In yesterday's Guardian (one of our better national daily broadsheets) - 'put one word after another'. Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Geoff Dyer, Neil Gaiman, P D James, Michael Moorcock, Rose Tremain, Jeanette Winterson and a host of others offer their rules for writing. Laugh-out-loud funny in places, though provoking in others.
...I'm putting this here because I figure there are people here who feel my pain. I think I'm pretty decent at ploting. I have a grand old time working out the significant events of a story and the order in which they should happen, but time and time again, I get to the point where I've got everything planned out and I'm ready to start writing and then...nothing. I realize that while I know what the story is, I have NO CLUE how to wright it! It drives me NUTS!
I've had this plot in the works for actually a couple of years now, not continuously, but close enough that I've but A LOT of time into. I feel good about it. I'm rather excited about it, but when I sit down to write, I never know where to go. First person is what I'm leaning towards at this point, and I figure that doing a test scene in a few different POVs would be helpful, but I'm irritated...yet also amazed at the amount of effort it takes just to get a story started @__@
Just wanted to throw this out there to see if other people have a similar problem and what y'all might do to...get around it. ^^;
Hello!I'm new to the world of Fanfiction - actually, I'm new in the sense of writing. Hence, I would love some constructive criticism and reviews so that I can improve myself as a writer. I hope you guys will help me grow leaps & bounds through your much-anticipated words.Thank you!!
Title: A Touch Lost or Forgotten Author/Artist: yukikohosokoawa Claim: Hyuuga Hinata 50 Shinobi Theme: #18 : Dreams Pairing: Uzumaki Naruto and Hyuuga Hinata Rating: PG, K+ (for some low-crude language and somewhat-indecent thoughts) Disclaimer: I had all rights to Naruto, the anime, and its characters. . . then, I woke up.
Summary: Is it a dream or is it not dream, that is the question. One would never know but it's clear they would never look at each other the same way ever again.
I'm not sure how many others out there started out their amateur writing careers with a spiral-bound notebook and a #2 pencil, and little else aside from a ridiculously large imagination and possibly an outdated dictionary. (I'm willing to bet, however, that the percentage is fairly large.)
In the computer age, though, most of us have given up pens and pencils and typewriters for a keyboard, we can get our dictionary and our thesaurus and even our research material online and find whatever we need with a click of the mouse. Most of us have probably also discovered the words of wisdom other writers and scholars of the language have passed down and keep hold of a handful of books to reference when we need an experienced guide.
A few of us might even be aware that there is software out there specific to creative writing--not just word processing like Word, Word Perfect, Open Office, etc, but honest to god novel writing software with organizational and outlining features that enables you to arrange your writing by chapter and scene with notations for practically anything you can think of. I wasn't aware this sort of thing existed until a few months ago; finem wasn't aware of it until I told her tonight, and thus I'd like to open a discussion.
So, barring the obvious such as your computer, the notebook you carry everywhere in case you think of something, your dictionary and thesaurus and, of course, Wikipedia, all of which I guarantee the rest of us have and/or use as well--what are the tools you can't live without? Do you have reference books for grammar or style? Is there a 'how to write' book that you just keep going back to? Is there a website or web-based program that you've found to be invaluable? Do you have a piece of writing-oriented software that you can't believe you ever lived without?
So, here's what's going down. I have a friend who is taking an Anthropology course this summer and one of her assignments is to do a study of a group that she is not a part of. She was really struggling to come up with an idea, so I suggested that she study something to do with fandom and let her know that this community exists and well...it's a go. She'd like to use us for her project.
Here's how it will go, squealita will be joining the group in a bit and she'll basically be posting some questions about why we write and why fanfic and things of the like. She might request individual interaction with anyone who is comfortable with that via IM. It is up to you guys whether or not you want to respond to these posts, but I will say that it would be a big help to her if she got feedback from more than like...just me.
I'm really excited about this. XD The project will go on for the next two weeks and I think it'll be cool to sort of explore our motivations for doing what we do. So there you go. Heads up. We're officially an object of study ^__^
I'd like to reiterate that participation in this project is completely voluntary. Keeley is totally cool, I promise. No shady business will be going down with this project.
Hi, my name's Zu and I'm an alcoholic writer. Apparently.
My crime would have to be laziness, not in terms of research (I'm lucky to have a pharmacist for a father who is now well used to my cries of "How high up would you have to be for a fall to kill you?" or "How much coffee would you need to drink before you needed hospitalisation?") What I do end up doing is not writing. Part of it's the inner critic telling me that I'm writing shit, but a large part is that I'm just plain lazy.
What do you guys do? Write Or Die is good, but it's the getting on there in the first place. Do you have betas to kick your asses and tell you to get back to work (if so, anyone know a petshop that stocks them?), or do you promise yourself something in advance? The old 'carrot and stick' option?
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this but I figured I would give it a shot.
I am planning an AxelxRoxas fanfic and I need some help working out a few details.
See this story is supposed to be about Roxas coming to Berlin, Germany to study at a German University for a year (this is due to my intense desire to write about *my* city) so to give him a plausible reason to do this I figured he would have to be studying something related to German (also, then he would have some basis of the language already).
Now I know what the subject would be called in German, but I have no idea what he would be studying in the States? Do people even do that in the States, go abroad for a year?
Axel gets to be my Berlin native, so no problems there, but I'd really appreciated if someone could help me with this problem.
curious