9and60ways

lazette (mostly known for her work at Forward Motion) has a nice rounup of links to 'how to critique' posts at

http://lazette.livejournal.com/132377.html

This is one of those topics where every now and again I wish I had a list of links to point people to. I haven't followed all of those articles, but between them, they ought to be useful; at the very least they'll be a starting point for discussion.

By sheer synchronicity, the question of underrepresentation of women in Fantasy has cropped up three times on my flist in the past few days; once in a post by an author musing that her WIP does not pass the Bechdel test and what to do about it (looking at the society in question to see what women are doing and not defaulting to 'man' for every new role and spearcarrier.) For me, that was the important thing that came out of the whole racefail/mammothfail discussions, the need for myself to look at what I was writing and who I was writing about and to question myself: am I reaching for the clichees-in-my-head (which might not be commonly shared clichees, but are always-the-same anyway) or am I reflecting the richness of the world in my portrait of it? *Are* my worlds rich, or are they, as I've just heard it put, one giant stag party?

Article series by kateelliott and Ken Scholes here:

Part 1
Part 2
ed.Part 3

This post by Marie Brennan (swan_tower) goes into the Bechdel test at greater length. (She's also taking the discussion to fangs_fur_fey here

kateelliott has an interesting discussion about the inclusion of dzots in fantasy novels.

I've been talking about abstraction/description here and there - and it's generated some interesting comments.

I've been following Book View Cafe's blog - bookview_blog for a bit now, and not just for dancinghorse's contributions. The blog is relatively low-volume, which is a shame, because a number of excellent writers are sharing advice about the craft. So I thought I'd point it out to y'all.

jmeadows has an interesting post on her journal where she plays with first person, present tense. A number of readers have rewritten a paragraph, and it's interesting to see what different people do with the same material.

http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/700589.html

Link to Steve's link roundups:

http://storybones.blogspot.com/2009/06/good-words-about-writing.html

http://storybones.blogspot.com/2009/06/about-writing.html

In that 2nd post he brings up the question of where the writing advice has gone. When I first joined LJ there were a lot of pro/neopro writers talking about writing. Are there really fewer now, or did the old ones stop posting about it and the new ones are just hard to find? Whose writing posts do you read?

If I call a character "Padma" and give clues to an Earth and possibly subcontinental origin, is it obvious that she's female? How about "Khadija"? It's the viewpoint character in a 1st person present narrative, and apart from the name, there are no other clues to gender.

I'm doing an academic creative writing course at the moment. It's interesting to be writing genre fiction when most of the materials have a literary slant, but my tutor is fine about fantasy and the marks I've been getting have boosted my confidence a lot.

As we're nearly at the end, we're looking at the revision/editing process. In the course book it says:

Fay Weldon says that "there have to be two personalities in every writer": A, who produces the first drafts, has to be "creative, impetuous, wilful, emotional, sloppy"; B, who works on them, has to be 'argumentative, self-righteous, cautious, rational, effective.

It's just as well that I firmly believe in the "Nine and sixty ways" mantra because I don't write like that. The course book had previously asked us to think of adjectives to describe our first draft writing self and I came up with:

hesitant, verbose, groping, tentative.

For my editing self I decided on:

judging, evaluating, decisive, balanced.

And now I know why freewriting doesn't work for me as a technique. It's why NaNoWriMo wouldn't work either.

I don't compose my first drafts in a sloppy white-heat of creativity. (To mix metaphors wildly!) My first drafts feel like tentative pencil sketches and the editing is like firming everything up, discarding what doesn't work and improving the bits that do work. But my method does work for fiction and I've managed to extend it to poetry as well.

It feels horrible struggling with a new story, but I just need to remember that the first draft always feels horrible, but I can make it right in the revision.

But I wondered if anyone else would like to think of words to describe how they feel while writing first draft and how they feel like writing/revising?

I've engaged on a long-term project to write four-and-twenty Bluebeard stories. So far I have three finished, and a few ideas. About the finished ones, I have two questions:

1) <writes a question and then remembers she actually came up with the solution a while ago but didn't have time to apply it.> Must go and do that.

Okay, so I have one question:

1) So I've got this brilliant Bluebeard story set in Victorian England. There's no fantasy element at all. There's dead bodies hanging in a locked room, but it's not really horror. The protag is mystified at what's going on and undertakes to investigate, but it's not really a mystery. Where on earth can I submit it to that would recognise the supreme rocksomeness of the protag, story and title and reward me with fame and fortune?

http://www.goldspot.com/Parker_pens/100/49760.html

Drool, drool.

This seems to be the modern incarnation of the 51, and GOD was that a wonderful pen.

Someone has to post something here, so here goes. I figure it makes more sense to have discussions here rather than link here to discussions elsewhere, because people could be having similar discussions on their LJs, which would mean the topic is scattered across LJ. Trying to do it here means one place to come and comment and if things get too unwieldy in the comments, we can start another topic for it here. At least, let's give it a try.

We all work/write differently, hence the 9 and 60 Ways. I never appreciated that concept until I heard it from Patricia Wrede over on the old Writers' Club boards on AOL. Until then, I thought there were rules you had to follow and I couldn't and it frustrated me. Okay, anyone reading my LJ for a while or my posts on rasfc might remember this. But it brings me to a topic that would make a nice start here. 

Have you gotten one or two pieces of advice re: writing that made all the difference? Has there been a moment of epiphany re: your writing?

For me, it was Patricia's advice (and from others online) that I'm allowed to find my own way. I don't have to outline. I don't have to adhere to the same MO others use. I'm allowed to experiment to find what works and then use it. If writing as I go and revising as I go works for me, then that's what I should do. That was so liberating.

james_nicoll recently posted a post asking for references on European settlement patterns, spawned off an offhand comment he made about how they were different from ones in the U.S. West. No comments yet, but it looks like it could develop into an interesting thread.

Tap tap, is this thing on?

Damn, I wish I had more energy because there are SO many good posts I could make just from Eastercon alone.

Anyway: what I wanted to say is: LJ is actually pretty good at following a discussion IF YOU USE THE TRACKING FUNCTION.

That is: you look at the bottom of a post and you'll see a link that says "track this". Click it, it will take you to a page that says more or less, are you sure? Do you want the links via email, your phone, blah blah blah? You say yes.

Voilà. New posts pop up in your email.

I haven't found a way to killfile posters yet, but I have a feeling there is.

msagara talks about them here and makes some good points. Not that anyone here needs convincing.

green_knight has been discussing outlining here and mostly here.

Previously, she posted links to one system of outlines (Kelly McCullough) and Another system of outlining by jessaslade.

[I meant to call this post _Making words work harder_, but on closer examination, that's not actually the entire truth. There are two issues here: one ways of making words, indeed, work harder - more impact for your wordage - while the other aspect are examples of where the words on the page are somewhat thin and need filling out to work properly. Many of them are things that have been discussed elsewhere and -when, but what these do is give good examples.

( The art of polishing prose )

Particular favorites:

( Personal Roundup )

Now it's your turn: what techniques have you come across that you find particularly useful in polishing your prose? What persistent errors do you find yourself making?

A rather lengthy analysis ^H rant, for reasons of length on beyond_elechan (my public face):

http://beyond-elechan.livejournal.com/13776.html

Looking at the list, I am no longer surprised that the current trend in books does not work for me; I am, however, slightly stumped as to what conclusions I should (or need to) draw for my writing.

Thoughts and comments? (here or there)

Since nobody else has gone ahead, I've set up 9and60ways (hrj's suggestion), with the subtitle of Nine and Sixty Ways (of constructing tribal lays) I had to set it up as a with-advertising, so if you briefly saw this post saying something slightly different, your mind isn't deceiving you. brooksmoses reminded me of the mechanism of setting it back to basic, and after some frustration, I found it. Yay no adverts.

If anyone has objections (or a few bob to spare, I'm happy to take over one month a year, if twelve of us do that, we can have a paid account); we can change it any time.

We need a userpicture.

We need volunteers to be maintainers - I don't expect it to be a time-intensive job, but I think for it to work, there should be more than one of me.

We also need a Community Description, Interests, Biography. (We don't have to have all of them, but suggestions are welcome)

I'd suggest setting up an e-mail all maintainers can access, for now it's going to mine.

We also need a charter, and should discuss that.I know we've pretty much discussed what we want to do and how, but it would be nice to have it formalised and written down somewhere.

And we can haz a sticky post - one that will always show up at the top - so we might want to have a few brief lines regarding what the community is about. (I've just put the quote from Kipling up for now.)

Err, that's all I can think of for now.

(I'm happy for styling suggestions, but the dragons stay.)