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First draft:
Editing: The Amulet of Sìochàin
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| Creativity Workshop: Issues and Interests |
| Thursday, 29 April 2010 21:24 |
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Because I'm a bit mad, I've signed up for a twelve week Creativity Workshop over at Merrilee Faber's blog, Not Enough Words. The workshop hasn't started yet, but in the run-up I'm thinking about where I want to focus my attention over that time. I'm having a bit of trouble with this, but here we go all the same... Short Stories I've written a couple of short stories, one of which I really liked, but I don't really give myself the time to explore the possibilities of short stories. I always have a novel in progress, and so all my writing time gets dedicated to that. This isn't necessarily a problem, but occasionally I struggle to move on with the WIP, and I think it would be better if rather than just not writing I was better able to work on something different. I'm not brave enough to try and tackle two novels at once, but I think I could cope with working on a short story from time to time. This is something that the workshop as a whole ought to be pretty helpful with, rather than a particular issue to focus on, since I'll be working on a new short story each week. Since I'm revising at the moment, this seems like a good time to try this theory out - I'd be a little more cautious if I was in the middle of a first draft, but I'm looking at this as a kind of test. If I can make it work with revisions, hopefully I can make it work with first drafts too. Idea Generation Another one that's likely to be dealt with merely by doing the workshop, I suspect, but important nonetheless. It's not that I don't have ideas, but I don't seem to have very many of them. The ones I have usually seem pretty good - I have potential plots for the next two books in the Amulet trilogy and one for a completely separate idea in the back of my head - but if I'm going to start trying to write more short stories then that simply isn't good enough. I suppose really the problem is more specifically ideas for short stories. Merrilee said that "A short story is just a climax scene without all the buildup," and I really like that way of looking at it. Unfortunately, most of the time I don't know the climax of my story ideas until I get to it, so I guess we'll see how that goes. POV I always write from the same POV, third person limited, but with multiple POV characters. I have one POV character per scene and everything within that scene is told from that person's POV. I'd like to experiment with this a bit - merely out of curiosity, I'd like to try third person objective, and so stop myself from being able to talk about anything that's not actually said or done. I have a feeling this will make me think about things rather differently, and although I highly doubt I'd ever want to use this kind of narrative in most of my work, I do think it'll be a very interesting exercise. I'd also like to play with first person narratives - when I first started writing, I used this a lot, but I haven't tried it in a while and think it might be helpful for experimenting with the ever-problematic 'show don't tell'. Description My problem is that I don't put enough in. I've heard the 'no info dump' and 'show don't tell' rules so many times that I think I'm kind of scared to put anything in that isn't actually action and dialogue. (Well, and internal musings, but that's a whole other problem.) I'd like to experiment with working description in to my writing, trying to get that balance right. Magic A few people doing this workshop have mentioned that they want to play with the use of magic a bit more. For me, the problem is the opposite. Perhaps it'll prove different with short stories, but I seem to be incapable of coming up with novel plots that don't involve magic. That's okay - I love fantasy, and I'm pretty sure it's what I want to be writing - but I would like to use this opportunity to try something a little different. Setting Linked to the last point, really - everything I write is set in another world. Usually leaning towards the traditional medieval-type fantasy setting. I'm not really sure why. This is another point that isn't exactly causing a problem, but that I'd like to explore. Maybe some urban fantasy. Or, heaven forbid, some straight contemporary drama. Anything's possible, right? Those are my initial thoughts. The first two aren't really things to focus on, since they'll be addressed through the workshop anyway, and of the others the only one that I really see as a problem is the description. So that's definitely one to work on. The others - POV, magic, setting - they're all things to play with, things to explore. And this seems like the perfect time to do that. |
Comments
Also - yes, you were stuck in the queue - I'm in the UK so I think you must have commented just as I was going to bed! I've set it to autopublish for now, which should make commenting easier during the workshop.
Linda - from looking around at other people's posts, I'm beginning to think it's quite a common problem. We're all so scared of the info dump that we're no longer even putting in all the necessary stuff! Hopefully this workshop will give us a chance to play around and see if we can fix that a bit. :)