Something I found online, and it’s just right…
Tag Archives: writing
Surviving NaNOWriMO – 10 ideas
So the NaNOWriMo is on.
My compliments and best wishes to all participants.
As I mentioned in the past, I will not be NaNOWriMo-ing this year simply because I’m doing a thorough revision and final draft of a text in 45 days (and as you read this, we are on day 29).
Anyway, I was rather surprised by this whole writing fast/writing good thing I’ve been through.
So far the going has been easier than anticipated – and I’ve been learning a lot of things.
So, why not share them?
I’m probably just re-inventing the wheel, here, but who knows?
Maybe someone out there might find them useful – for their NaNoWriMo marathon or for anything else.
So, here goes… Continue reading
Supporting cast
It sometimes happens that I fall in love with my support characters.
Now, every series should have a handful of characters the hero can call upon when he gets in trouble – as heroes will.
Not properly a sidekick, more like a recurring character.
Think Marcus Brody and Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies.
Such characters provide support, continuity, and quite often an element of comedy that the hero can’t bring himself (being heroic AND funny is hard work indeed, for both hero and author).
More generally, they can voice the feelings and the thoughts the hero, for a number of reasons, can’t.
They can act as conscience, provide wise suggestions, or quite simply hand the hero the tool he needs, when he needs it.
The Italian Consulate in Shanghai, 1936
The building you see in this photo housed the Italian Consulate in Shanghai in the 1930s.
The climax of the first part of my book happens here. Continue reading
Warm-ups
Nathalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is (together with Tom Robbin’s Still Life with Woodpecker) the book that got me back to writing after a long dry spell, back in the ’90s*.
Right now I’m re-reading my second-hand copy of Wild Mind – Living the Writier’s Life, which is an ideal sequel to Writing Down the Bones.
The book was very dear to the previous owner – words and passages are underlined, stars are to be found in the margins, marking ideas or paragraphs the previous owner found significant. Continue reading
Revision and final draft in Scrivener
So the final draft of my novel is coming along, and I’m doing it in Scrivener.
Now, the first draft was written two years back using my usual Gedit + LibreOffice.
I hammered away at a chapter in Gedit, then I pasted it in LibreOffice, revising and cleaning it up.
Then on to the second.
In this way I wrote a workable first draft of a 40.000 words novel in 20 chapters, and I did it in ten days.
Nice and smooth.
Now, for the revision.
I have here the editor’s notes – I know what my editor and my publisher want from me.
We discussed the details, we worked out what worked and what not.
Time to do the final.
And I’ve to do in in English (the first draft was in Italian). Continue reading
Spreadsheets and action
I already discussed action sequences and combat and whatnot in a previous post. but we got talking, with my friend Claire, and I described how I use a spreadsheet to plan my scenes.
So why not share it, too?
Now, to me choreographing an action scene in a story is a fine balance of three processes
- I have to imagine the sequence, run it in my mind like a movie
- I must know exactly who does what and when, in what order etc.
- I must find the right words to show it all on the page
Karavansara 