
There’s been lot of discussion lately in the blog and twitter spheres on the subject of boys and YA (young adult) literature. More specifically writers and others are asking why more boys aren’t reading YA. I’ve followed a number of these discussions with interest, but for the most part I’ve been fairly quiet on the subject. However, a recent discussion (Where Have All The Young Men Gone? : Guys In YA) on YA author Dawn Metcalf’s blog has finally motivated me to join the conversation.
Most of us are familiar with the expression, “Never judge a book by its cover”. In other words, don’t assume what something is like based only how it looks. This expression is usually offered as an admonition about people and prejudice, but here I want to consider its literal meaning with regards to actual books. (more…)
