All one needs

All one needs to write is a story and a will to tell it.

That is it. Everything else is just noise. I purchased a monitor, a table, a series of  chairs, and God knows what else, but nothing helped me write. Now that I write everyday, I sit at the dining table, on a cheap chair with decent back support, and use a three year old laptop. I write because I want to write. I find time for it, I study it, I enjoy it, it makes me feel good, so I write. I don't worry about publishing, or agents, or twitter, or anything else. I don't even think about whether it's good or not, or will anyone ever read it. That is not for me to decide. I just need to get the words on paper, or in this case, a docx file.

By the way, I participated in Nanowrimo this November- that's National November Writing Month for all the noobs. One has to write 50000 words in a month. I didn't quite manage that, but I wrote close to 32000 words, that's 32000 more than I had in October. The best part is, the habit of writing more than a 1000 words a day seems to have rubbed off. I wrote another 3500 words in 2 days of December. If this continues, I might actually finish off the book by mid-Jan, as I had earlier hoped.

And no posts over the last few months, because I haven't had time for anything else.

Book number 2, here I come

I officially finished my first novel in the first week of June. Then took a nice long break, went to Hawaii, fell sick, watched the world cup, generally had a good time. Now it's back to work.

I spent so much time on actually writing the first novel that I forgot the best part about writing a book: starting it. You get to build a world, come up with new characters, new settings. You are not worried about finishing it yet, you are anticipating getting into it. And for the second book, because I finished book 1, I have well defined steps about how I want to proceed.

1. Come up with the whole story- the cast, the settings, the world, everything. Do not start writing a chapter till you know how the entire book begins and ends. This may seem extreme to some, but it worked really well for me. I knew the direction I was going to take and I stuck to it. The end may not have been exactly what I envisioned, but it was close enough. At least there was an end.

2. Not only would I finish a short writeup, but also I would write what I would expect each chapter to contain. No, I don't expect to stay entirely true to this. I will swing wildly apart from this, like someone hanging behind a formula 1 car with a bungee cord, but again this keeps the direction true. I may miss a few chapters, but at the end, I will get back in the general vicinity of where I want to be.

3. Not make the same mistakes I made with book 1. Frankly, between you and me, book 1 sucked. It was really really nothing to write home about. The best thing seems to be that there weren't too many grammatical snafus. Well, one lives and learns.

It's off to book number two. I hope it will turn out better than book number 1. Something I could actually look to publish.

That may or may not happen, but one thing's for sure. The fun I will have writing it is going to be legen..... wait for it......

Writing- the aftereffects

Now that I have officially finished a book and I am looking beyond that process, I have come across a couple of unfortunate aftereffects of writing. The first is that writing has spoiled reading for me. I cannot read a book without comparing it to my book. I judge the writing style, the grammar, the voice, the illogical jumps in the story, everything. Adverbs stick out like sore thumbs. If a character does something inexplicable, I shut the book and don't open it again. Reading is not a process of taking me away to a different place anymore, it is a comparative and competitive exercise. I am pretty sure that's not the right thing to do, but i don't know how to undo it.

The second thing is my feelings towards my own book. Sometimes I feel like i have written a masterpiece, and at other times I feel like it's trash. I am pretty sure the reality is somewhere in between, but I don't know towards which side it leans. I am not even sure whether I should publish it anymore.

Hopefully, I will get a few beta readers who will tell me what to think. I should at least join a critique group. That might give me a neutral feedback.

Rambling apart, I have printed the second draft of the book and will go through it over the next week. Hopefully I don't feel too bad about it later.

Publicity stunts

Now that the first draft of my book is done and I am almost halfway through the second one, I am thinking of other things that I need to do. The first and foremost seems to be to create a buzz for my book and me. And the most obvious way to go about that is twitter. Almost everybody who has published their book say that twitter is the way to go. But man, is twitter hard!

I am following less than a hundred people and still the sheer noise is terrific. Since starting to write this blog about five minutes ago, there have been seventeen new tweets by the ones I follow. I think there is some sort of service that most fellow authors are using. The service most likely retweets certain people's tweets and sends out their own at preset times. No one can spend the amount of time reading and tweeting this much and still have enough to do anything else. This means that if I get a few thousand followers, my feed will have anywhere from a thousand to infinite tweets a day. I am pretty sure I am never going to look at even one. But then neither will anyone else look at mine. It is chaos and standing out in it is going to be bloody tough.

Adding to that is my general personality. I am not particularly witty or clever, nor do I have much to say. Most of what I do is either too mundane or too important to talk about. I prefer to shut up and listen, unless I am in the company of close friends.

This will take some doing. I will have to go through this in the same way I go about everything else I need to do- analyze, understand, conquer. Analyze what the hell is going on, understand what I need to do and then go ahead and do it.

PS: Number of unread tweets by now is 46

Writing and SDLC

I have been interested in merging the writing cycle into the Software Development Life Cycle for quite some time now. I started this post in 2009, but never got to finish it. But now, I think I should give it another whirl. One of the most important things of SDLC is to catch problems earlier; the earlier, the better. If you see something wrong in the first phase and correct it there, it will cost way less then correcting it a phase or even a couple of phases away. Same logic should also apply for book writing. If the plan you have is error-free, you will have lesser problems later.

So how does the SDLC run. It has various stages which are bidirectional. You can move from any phase to a phase before or after it. Lets start with the first stage.

1. Requirements: For an actual software company, this is the craziest phase. One has to make sure everything is covered and there are no loopholes. It requires making sense of a whole buttload of non-sense. However, for book writing, this is going to be the simplest thing ever. At the end of the phase, you need to have an idea and a setting. If you write fantasy, a basic structure of the magic of your world, what kind of a story would it be, who would be the target audience. Basically, the kernel around which your whole book will reside. If that idea is not good enough to work with, don't even move to phase 2.

2. Planning: This is important. In this phase, you will sketch out everything: your characters, the working of your world, the rules that every entity in the book will follow, and most importantly, a start and an end. Make sure everything gels together, because once you are past this, changing even a little thing might require massive changes in the latter phases. You cant mess this up, or be prepared to rewrite chapter after chapter after chapter.

3. Development: This is the actual writing part and the longest part. You will pick up the basic blocks that you had from planning and meld them together. You could write in as much detail as you want, or keep tags for work that will come later. You will make sure that whatever start and end you had in mind seems correct when you put it on paper. Once done, you have the first draft.

4. Testing: This would be the first revision of the document. You could put in a few more chapters to make things right, patch up all the missing descriptions, remove the unnecessary fluff and have a book that seems complete. This is the second draft. Then you go back and run grammar and spelling checks to make sure things are correct. You print out and read the book, marking errors and inconsistencies to ensure that they get corrected later after you are done reading. You will know how your book feels when read as a whole rather than part by part. You do whatever you feel necessary, as at the end of this phase, your book should be as ready as it will ever be for publishing.

5. Maintenance: A book is never quite done. Nor is software. There will be constant maintenance cycles where you will remember a stupid thing you did and go back to either phase 2 or phase 3 and continue on from there. This is an endless process, or at least it will last till you get tired of your book.

If you make sure to achieve the objective of each phase before moving to the next, you might have to do a lot less rework. I know, I wrote almost a whole book which I cant use, before I got to a draft I was satisfied with.

Publishing and other stories

Now that my book is on its way to completion, publishing it becomes a concern. Do I self publish, or do I go the traditional route?

Going the traditional route has some advantages. It is definitely the more respected and well traveled one. I will probably get some rejections and maybe some reasons for that. So I would know the obvious shortcomings in my writing. If I do get published, the publication might take care of the sales and take that load off my already injured shoulders.

But the more I read about it, self publishing seems the new "in" thing. It's easy, it's free (at least for the e-book variety), and it gets your words out the fastest. Though I am undecided, I happened upon an interesting little experience about self-publishing.

http://www.jasonkomito.com/#!articles/c6jx

It's a good link to go through as it gives you specific resources and steps. A good one to keep in the favorites tab.

How to publicize a self published book? Well, that is a headache I would rather not think about. It's another story altogether.

4 years!!!

It has been four years since I last posted here- four long, eventful years. I could give a lot of reasons for not writing a book, but in truth there's only one: I got lazy.

Over the years, I keep getting mails from time to time when anyone visits this blog. I wont lie. The thought of taking it down occurred to me more than once. But I never got to it. Maybe because this was like a photo album of a journey I took. I aborted the trip halfway through many a times, but the post brought back bittersweet memories of exploring uncharted roads and getting lost.

I often returned to the pages of this blog, reading my own posts, enjoying them for what it was worth, sometimes just for my naivety. I wanted to post a last goodbye, but I could not bring myself to post anything. Only someone who was writing a book could post here. Not someone who kept making false starts. Maybe the blog could remain just as unfinished as that book of mine.

But now I can revive this old journal of mine with no sense of shame. I am writing again. I havent given up after a false start. I have continued on till the next one and the one after that. For the past eighteen months, I have written almost every morning. Now I have 60000 words of a novel that is well on its way to completion. I have hit obstacles, but I have kept fighting them. For eighteen months, I have gotten up at 6:00 every morning and put down at least 500 words every day. Most of them unusable. But over the days, I have 60000 words of a usable first draft. A draft with a story where characters have motivation, and shit gets f*cked up for them, again and again and again.

Is it a good story? I don't know. Would people like it? I don't know. But at this point I don't care. I have a book. I finally have a book that I can complete. And if I can do one, I can do one more. And one more after that. Now I know how. The gist of the message is this: I am back, and I am here to stay!

World building

Over the last few weeks, I have been world building. I got the history, at least enough for me to get a feel of the land and its people, the state of current affairs, and the geography. Then I got excited and decided to start writing. I mean, I will have to rewrite part of the world anyway, but if I get out a chapter or two, at least I will be happy. But I hit a big snag.

In a world its not the long term things that cause problems. It's the short term things. Things like paper, money. Did they have paper. If not, what did they write with. Did they have ink, and books, and the entire number of things that come with books. Then, what did they measure things with. What were their units of length and time? I cant very well go and write in kilometers and meters now, can I? Where do I cross the boundary between new world and utter masses of confusion?

I havent decided yet, but I think more building is required. One thing I will try to do is live a day in a city of the world, and see what things I come up with.

Start with waking up. Then question myself, why do the people there sleep. How long. Do they have beds or they sleep standing up, or on their heads. Then do they brush their teeth? If not, do they have teeth. And in the same lines. I should be able to handle a lot of things this way.

Of course, I haven't yet decided the nature of the city. How well planned would it be. Would it have small roads, or big wide roads. Lets see. At this point, the feel that I get is like an old Indian city.

My second story

Finished my story for the month yesterday. I had a lot of fun writing it and it showed in the story. Most people who read it thought it hilarious.

Also almost finished on the background of my novel. This one is quite good, I think I have mentioned in some earlier post. Added a few more twists to make it better. It is a little tough to write, but if written properly, I think this one might get published.

I submitted the short story for critiquing in my writing group and got only two critiques. It is my understanding that people will not critique anything they find too bad or in which they find nothing to critique. I hope that this story falls in the second category, as it surely does not fall in the first.

Now I am seriously looking for short story markets to publish my story in. It is more difficult than I imagined. There are so many sites, but I have to go through their prior publications to decide whether my story fits or not. Not found anything fruitful till now. My first story, which I submitted to a generic website, has not even been read as of yet. So waiting for it. I don't mind even if it's rejected. Just let me know soon enough!

A bit of a meandering post, but there are quite a few things going on.

I hate commas

Almost as much as I hate my net connection. Only difference is that in case of commas, at least I can do something.

The problem with commas is that if you look into the rules of commas, its a veritable grammar class. Now look at the following.

Commas have to be added to separate the apposition from the sentence. What in the effing heck is an apposition. It is 'A grammatical relation between a word and a noun phrase that follows'. Got it? Neither did I. In simple terms, it is a phrase which can be used in place of the noun.

Then the next thingamajig is that it is used to separate the dependent clause and the independent clause. You may or may not use it to separate two dependent clauses. e.g. you should put in in front of a but or an although, but an and may not require it. I didn't say the word conjunction.

Which brings me to my favorite term- comma splicing. You cannot use commas to separate two clauses when there is no conjunction linking them. This causes a comma to splice. giggle..giggle..giggle.. of course I don't pronounce it as splice, I pronounce it as thplithe.. Try it, it's much more fun this way. In such sentences where there is no if or but, you use a semicolon.

I am still a bit unsure about commas inside quotes, but it seems that when you don't end a quote with a question mark or an apostrophe, a comma is a must. However, if the quote ends the sentence, then it can be a full stop.

Finally, my outlook is that one should put in a comma wherever it will reduce or remove confusion. For other places, if you are in doubt, do not put a comma.

One of the better links is comma uwc. Have a look at it, it will answer some questions.

Should I join a course

When I started playing cricket, I was bad at it. I am still not great at it, but when I stopped playing, I was playing at the best of my ability. What I have noticed about myself is that I need some guidance in the initial phase of anything I do. I cant get the ball rolling by myself, so someone needs to do it for me. Once I start though, I am limited only by my own abilities. For cricket, my guidance came from a P.G.Wodehouse book. Mike and Psmith, I think it was. He wrote about bowling that some character decided that bowling was about pace, break and accuracy. If you have all three, you will be a dangerous bowler. I made more improvement in my bowling in the six months after reading this book, than I had made for more than ten years before.

The same thing is true for anything else. I suck at table tennis as I haven't received any guidance at it.

So should I join a course for writing. Based on the above, I should. But the problem is not about guidance, it's about correct guidance. I have received more guidance for math than any person under the sun, but I still cant differentiate to save my life. I am an engineer. That is a big thing! And now, I am scared of it. So what if I joined a course, but I don't get the kind of help I need from it?

My first epiphany

Last night, during dinner, I realized one very important thing about writing.

Great writing is about great characters. You may be the best shower, (as in show, not tell, not the bathing kind), the best grammarian, the best with word play, but if your characters are not good, your writing will fall flat!

You need to create characters that people can relate with, empathize with. Your readers should get worried if the character gets into trouble. The moods of the character should reflect in the moods of the reader. Then and then only, will your writing be good writing.

Not that this is new information, but I got so involved in correcting my adverbs and activating my passives, that I could have stopped paying attention to this basic factor.

I can always correct my adverbs and correct my tenses, but if my characters are not good enough, I wont have to!

Mistakes from a long time ago

My first blog this year. I looked at my first story which I wrote about an year and a half back and found quite a surfeit of mistakes in it. If I list them down,

1. The story is about 12 pages long. I can snip enough of it to reduce it to less than ten pages.

2. It has more adverbs than a manly man has hair. I found one sentence which had three adverbs in it.

3. A plethora of exclamation marks! I seem to have some sort of hidden love for them. Every third sentence seemed to end with an exclamation mark.

4. Overusage of actually, seemingly, and basically. Basically all of these words can actually be removed without changing the sentence in any way seemingly.

5. There are descriptions which can be improved, but I think that will change the style of the story and make the narration inconsistent. So dunno whether that would be an improvement. (I was going to type actually between would and be. I need to see whether I use actually too much even while talking.)

Overall, the story can use an overhaul. What I am pleased about is that I can understand what went wrong and in ways that went wrong.

Note to myself: You should keep all stories you write on the backburner for at least a month before going in for a final draft. You are more likely to see additional mistakes then.

Second note to myself: If you end up without writing a book, that will not be because you don't have the talent or the wherewithal to do so, but because you lack the desire and the intention to get off your stinking butt and write.

Third note to myself: The effing bastards on TV are not important. They have already made it big in life, while you are still sucking apples.

1000 words done

I finished a good story in 988 words and submitted it on a site. My first submission. I hope it works!

This time around the critiques were fewer, which can mean that the story was better written and there were no easy comments to give. Also, the comments that were there were pretty basic. Nothing exceptional, just 2 sentences in passive and an adverb that I missed. I can live with that.

Status update

I have decided to send out at least one short story each month to the various online publications that are there. The whole point of writing is to get published. And If I want to be considered as a serious writer, then I think its better if my name can come up in a few online searches. Of course, all this considering about a quarter of my stories will be published. Hopefully!

On a less serious note, finished two chapters. Not getting the hang of writing for a younger audience. I mean, what I have written is fine, but it's in too much detail! I list every activity the protagonist carries out, which is not what I seem to remember from the books I read in younger days. The second problem that comes with this is a lots of sentences with he did this, he did that, then he did the other. Irritating, but I dunno a way around. In any case, I will keep writing it and not worry much about the style. Its always easier to skip extra details later, than adding more of them.

Also trying to figure out a thousand word story. Can we do it, I ask myself. Yes, we can, I answer!

Studying, reading and writing

Now that I want to write a simple story, I genre is shifting towards children's writing. So just did some basic research on what constitutes writing for children. A net search revealed that I knew very little about it. All my readings were made up of Enid Blyton's books, so her writing I know, but not much else. I was disgusted to find that not one of her books made it into the top twenty books for children. Not even Famous Five! It also may have to do with the fact that most of the lists were American in origin. But anyhoo, I looked up the list and came up with a few books which were common in all of them. I have read Narnia out of them, but I ordered the other eleven. This is so much fun. Not only will I learn how these authors wrote for children, their tones, their voices, their words, but I will have a heck of a good time doing it.

The best list I thought, was http://www.teachersfirst.com/100books.cfm

One more thing I realised, I have better talent at this type of writing, where I dont have to worry about sounding intelligent or ponderous, but just have fun writing. I am done with two chapters in just a couple of days. The chapters aren't that great, but then its a first draft and not supposed to be great.

Today's thought for the day: A completed manuscript in the hand, is worth twenty ideas in the bush. Not mine, I came across it on the internet, but I dont remember where. On the whole, though, a very apt thing to keep in mind.

A simple story

What I cant understand is why cant I write a simple story? Why do all my stories end up with a convoluted plot about kings and princes and saving the world and what nots! I mean, if I tell you the plotline of my latest story, you will be impressed. But writing it would be like climbing Everest, especially for someone who gets tired climbing hills in the Western Ghats. The thought of writing it sinks my heart somewhere near my toes and gives me a severe case of the heebeejeebies.

What I want is a simple story, not quite the 'boy meets girl' type, but not much harder and more importantly not very long. Somewhere near 70k-75k words is enough! I wont feel overwhelmed while writing it, so it might actually get written.

Yesterday night, just telling a bed time story, I made up a good deal of a fairy tale. It had a good deal of fun in it, but only for young readers, probably preteens. Let's see, if I can keep it simple, I will have a decent plot to write about. I may not be able to publish it, but at least I would have climbed a decently sized hill, which would make Everest seem just that bit smaller.

Finally!!!

Finally, I think I am ready to start again. I spent the last two months trying to improve my writing. Spent a lot of time on the net, especially for English grammar and styles of creative writing- trying to find out what is good writing and what is not. And of course, how to write fantasy, its potholes and not-dones. One of the better links I found is Limyaael's Fantasy Rants. One should go through all of these, at least to avoid the basic stereotypes and errors in fantasy fiction. I assure you, there will be a lot to ponder in here, and your story will be much the better for it.

Now, I have also worked on some softwares, mainly open-source, which can help me in writing. I will probably share my experience with them in some latter post. But, just for now, openoffice.org rocks!

One major change I have made in my writing schedule is that I wont try to write a certain number of words a day. I will just write a single scene each day. That is easier to write and I dont have to think ahead while writing. I can spend the whole next day wondering what to do in the next scene and then spend an hour or so writing it down. There might be some discontinuity involved, but since it will be the first draft, it will be allowed.

Happy writing to me again. I hope this time at least, I go past ten chapters.

A good start

There were a few things I had not ironed out during my last attempt at writing a novel. So I ended up with a few issues. Most of them could be blamed upon not thinking things through. To point them out

1. Characters: I had chalked out the main characters well enough, but I didn't think through enough of the side characters. So after a certain point in the story, the motivations of my main characters didn't seem real. This time round, I will not only chalk out the main characters, but also flesh out as many of the side characters as I can.

2. A thorough plot/storyline: I thought out the main storyline well, but didn't follow through on the subplots. So I missed out on a lost of conflict that could have been added. Now, though I am done with the storyline, to a large extent, I am still ironing out the plots within the plots. And believe you me, the subplots add so much to the story. A little love story on the side, and the motivation of the characters can change. They also open up a lot of other avenues and options that the character can choose from, which makes the story more fun.

So, version 5.0 of the story will be put through the planning stage in a far more effective manner.



3.

An example of some very good writing

I got myself a copy of Dan Brown's latest book, The Lost Symbol. Though I have just finished some fifty pages of the book, one thing struck me right between the eyes. The book is an excellent example of how to write. I will not comment on the content, but the style is fantastic.

On all my research on how to write, I came across the following points

1. No adverbs
2. Show, not tell
3. No infodumps

1. No adverbs: I came across only one adverb in the first fifty pages. Even if we say that I missed nine or ten for the one I picked, that's still only one adverb per five pages, a brilliant ratio in my ledger. And it will be lesser than that.

2. Show, not tell. This requirement says that you don't tell that Jorge bought a new red car. You say Jorge opened the door of his scarlet Ferrari and took in the smell of the new leather seats. He slid in, still unfamiliar with the size of his new car, after the humongous SUV he drove, and took hold of the steering wheel. Even when the car was not running, its power made him come up in goosebumps.

I guess you get the point. Read Dan Brown's book, purely from the writer's perspective. It will be a lesson in how to do the above, page after page, line after line.

3. No infodumps: As my main genre will be fantasy/speculative fiction, I need to give the readers a large amount of information so that they can understand the entire system of the world I am putting them in. I have to do it, so there's no escaping that, but the tact is in how to do it. You have to make sure that the information is not boring and that it does not take the reader's mind off the story. So it needs to be presented as a part of the story.

Dan Brown also has to provide chunks and chunks of obscure information on his topics, and he does it well. He slips it into conversations, or puts in flashbacks of the protagonist's lectures, which somehow don't deter the reader from the story. He gives you information before he uses it, so you as the reader are already trying to join the dots on how the information would be used. Of course, the dots you join are never as exciting as the real story, but that is a different story.

A good post

8 rules to write a short story

An odd coincidence

I was reading P.G.Wodehouse's Uncle Dynamite, where I came across two names.

1. Harold Potter
2. Hermione Bostock

Then I read another one of his works, Plum Punch: Four Short Stories, which had the names

1. Dudley Jones
2. Stanley Pettigrew

Which led me to think that maybe, just maybe, some of the names in Harry Potter are taken from Wodehouse's creations. This is wild conjecture, but it leads to an interesting observation. When I need a new name, I search through a huge database on the net, struggling through to find a name which fits the character in my head. However, what Rowling may have done is picked up a book from her shelf, turned to a page and stuck to the name she found. I think that is a good method, much better than mine. It leads to no waste of time and is quite practical. No human has a control on his name, then why should a character.

On the other hand, when parents name their kids, they do take some trouble finding the name. Then, shouldn't it be same for writers and their characters.

I think that the main characters should be names properly, and the others should hope that they dont get named Polly Parrots or Pongo Twistleton.

I, myself, would prefer to be known as "Absolutus Fantasticus", thank you very much!

Note to myself on adverbs

Adverbs! I have been breaking my head on them. Writers are supposed to avoid them like the plague, but I cant seem to do so. A few do creep in, unpretentiously.

But I have come to a final conclusion. Adverbs can remain, if they really add value to the sentence.

e.g.: There are two adverbs in this post. The first is unpretentiously, which does not add any real value to the sentence, as when I say things creep in, then doesn't that already include the 'unpretentiously'. So, that can be cut off!

However, the 'really' in the next line seems necessary, so it can stay.

One more thing I can do is change things like "He smiled brightly" to "A smile lit up his face." A much better way to write.

PS: I have come up with a background over the weekend. This week will be spent in ironing out anomalies and inconsistencies. Next week I will start worrying about the story and by end of August, I plan to have at least four to five chapters finished.