Tag: writing a novel

Welcome back! And Happy New Year!

welcome back

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.

Happy New Year!!!

After a short vacations I’m back! It was a good break and I feel quite reestablished from NaNoWriMo, blog work and all of the shenanigans.

The almost two weeks pause served me well. I decided to truly stop all of my routines and just do what felt right at the moment. So, I ended up editing a lot of my current work in progress, ‘The Shapeshifters’, taking my sweet time with each reread.

Yes, I have lost count of how many times I have read this draft! And this is a good thing. Another good thing is that I keep feeling invested in editing this story and revising it to its utmost iteration.

I still feel I need to identify all the mistakes before I hand it to someone else to read. ALL OF THE MISTAKES! And this is giving me a headache… but it will get done on the best of my capacities.

I have been struggling with the unseen mistakes. Which are those things that only a fresh pair of eyes detect on most cases. Because I have the story, and it’s backstory, and all the transitions but, sometimes I feel I eat some parts of it without noticing.

These are the bad parts that a fresh pair of eyes detect almost immediately, while the authors eyes are pretty tired at this point and miss the huge wholes in it.

Now I’m back to my creative projects. I have been planning 2023 and trying to align myself with all that I need to accomplish in this new year.

I have new Creative Projects and some old one’s also.

I have been doing the choice of the Annual Word for eight years and this year I chose…

annual word

Already defined my reading goal for 2023. It’s 60 books and it’s up to date on my Goodreads profile.

Also my writing events are coming along in their planning efforts. I’m trying to transition to ‘The Shapeshifters #2’ and trying to figure out how to go about it.

On Vlook, my YouTube channel, last 2022 video was a fun one. It focused on some reading updates and the attending to Cirque du Soleil performance, Crystal. Now I’m planning new content and still learning a lot with it.

I am also doing a 12 months, 12 themes research, for this year. In 2022 I did the 12 laws of karma. Now it’s time to study Resilience. Each month I focus on a new component of Resilience. January is time for Growth. Which I find quite appropriate. 

As for New Challenges, I’m looking to my writings and the need to integrate a more professional perspective of this author’s life. I’ll be honest, I’m struggling. But I won’t stop. I will not give up.

So, this year I expect to learn a lot with my shortcomings and prepare myself to push through more difficult times.

I hope your beginning of the year has been peaceful, happy and productive.

So… How’s it going? How is 2023 treating you so far?

Please leave a comment and subscribe for more content.

Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

***

Another writing update on ‘The Shapeshifters’ and NaNoWriMo

writing update

Only five days to the end of November. Only five days to the end of NaNoWriMo. But ‘The Shapeshifters’ is a long way from finished.

I started planing this story, with all my usual twists and turns, but you can read more about it on ‘Hello NaNoWriMo and lots of Shapeshifters‘.

I made plans and then I made a plan for the plans… now I have a new plan. But about the planning stage of this story you can read more in ‘Setting up my NaNo Project and Prepping all the must have’s‘.

If you’ve been following me on social media you already know that I managed to write my 50K for NaNoWriMo on the 13th of November.

I was a few scenes away from the mid point, when I hit the 50K, and I over estimated how much it would take to write this story. I figured I could aim towards 100 000 words, so that I would have a bit of a wiggle room for cutting during editing processes.

Well, this didn’t happened!

I’m very conscious of what I put in when I’m writing fiction. I tend to write in a way that gives just enough details for the reader to imagine the rest, and allow them to make the bigger connections between the information if they want to.

I don’t employ many words in creative descriptions. Purple prose doesn’t captivate me when I’m writing fiction. And I didn’t want to fill it with unnecessary junk just to make the word count. So, no 100K for ‘The Shapeshifters’#1.

On day 23 of November, I already knew I wouldn’t be writing much more than the 77K. Even if I know I have a few more things to add, even entire scenes. But this will not represent 30K of writing. It really isn’t possible to accomplish on the remaining days of this NaNoWriMo… and I’ll tell you why in a moment.

I started getting a bit fretful about this, it’s been a freaky gut turner, but I figured I wanted to study my options first.

Option #1. I could go ahead and start revising the draft.

But this is usually a more slow paced activity and it would not produce the 1667 words per day I needed to put in.

Option #2. Or, I could move on to ‘The Shapeshifters’#2.

But this meant starting another rough-rough draft without having done my due diligences.

And… I’m not emotionally prepared for this!

Another detail, that might seem stupid to you, but it’s important to me, I really wanted to earn all the badges on NaNoWriMo website.

I can now tell you that this will not happen.

First badge: I will not hit my daily count every single day of November, because I already achieved the 50k and I’m not going for 100K anymore.

Second badge: I don’t know if I’ll be able to update the daily count every day, because editing is different from writing.

On the 23rd of November I tried to start editing the draft.

I know it needs a lot of work, but editing is different from fully writing, so I did some editing… 278 words worth of editing.

And on the 24th of November I went back to the drawing board.

I’m starting my edits now and there are some details that need to go in, and some considerations to be done now, if I want to write this trilogy properly.

And I do want to write this trilogy properly!

So, I’m all in my drawing board mood.

drawing board

For now, I’m trying to hold on to my win here. I wrote 77k on a draft in twenty two days. That’s a win.

I did it at a faster pace than I imagined possible.

I had great fun writing and rereading this story.

I identified some must have’s and need to do’s and I’m focusing on doing those.

I’ll be talking a bit about this on this week’s YouTube vídeo. Please, don’t forget to subscribe to VLook and hear all about it.

Hope you’re doing well and participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo. If so, how’s your project going?

Please leave a comment and subscribe for more content.

Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

Pantser into Plotter

pantser into plotter

I guess as time passes, and we get to practice more and more of our writing, some things about ourselves are bound to change.

It’s not by chance that most writers start as pantsers and after a while evolve into plotters.

Why? I’ll tell you as much as I’ve lived it. 

something about yourself

I don’t believe this was meant to be taken literally. But, yes. When we start to write our first novel we discover many different things about ourselves.

Not all of them are as deep as implied here. But most most of them are of the life changing variety. 

The 4 Creative Paradigms

Picking up on the Creative Paradigms as explored on ‘Writing Fiction from Dummies’, meaning the methods we may use while writing the first and subsequent drafts, we have:

  • Seat-of-the-pants (write in one sitting, without planning or editing)
  • Edit-as-you-go (write without planning but edit thoroughly as you go)
  • Snowflake (write a general plan, adapting it as you go)
  • Outline (make a detailed plan, than stick to it regardless)

Our beliefs

When we start writing we want to be good immediately. We want to become the best. We learn how to do some tricks (those things that we read and thought them out of this world good) and pray they carry us into an organic, and not too troublesome, writing practice.

But, at that time, we hadn’t put in the how many?!?!?! working hours we need to have some proper insights on the work itself.

The pantser kind of is our first and most dearest friend. And he can stay that way if used for the parts where he does his best work, like imagining a plot.

So, a pantser writes his stories using the Seat-of-the-pants creative paradigm. A pantser writes fast, without planning much, making it up as he goes along.

A plotter write his stories using the Outline creative paradigm.

A plotter uses outlines to plan and write his story. He works out the kinks before getting himself into the trouble of writing a full draft.

My journey

Looking into my own writing practices, I have used all of the different creative paradigms.

Experimenting on what best fits my writing needs, seems to be my method, and I use them in different parts of the writing process also.

I believe it’s a good thing to respect each project and leave to it to dictate which method would serve him best. There are projects that ask for a quick plotting session and others that are best left to the heat of the moment inspiration.

But, one thing I had been noticing in my writing practice, other than it evolve regardless of should’s and shouldn’ts, is that each project seems to ask from me a different creative approach. 

As I’ve been working on different lengths and types of stories, I understood that some require a bit more planning from the get going than others. As well as, some ask for more improvisation in order to flush out more creative ideas.

Also, there’s a creative paradigm more fit for a first draft of a story, and another quite different, for a second or third drafts. Why? Some give us more leverage to explore, while others are more suited for working out the things that aren’t good enough.

permission

I had been using all of them, sometimes both pantser and plotter on the same writing project, just in different phases (drafts or composition materials) of it.

But I kind of figured out that, when we start writing, and have a practice for some years, we get to evolve naturally into using more wholesome writing methods. 

We do not have the thrill of the major plot twist. I mean it in a sense of spilling everything onto the page with just that big goal in mind, not delivering on all the other requirements for a good story.

With practice we get to appreciate the composition of the story as a whole. Enjoying it best when we can work out all the details that will help us deliver that plot twist emotion seamlessly.

And it’s kind of easier to draft an entire novel if we have the guidelines previously written out.

Writing an extensive piece of literature is a tiring long run, a marathon, not a sprint. If we have the road clear, and all set up, we can walk it until the finish line, without many path corrections.

But I believe, the important thing to retain in this subject is: we show up to our work, we practice, we experiment, we write stories and we evolve as writers. Then, the creative paradigm will be our own, perfectly suited for our way of writing and being.

Hope you’re doing well and participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo. If so, how’s your project going?

Please leave a comment and subscribe for more content.

Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

***

References ✍🏼