Doug

Something new I’d like to share. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts every day at my job, and every so often it occurs to me there’s some classic or another I somehow never read. So, why not spin it on audio while I type? So far I’ve listened to The Gulag Archipelago, Dracula, Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down, and Shakespearean plays.

And I’ve known…[Read more]

Well done on the short story acceptance, Doug.

Hi Raine, thanks for asking. The story will appear in a Thirteen O’Clock Press anthology called “Chains,” about dealing with captivity, prisons and the like. Submissions are open until it’s full.

@dougk sorry for being so useless at checking in here. Hi & well done on the short story acceptance. Is it available online?
I repeat the ‘this too shall pass’ thing to myself fairly regularly! It’s the perfect balance of hope and recognition.

Once again thank you to all of you for giving your thoughts on this. I feel immediately guilty as I have close to no experience and not much to offer by way of my own conclusions.

I agree with those of you who say that the shape of your various elements (character arcs, plot lines etc.) needs revision between drafts, and it reminds me that the…[Read more]

I’ve been fortunate that I could keep going to my job as usual (I work for the state of Rhode Island). Though there are all kinds of safeguards, and Army & Air Force personnel about.

An acceptance last week for a new short story, reminds me that life goes on.

And a wise old saying reminds me that “This, too, shall pass.”

I think most writers are also great readers and have acquired an instinctive grasp of story structure. That doesn’t mean a bit of conscious knowledge won’t help. But sometimes you have to trust your unconscious.

I’m another one whose eyes glaze over at charts, grids, questionnaires and all the rest of it, and find the idea of forcing a story into a set framework very inhibiting. I’d come to suspect that lack of a coherent framework in my writing was one reason I’ve never got on the road to publication, but when I applied the 7 Cs to my last effort it…[Read more]

Ooh what an interesting conversation!

I think it’s quite hard (impossible for me) to tailor a novel according to a detailed framework and I will often start with only the inciting incident, the external problem the MC has to fight/solve and the antagonist forces, whether they’re people or circumstances, then let the story develop a first draft…[Read more]

Thanks Sea – not heard of the ‘7 Cs’ but it makes perfect sense. Perhaps it is that it can’t be immediately applied from the start, i.e. you (meaning one, and definitely I) have to write quite a lot of scenes involving character and events before the story line appears, after which tweaking into shape can take place.

I’m relieved to hear I’m not the only one to have been unable to find a theoretical how-to-plot scheme that works for them, and I really have tried because plotting is certainly what I find hardest, not being a natura story-teller.
Screenwriter Jeremy Sheldon did a brilliant presentation at a Festival of Writing weekend, (2014?) and I’ve been…[Read more]

I always sit in on these ‘story arc’ kinds of sessions in the hope I’ll find one that works for me. I never have…

I do have two that help remind me of the essentials though.

The triangle…I learnt it on the self edit course (now run by Jericho Writers) and blogged about it here:…[Read more]

Thank ‘insert deity here’ you have wrestled with the same issues I’m facing. It’s wonderful to feel that others have toyed with the various types of writing and that I can see some of my own struggles being described in almost the same way I view them.

I love the ‘plantsing’ because it goes some way to alleviate my fears that I’m caught between…[Read more]

In every case I have started with a main character, a beginning, and end and a rough idea of how to get to the end.

However, my characters have a way of bossing me around.

In one novel the guy gets the girl, but as I wrote it became clear that the girl was wrong for him and I then had to write a sequel getting him out of that fix (eventually the…[Read more]