19 August 2006
Back to the grind...
I looked at Alchemy last night. Prologue - still love it. First chapter... okay... Then it all goes down hill from there, LOL I need to Snowflake my plot. Joy. And then I'll know what's missing.
Reading/read two books. Ploughing into The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin omnibus which is so much like the TV series, only somehow darker and more bitter.
And I've just finished Something Wicked.
Maybe it's me being European, but the info dumps were annoying. The heroine was an American with strong family ties to both Greece and Italy, but she knew absolutely nothing about Europe in any way, shape or form. That's how the info dumps worked, highlighting the h's ignorance. Made me want to smack her at times, LOL
It's DIY day today, I have an appointment with a steamer and a whole lot of woodchip... *sigh*
Reading/read two books. Ploughing into The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin omnibus which is so much like the TV series, only somehow darker and more bitter.
And I've just finished Something Wicked.
Maybe it's me being European, but the info dumps were annoying. The heroine was an American with strong family ties to both Greece and Italy, but she knew absolutely nothing about Europe in any way, shape or form. That's how the info dumps worked, highlighting the h's ignorance. Made me want to smack her at times, LOL
It's DIY day today, I have an appointment with a steamer and a whole lot of woodchip... *sigh*
posted by Kim Knox at 12:47 pm
5 Comments:
How does one 'Snowflake' a plot?? *is dumb*
I'm with you on the infodumps. I don't think it has anything to do with European, though - infodumps are just a waste of space (don't get me started on the chapter-long infodumps in The Da Vinci Code...). I'm about to give up on one of my favourite crime writers because she keeps infodumping :/
Snowflake - you either love it or hate it and it's here:
http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html
It works for action stories - not so well for emotional stories. Sooo can't write a contemporary with it, LOL
In *Something Wicked*, they were short asides about the country the h was in. I think that it was how unnecessary they were that got me miffed- for instance where Turkey is (wtf?) and how stupid the h became (to me anyway) by knowing so little. The H would also spout historal and cultural trivia at any given opportunity.
Ah well, Oxfam handily opens at 12 tomorrow ;-)
The thing with blogger is that it doesn't give you email notification when you get a reply... *sigh*
So apologies for late response.
Thanks for the link to snowflake! Do you find it works for you in any shape or form? I sort of fall in the middle of 'seat of the pants' writing, where I know where I'm going in my head and by sheer dumb luck everything just falls into place, and the 'plot a little' type where I write an outline and then write over it (of course I always forget to save a copy of the outline elsewhere to use as a synopsis LOL).
The h didn't know where Turkey was? Do they not have maps? o_O
Snowflake works for me, to a degree.
The single line, paragraph, characters, then a detailed plot break down... then I stop.
For Bone Magician, it took me six weeks to write about 13k of outline - this included whole chunks of scenes that I could just cut and paste in when I got to that point in the story. That was *very* nice.
I then wrote just over 90k in about 6 months. Which is a vast improvement on my first attempt at a novel - 100k in about 7 *years*
I might also have a go at the first draft in 30 days thingy. That gives you lots of nice check lists and stuff. It's not really a first draft it is just a detailed outline.
And by the time I've done that, Nano will have rolled around again...
Oh let us know how you get on with that first draft in 30 days thingy. I was looking at that the other day, but I read somewhere else that it only really works for non-fiction (surely that's rubbish, going by the amount one can write during NaNoWriMo...).
I'm dithering about NaNo this year. It worked very well for me last year but it was rather tiring LOL! I will if you will...
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