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Obsessive about words? Is your book the best part of your life? Do stories take you away?

A place where we can share our problems with Chapter Three or the Second Act.

Writing is a tough art, simple words link one mind with many.

Music has tones, drawing composition, but words know no bounds.

The Showcase and Blogs are for showing work, here for talking about producing it.

How is it best to start writing a book?
I have had several in mind for years, but my problem is starting... I would hate to get halfway then realise that it doesn't all tie up nicely, yet if you plan it out by chapter, it lacks spontaneity... and that is what has put me off starting. The idea of having it all pre-planned.

Also, what sells best?

I do not get structure, planning, if I knew, why write? That form does work for a motor repair manual.

The story is the middle, when I catch and idea I will lose it thinking of a title, so I just start in the middle, and work outward. It is the heart of the action, and I have no way of knowing if it is a short story or full book. Beginnings and endings become apparent when the middle is formed, it had to come from somewhere, and it will narrow to an exiciting finish. The last thing to write is the first few paragraphs, where you capture the reader. And very last, a title.

The first idea becomes several pages of rough uncorrected work, but it captures the essence of the story. I never know if it is a scene, a short story, or the heart of a book, just write it. Good images and dialog will find other uses. A book is a collection of related short stories, chapters, that tell an overall tale.

It all starts as several pages of rough work, no telling where it will lead.

Stories tell themselves, writting is listening, go with what comes, editing can come later, sometimes I am lost for pages and then see where it is heading. Writing is like riding a horse, the rider does have some control, but it is best for both when the horse runs free and the rider blends with the motion.

I have no idea where stories come from. Looking within I cannot explain what I have written. All I can figure is a receptive mind and a keyboard. My opinions change, I say things that I would never, and I see the world, the story, from the views of several very ditterent minds.

Starting is garbage, and it has to be taken out. We were all taught how to write, what a story is, and have lingering and ill formed thoughts. The good part is our storage is small, and ten or twenty pages clears the entire past. Mine was garbage, many others have said the same.

Once the mind is empty, clean new thoughts flow as fast as I can type. I do not think I create, I just read as it comes out. Do not burn the garbage, it does have some insights, bad writing yes, but real feeling. It was long hidden in the mind, now a desk drawer will do.

What sells best is Romance, Harliquin Romances have outsold everything. They are very formula, but it works. It is the easy way to get into print. The reader is seeking great depth of emotion, going from dispair to being overwhelmed by love. It is all feeling and description, with a happy ending.

They have more readers than Harry Potter, always looking for a new story.

Thanks... I shall bear all that in mind and simply make a start rather than using the whole planning thing as an excuse to procrastinate...
Romance...yuck, never, never, never, lol.
My idea was more along the lines of an afterlife exploration of life when lived...mistakes, triumphs, losses, gains etc etc. Had it stuck in my head for a year now, that one. But keep trying to figure out all the switches in my mind from ^^up there, wherever, to down here, in life.

The keyboard is the only cure. Tap, tap, tap.

Love your opening sentence in the quote Inventor. It is a beautiful word picture. Ahem, I've added a semi colon ... picky picky picky...

There are many ways to begin writing. Some writers have an image that will not go away. Some labour over their works for years, whereas others let it rip in a few weeks and produce great works. The main thing is to start.

I agree withe you Graelwyn. You could never write to a formulae. Have you read Doris Lessing?
She writes both fantasy and mmm not fantasy. I love her all her work, but I think you would get a lot out of her fantasy.

Great thread, Inventor.

Last edited by nannarob on 11 May 2007, 3:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for starting this Inventor,it's a great idea.I may actually put a poem up(though it feels a little like expossing my bum(em...bare...assing)....

I write much the same way as Inventor describes. I have fair idea of where I'm going with it, but I don't know the specifics of what should happen. I remember a quote from a comedian saying that "If you spend too much time thinking on a joke, then it's not worth telling." I beleive the same applies to writing, if you spend too long figuring something out then you should probably change/get rid of it.

It also relates to the idea that often jokes you tell on the spot are a LOT more funny than those you spend a day thinking about. Writing also follows this pattern I beleive, writing on the spot and letting it all flow out on the fly is much more affective than thinking hard about what should happen next.


On another note, I find that the aspect of writing I like doing the most is, ironically, dialog and conversations, because this is the best way to show characters and it's also pretty versatile, plus it's also fun figuring out which character should say something next!

I have to agree with Inventor; writing is a fluid, spontaneous act.

What I really love about writing is the amazing surprise of where a story, or a poem, can actually go. I always end up in interesting, and unexpected places. It's really exciting.

I've met some other writers before, but it was a bit discouraging because they all planned their stories, and they seemed to expect stories to be linear in some way. I agree that all things have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I'm not sure exactly why one should be bound to a temporal structure when there are so many other possibilities.

Usually I have an idea in my head, a concept I want to explore, or a series of symbols that keep bothering me. Then characters arise from it and I write out what they do, where they are. For me, writing is taking the sounds and images from my mind, and translating them into text. I love figuring out how to describe what's in my day dreams, and sometimes my night dreams too. Sometimes I fictionalise my memories, or I'll fictionalise someone I used to know. That's a big one. I fictionalise people I used to know to see if I can try to figure them out.

I'm never sure about my dialogue. It's always a little strange, and people have "criticised" that my characters are a bit inaccessible -- fascinating, but inaccessible. I always have one character who's a little too much like me in that way. I've finished writing one novel (I'm editing it), and I'm working on a second novel, but I find that my main characters will lean heavily on internal dialogue, and that, overall, if you don't pay attention to the objects and images that surround the characters, you'll very much miss the character's personality. So, for me, character and story comes out through the presence and movement of objects rather than through dialogue and story telling, which, I've been told, makes it a bit hard to read until you get on to it.

I've actually considered writing romance, just to get myself published to show people in my life that getting published is something I can really do. A lot of people seem to write fantasy.

In a lot of ways, writing is a place to be natural versus feeling stilted. If everything else is somehow stilted and structured, it makes little sense to structure the creative capacity of the mind. And that's what it is. Writing is losing one's self in the dream-scape, the amazing occurence that happens through transcription when the dream scape is written down. There's a point where writing becomes expression beyond creation.

[quote="Inventor"]Obsessive about words? Is your book the best part of your life? Do stories take you away?
quote]

After writing I like to walk, and very probably, if I have writen some pages I will feel very well.

I don't really know that I write, it is to say, very often I can't recognise what I wrote and I get sucessively surprised reading my own texts, and I like so!

I believe writing is a kind of exorcism, I need it to expel ghosts that can really possess my mind... well, in fact this is another story...

Although I do like everybody above, writing whithout planing or structuring chapters etc, I believe this is the most used technic and probably the best... I will try it someday.

If you write a lot, and everyday, I believe a book will emerge, and you won't understand exactly how it hapened.

Well put and a great idea. You ever think about doing any inventing?

This writing thing is very young in me, only matter of some months, sure I've gotten words down before but this is different. A med has allowed the brain race to focus abit, gives it time to actually get something down before it takes off again.

Dysipline is the tough one for me. Putting a limit on the lenth, counting words wasn't making it. Poetry is a dirty word to me. But yet the dysipline in it is what I want. I have to make my words count, not the other way around. A comma and a period becomes really import to try and get the flow, the beat. It allows the free flow. I don't want a style tacked to it, if it doesn't ryhme cool, if it isn't in the correct form for a given style cool. Writ something that is 14 lines and wring my hands trying to make it sorter, it just feels too long. I'm leaving the way I spell on purpose, trying to correct it would stop the flow. When trying to get something that magicly popped into my head, you should see it on screen, it's not even words to anyone else it would look like some kind of freakin code.

I would only add to the above that I don't think where this might go is not just limited to wrting. But probably need a little disaplin or however the freak you spell it, to this thread.

So I would ask the question.

Dysiplin

I think you should just write what flows out, and then review it later to see if you missed anything.

Get it out, redirect the brain to the keyboard, let her rip!

Then later in a cold mood come with the blue pencil of death.

Strike down the weak, and off point, encircle the misstated, Darwin!

Let the dust settle and write what is left again, more will join.

Ten pages become one, which again becomes ten. This time with a solid core to build from.

Let it out, then reject it, more will come, and less rejection.

Writing has been a part of my life for the better part of 10 years it is my passion and currently I am branching out and writting a play/story-based lightly on the concept album Kilroy Was Here by the rock band Styx should be my biggest challenge yet