Bella

AAARRRGGHHH! (as it used to say in my comics)

Up with the count. Resisted the temptation to count the 2500 “seed” words that I had before the start. I think I’ll have a couple of hundred more to do before I give up tonight. Remarkable difference in the way I feel about making myself write at this pace which, honestly, isn’t that high a word…[Read more]

@kazg, thanks so much for that link.

And you’ve expressed above so beautifully my exact thoughts on story structure – including the necessity of balancing all our technical knowledge with room for the subconscious to speak.

I’m pretty sure I’ll get the words down. But right now I have only the vaguest plan and I can’t think of even a working title.

Well, I’m feeling a tad more apprehensive than in previous years. There’s a certain investment in succeeding this time – for me. Well, succeeding in writing the requisite number of words anyway. My record is one complete children’s story, one block of 50K words that I eventually deleted, two failures.

I often think “getting” story structure is like one of those damn magic eye puzzles. All these people around you are like “oh yeah! It’s dolphins!!” while you’re staring at it like, “whaaa?”

And then, you glimpse it (maybe in a CM Taylor workshop), but then it’s gone again. You glimpse it, it disappears, you glimpse it, you go…[Read more]

I think we all did that with our first book Raine! And some of us, with our second…

I know what you mean, Hilary. And FWIW I try now not to worry too much about the minutiae of all the different (with a lot of similarities) theories of story structure. That way lies madness for me. I read them and enjoy them and sometimes I get a light bulb moment and often some part of them sticks in my mind and comes to the fore when I’m trying…[Read more]

Very interesting blog. I, too, have listened, enthralled, to Craig’s lectures on this, and have read an enormous amount of stuff about structure. I’m struggling rather with it now, at the almost-finished-the-second-draft-of-my-novel-stage. I don’t know if my struggle is because I’ve read too many different models/descriptions and have become…[Read more]

Hi L,

I think you could trim most of the paragraphs in the first half of the story, really. The Physics thing (tight pants) early on could go, you use this analogy later on anyway. Watching a film at the cinema, that paragraph could be less wordy I think.
And towards the end – “zipped her hoodie and pulled the hood over her head” etc. I know…[Read more]

Still missing three quarters of the story….

That’s the most important bit done.

Thank you for a very interesting read Daedalus. You have made me want to go and watch the film. I am

I absolutely agree with you Raine about not every character progressing through their arc in synchrony and entirety but nevertheless needing some sort of arc. I have only recently realised that this gives the relationships between characters energy and life as they shift according to where they are in their ‘journey’. It is a powerful tool.

I think “Spotting an opening…” needs a new para. The lipstick thing is a little over complicated, I think you could shorten it without losing anything.
The “pills like skittles” analogy doesn’t work for me.
“Small-to-medium-time” seems a cop-out, he’s a small-time crook, I think.
“Anticipated to sit..” should be “anticipated sitting”.

I’d take…[Read more]

@janeshuff, that’s a great way of putting it. Yes, “the broad sweeps” and then refining in the edits.

I too tend not too worry too much about the overall structure when I’m actually in the thick of writing a first draft but I have found that reading the various books about structure has helped me be aware of the broad sweeps of the shape of a story as I’m thinking it out.

Sorry – I didn’t actually mean that story structure depicts mental illnesses.

More that psychologists have many different models to describe particular MH conditions. For example, for depression we have the CBT model, the psychoanalytic model, the interpersonal model, the biological model etc. etc. Each model is trying to describe and explain…[Read more]

I remember doing these sessions at York…it all seemed to make perfect sense when CMT was explaining it, but I can’t put it into practise. I don’t think I have the kind of logical and structural mind that can break a story down into these kind of segments. Which is annoying, because I know it’s all good stuff and very useful – I just can’t apply…[Read more]

Very nice… There were a couple of points only that tripped me up in the reading:
‘Tasha and she nicked the lipstick’. Didn’t sound right. I wondered about ‘She’d nicked the lipstick when she was with Tasha’, but wasn’t sure how that’d affect your word count.
‘The salty scent of sweaty skin trapped in every pore’. I read this first as the sweaty…[Read more]