Worderella Writes

Quote: Honest Assessment

Make an honest assessment of what it is you’re willing to sacrifice for your writing because it is quite a painful exercise, it’s so subjective. It should be a process of reasoning - you’ve been honest with yourself, you know what it is you’re prepared not to have in order that you might try to be a novelist.
- Elliot Perlman

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Playing with Structure

Here is a great article on the structure of your work, stressing the importance of making the structure as important as the plot.

What is Structure?
by David Mitchell

To begin with, structure need not just be a frame on which you hang narrative, but a kind of plot in its own right, running parallel to the narrative-plot. Twists in this ’structure-plot’ occur as and when its nature and workings are revealed to the reader.

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Quote: Open a Vein

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
- Red Smith

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Hurting Our Characters

Well, it’s Finals Week™, so we all know what that means: I get to start writing again! At the end of every quarter as assignments trickle to a halt and I’m left with more free time, all those little nuggets of inspiration that came to me earlier (but I couldn’t encourage because I had to be in school-mode) are now free to take over. What does this mean, Worderella? What are you trying to tell us?

It means that I’ve written another couple of thousand words over the last few days, which is a cause for celebration. Assuming I keep my overall goal of approximately 85 000 words (the range for a full-length novel is anywhere from 80 000 to 100 000+), then I can safely say I am 39.5% complete with this draft.

But I’ve hit a slight roadblock.

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The Heart of the Story

Though this is more about feature writing in a newsmagazine or some such publication, I thought this article was helpful for us fiction writers as well. Just um…whenever he writes “journalist,” substitute “fiction writer.” In general, it works out.

The Heart of the Story
by Jon Ronson, feature writer for The Guardian

Finding a Story to Tell
How do you begin your story? All journalists are, to a greater or lesser degree, paranoid conspiracy theorists. This is because stories do not have natural boundaries, every lead can take you to another lead, every thought to another thought, and eventually - if you allow yourself to become crazy - every story you write can incorporate the past, present, and future of all human civilisation. You don’t believe me? Okay, I’m going to pick a topic at random. The Paris fashion shows.

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Book: The Thirteenth Tale

Margaret Lea has a secret about her birth; a secret that haunts her to this day, and affects every decision she makes. She is the daughter of an antique book dealer, and so is his helpmate in running the bookshop that maintains their lifestyle. One day, a letter arrives for Margaret, written in an awful hand, requesting that she journey to the home of the infamous writer, Vida Winter. Miss Winter is infamous because of her past, or lack of it, for with every interview there is a new rendition, and none of them are true. There is no record of Miss Winter’s birth, her childhood…nothing to say who she was before she appeared in the literary world. Miss Winter, it seems, wants to tell the truth of her past for the first time, ever, and she has chosen Margaret for the job. After thirty (or forty, perhaps?) years of public speculation about the past of Miss Vida Winter, and the plot of the missing thirteenth tale from her book Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation (only twelve were released), Vida Winter is ready to speak the truth.

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Quote: Just Do It

The best writing advice I ever received came near-simultaneously from two different sources.

I was struggling through my first full-length work, finding it a very different and untameable animal from short fiction. Writing the book was like walking against a wind machine where life, other story ideas, and lack of polished expertise threw themselves against my every effort.

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Playing with Structure

Using Foreshadowing
Heighten the themes of your story or increase the tension by using small incidents which echo later, more significant events, known as foreshadowing. Keep it subtle though, and the reader will be quietly thrilled to have spotted your literary trickery!

Multiple Viewpoints
Don’t be afraid to tell your story from multiple viewpoints if you feel it’s right, but be careful not to confuse the reader - make it clear which character is in pole position at any one time.

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From the Notebook: Inside the Victorian Home

I have so many notes dedicated to life in the Victorian home that I could probably dedicate an entire month’s worth of posts to the topic. I won’t, but here are some tidbits here and there that I found interesting.

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Quote: Start Straight Away

Get the reader into the story straight away, and use crisp and unassuming language. Don’t make the reader want to reach for the dictionary.
- Elliot Perlman

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