Columns

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of the Shitty First Draft

August 15th, 2017

Right now, I’m revising a shitty first draft of a short novel. It’s a pain because I pretty much have to rewrite the whole thing, but what's great is I don’t have to think too much about the plot. I’m switching the POV from third person past tense to first person present tense. I’m focusing more on the language this time around, because I know my story and my characters. I am experiencing the best and worst parts of writing a shitty first draft.

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Should Stephen King's "Rage" Return to Print?

August 14th, 2017

In Stephen King’s Rage, a high school student with a gun shoots his algebra teacher and takes a class of high schoolers hostage. King wrote the book when he himself was in high school. He let it sit, and after he’d published half a dozen bestsellers, he rewrote Rage and had it published in paperback under the Richard Bachman pseudonym. The book sold decently, and then it pretty much went away, as most books do. Then:

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Writing the Crime Scene: Murder or Suicide?

August 11th, 2017

"I just want to make sure that nobody did the suicide to him." — Detective James "Jimmy" McNulty, HBO's The Wire

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Beneath the Terminus Stone: Borderlines as a Theme

August 10th, 2017

Towards the end of the writing process, during the third or fourth draft, say, we’re really dealing with a world, a cast of characters and a series of events that we’re at home with: on a fundamental level we know these people and these things. We might even love them, even the villains. Especially the villains. There will still be a few little surprises awaiting us, story-wise, and who knows, we might even make enormous changes at the last minute. Which is very scary. But the heavy lifting is done, and we’re now attending to the final details.

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Book vs. Television: What TV's Sheriff Longmire Is Doing Wrong

August 10th, 2017

The Walt Longmire Mysteries by best-selling author Craig Johnson debuted in 2004 with The Cold Dish, and since the release of the second book in 2006, Death Without Company, a new installment has come on the heels of the previous each year. A television series based on the books premiered in 2012, and survived a switch after its third season from the A&E network to Netflix. A sixth season is set to air in September and there’s been some buzz about a movie follow up.

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When Reality Gets Tough, the Tough Get Reading

August 9th, 2017

In a college literature class, a professor spoke negatively about using books as a form of escapism from reality. I took that hard, assuming he meant we should never take a break. We had to be fully engaged in reality, 100 percent of the time, or we were living life wrong.

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The World in the Skull: A Story’s Environment

August 9th, 2017

One of my best friends is a film maker. We’ve skirted around the idea of me writing a script for him for a number of years now, but it never seems to happen. I remember one reason why he thought I wasn’t exactly suitable for a particular project: “You’ll start world-building.”

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Through the Labyrinth: Plotting the Story

August 8th, 2017

Plotting. Plotting, plotting, plotting. Plotting. Plotting. Plotting, plotting! It’s the one aspect of novel writing that scares me the most. The thing that makes me wake in the middle of the night, saying to myself, “Of course! This is what happens next!” The miracle idea that by morning’s sad light seems inane, or cheesy, or worst of all, utterly nonsensical. Plotting. Now what happens? How does this present event connect back to that other event, four chapters in the past? Why on earth is this person taking this particular action now, for what reason?

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Moods in White, Black and Grey: Finding a Style

August 7th, 2017

Just as every book has its own ideal structure, the same is true for style. Some authors have a style uniquely their own; you can recognise their work from just a few sentences, as with J.G. Ballard or William Burroughs. Other authors operate more closely to the universal style or ideal of well-made prose. But within these two parameters, a book, a short story, needs to be expressed in the language most suited to its expression.

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A Bestiary of Authors' Brains

August 7th, 2017

The mind of an author is a dangerous place. Bad things happen in there. Awful things. However, it is the place where most authors spend the majority of their time. It’s also a place that, for a variety of reasons, regular people often have to enter. For those of you who have to do so, and for authors who want to know exactly what kind of beast is messing with them and how to fight it, I have created a bestiary of the writer's brain. This is not, by any means, a complete bestiary; it is merely a starting point that seeks to cover the basic information and provide help.

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