Mad Iguana

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]

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]

Good article, Daeds. I might try to hunt down the Twitter thread to see what else was said.

I saw someone (Hellie Ogden I think) say that 60% of her submissions either fail to meet the submission criteria (format, genre, basic spell checks etc) or are clearly at way too early a draft to be sent out. I was so guilty of this last with my first…[Read more]

Thanks for the link.
The advice that really counts is to ensure you remove all typos, formatting errors etc. as it shows you are concerned with detail.

I’m not sure about ‘clean prose’, as everyone will have their own opinion about this, including agents. But if you interpret it as ‘no unnecessary words regardless of sentence length’, then fair…[Read more]

@StellaOlivetti – thank you for your feedback and please don’t feel back about nitpicking. I like nitpicking, I want nitpicking because that’s what’s going to help me improve on my story so all your comments are very helpful!

The main reason about the grandmother being Russian is a kind of nod at Neil Gaiman and American Gods and the idea that…[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….

Ah, yes. Planning. It’s going…um…

@johnSAlty — thanks John for your feedback it’s all very useful. As a matter of interest any particular paragraphs you felt were overwritten?

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.

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]