[NON BLOG] Notes on Future Writing
Oct. 1st, 2004 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI'm fairly sure that I'll participate in NaNoWrimo this year, as I mentioned in Wednesday's post. I do have a story idea, I think; I do have some writing skills, I believe; I do know, thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talktooloose this weekend past, how to improve on my previous efforts. I'll be creating a public livejournal, like roosterbear did with daddy_o last year, where my frantic daily scribblings will be posted.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my writing. I'm fairly sure that any future career I embark upon will involve my writing skills in some form, whether I do freelance writing or lawyering or researching or language teaching or something else entirely. Until I finished graduate school, I was fairly happy with my writing skills generally. As time has passed, though, I'm seeing more and more problems with my writing.
For instance, take Tuesday's post about East Germany and the aftershocks of German reunification. I originally wanted to copy it over to Living in Europe. I haven't done that yet since my account there is dysfunctional and I can't post anything. I don't think I ever will post that article in its current form, though, since it's flawed.landsman raised interesting questions about the long drawn-out construction of a German nation-state that the article really should have dealt with. To say nothing of interesting little analogies like the popularity of the Front national in the Teutophone districts of Alsace-Moselle and the historically sharp tenor of German nationalism in the pre-1945 east of Germany (now western Poland and bits of Russia and Lithuania, not the former DDR, but still). Those details would have taken the analysis from a pedestrian level to some more interesting level. Those details were lacking.
Another example is yesterday's post on assisted suicide.talktooloose asked whether I'd seen The Globe and Mail's front-page picture of the late Charles Fariala, his nude muscular torso visible above the fold in a bizarre sort of cheesecake. I had; in fact, it was that picture, illustrating as it did the dissonance between his apparent and actual states of health, which got me thinking about the topic in the first place. Had I only remembered that, it would have made for a much more powerful opening. More detail on my personal experiences would, perhaps, have similarly made it more compelling.
One thing that my writing--fiction and non-fiction both--lacks is a sufficient and consistent attention to detail. I think I do a very good job researching, and I'd like to think I've got a lucid and entertaining prose style. I just have a tendency to fail to communicate what I'm thinking as effectively as I could, to manage the body/keyboard interface as well as I could, to have characters which read as badly sketched, passages of prose which don't attract the reader, settings just off enough to be unbelieveable. In short, I'm lazy. And, as is almost always the case, this laziness could be so easily improved upon.
That's why I plan on taking part in NaNoWrimo. It's a high-speed writing contest, requiring a minimum of fifty thousand words, or something like 1 500 words a day. It requires, on the part of its participants, a strong command of plot and narrative and characterization, and an ability to sustain this command. It would, of course, require a radical reduction in my blogging time, but I've got enough seeds of essays stored up on my 3 1/2-inch floppies: I can reconstitute stuff over the busy month of November.
At the very least, I'm competent enough to fail quite spectacularly and to emerge at least somewhat chastened. ;-) At best, I might emerge with some fiction at least theoretically worthy of publication in whatever form. It's worth the effort, I believe.
What will it be about? I think that I should write about what I know. I tend to agree with Margaret Atwood's opinion, expressed in Moving Targets, that a world in which writers like herself could only write exactly what they knew first hand, would be as close to writer's hell as one could imagine. Random copying errors, though, are useful. The skeletal plot as I imagined it yesterday involves alternate history in some form and Prince Edward Island; see here and here for some more background details.
talktooloose this weekend past, how to improve on my previous efforts. I'll be creating a public livejournal, like roosterbear did with daddy_o last year, where my frantic daily scribblings will be posted.Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my writing. I'm fairly sure that any future career I embark upon will involve my writing skills in some form, whether I do freelance writing or lawyering or researching or language teaching or something else entirely. Until I finished graduate school, I was fairly happy with my writing skills generally. As time has passed, though, I'm seeing more and more problems with my writing.
For instance, take Tuesday's post about East Germany and the aftershocks of German reunification. I originally wanted to copy it over to Living in Europe. I haven't done that yet since my account there is dysfunctional and I can't post anything. I don't think I ever will post that article in its current form, though, since it's flawed.
landsman raised interesting questions about the long drawn-out construction of a German nation-state that the article really should have dealt with. To say nothing of interesting little analogies like the popularity of the Front national in the Teutophone districts of Alsace-Moselle and the historically sharp tenor of German nationalism in the pre-1945 east of Germany (now western Poland and bits of Russia and Lithuania, not the former DDR, but still). Those details would have taken the analysis from a pedestrian level to some more interesting level. Those details were lacking.Another example is yesterday's post on assisted suicide.
talktooloose asked whether I'd seen The Globe and Mail's front-page picture of the late Charles Fariala, his nude muscular torso visible above the fold in a bizarre sort of cheesecake. I had; in fact, it was that picture, illustrating as it did the dissonance between his apparent and actual states of health, which got me thinking about the topic in the first place. Had I only remembered that, it would have made for a much more powerful opening. More detail on my personal experiences would, perhaps, have similarly made it more compelling.One thing that my writing--fiction and non-fiction both--lacks is a sufficient and consistent attention to detail. I think I do a very good job researching, and I'd like to think I've got a lucid and entertaining prose style. I just have a tendency to fail to communicate what I'm thinking as effectively as I could, to manage the body/keyboard interface as well as I could, to have characters which read as badly sketched, passages of prose which don't attract the reader, settings just off enough to be unbelieveable. In short, I'm lazy. And, as is almost always the case, this laziness could be so easily improved upon.
That's why I plan on taking part in NaNoWrimo. It's a high-speed writing contest, requiring a minimum of fifty thousand words, or something like 1 500 words a day. It requires, on the part of its participants, a strong command of plot and narrative and characterization, and an ability to sustain this command. It would, of course, require a radical reduction in my blogging time, but I've got enough seeds of essays stored up on my 3 1/2-inch floppies: I can reconstitute stuff over the busy month of November.
At the very least, I'm competent enough to fail quite spectacularly and to emerge at least somewhat chastened. ;-) At best, I might emerge with some fiction at least theoretically worthy of publication in whatever form. It's worth the effort, I believe.
What will it be about? I think that I should write about what I know. I tend to agree with Margaret Atwood's opinion, expressed in Moving Targets, that a world in which writers like herself could only write exactly what they knew first hand, would be as close to writer's hell as one could imagine. Random copying errors, though, are useful. The skeletal plot as I imagined it yesterday involves alternate history in some form and Prince Edward Island; see here and here for some more background details.
