GippsGirl

Last day to put in an entry for the Den monthly competition, people… 🙂

Sorry @athelstone, just saw your question – I’m Kaz Ginnane over there. I see I’m already friends with @daedalus, @jillybean and @raine 🙂

I have a title. And a reeaallly rough idea of what happens. But there are still many strands waving wildly around and I have no idea where I’m going to stuff them, let alone tie them together neatly…

I’m apparently planning it now, but here I am instead!

And now I’ve seen this and am very, VERY sorely tempted to whip out the credit card…Margaret Atwood is one of my all time lit heroes. And can I just boast that when I first started on Twitter, my first tweet was to her and she REPLIED!!

(Twitter has never lived up to that since, needless to…[Read more]

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.

What a lot of clever things have been said on this thread! I have read through them all now and it’s all fascinating.

I love Dara Marks, @raine, and your summary is brilliant. I’m getting ready to do NaNoWriMo with book two now and I’m holding these ideas in my head (as opposed to an actual firm plan, which truly is beyond me at first draft…[Read more]

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]

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]

Ah, yes. Planning. It’s going…um…

That’s the most important bit done.

Thanks Raine. I’ve seen the film numerous times over the years (the first being as a very small child) and have got different things from it each time. One reading would definitely be a clash between rival alpha males. And it’s definitely in the ‘high adventure’ tradition, but I do think there’s more to it than that. Not least as ultimatel…[Read more]

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]

I was watching the film The Flight of the Phoenix earlier today, and this ‘arc’ kept occuring to me, so for the sake of curiosity I decided to have a look to see if it fit this structure, and if so, how. It’s a bit of an interesting case as it’s an ensemble piece with multiple ‘main’ characters, each with their own arc. I’ll consider it for the…[Read more]

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

Yeah, I tend to consider matters of formal structure far more in the edit than in the initial draft