Photo by [noone]I’m reading Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut.  It’s a strange book, but I’m finding it funny and interesting and absolutely worth anyone’s time.  I love reading just about anything he writes.  He is so entertaining and so readable—which can’t be said for most luminaries of literary fiction.  It really doesn’t matter what he is writing about.  He is deservedly considered one of the greatest American writers ever.

He gives his opinion of semicolons towards the end of the Timequake.

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons.  They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything.  They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

Ponder that for a while.

Tags: authors, books, grammar, Vonnegut, Writing

Have you ever been reading a novel and part way through noticed a quirk in the author’s style of writing?  And then you can’t help but notice it every time it happens.  It can be distracting, can’t it?

I’ve started reading novels with the Kindle application for the iPod Touch.  I discovered it’s a surprisingly good platform for reading.  Since the iPod Touch is back-lit, it is especially useful for reading in the dark.  Amazon has also been giving away quite a few Kindle books—often the first book of a series.

The book I’m currently reading on the iPod is His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik.  I’m about half-way through and I am enjoying it quite a bit.  Once done, I’m sure I’ll continue reading the series.  So in this case giving me the first taste for free will pay off.

There is one oddity I’ve noticed in this book—semicolons.  I have never seen so many semicolons in any other book in my life.  In fact, I believe after reading half of this book, that I’ve seen more semicolons in it than in every other book I’ve ever read combined.  I’m sure they are all being used properly, but it is unusual.  And I can’t help but notice almost every semicolon and think to myself, “semicolon!”  If Novik goes a whole paragraph without one, I find myself thinking about that.

I present you with an example paragraph:

Every feeling protested against the sacrifice of this dream; yet under the circumstances, he was not even sure he could honorably make Edith an offer which she might feel obliged to accept. And there was no question of courting someone else in her place; no woman of sense and character would deliberately engage her affections on an aviator, unless she was of the sort who preferred to have a complacent and absent husband leaving his purse in her hands, and to live apart from him even while he was in England; such an arrangement did not appeal to Laurence in the slightest.

Three in one paragraph.  Outstanding!

This has made me realize how developing tendencies as an author can create distractions for the reader.  Even something as small as a punctuation mark can cause a distraction as it did in this case.  Remembering this is especially important for writers who are not as skilled as Novik: the book is good enough and interesting enough that I don’t mind the distraction.

That leaves me with two choices, become such a good writer that readers are willing to ignore my distracting quirks or avoid the distracting quirks all-together.  Long term, I’m hoping for option one; short term, I’ll do my best to go with option two.

Will you look at that?  I used a semicolon.  And there is a slim probability I used it correctly.  I’ve still got a long way to go to become a master semicolonist.

Good day to you and semicolon!

Tags: authors, books, dragons, observations, Writing

I sit here having just passed the 10,000 word mark and I’m feeling pretty good.  When I first began this enterprise, I wasn’t sure how difficult I would find it to write the number of words necessary to fill an entire novel.  I worried that I would finish the story and discover I didn’t have much more than a short story.

In college, one of my biggest challenges was being able to write enough to satisfy the page requirements of papers I had been assigned.  I had to use all the formatting tricks available to fill the five or ten or twenty pages demanded by the professor.  I’d increase the margins, increase the spacing between the letters, use slightly more than double spacing, and of course use the Courier New font.  How I loved that font.

Photo by robotographyWhen I read what other authors have to say about their writing process, most of them write much more than they are planning to keep in the final version.  Then they slice and dice to get to their desired word count.  I hope I don’t have the opposite problem.

10,000 words has gotten me through four chapters and I’ve I still got a bit to go before my first major plot point.  I’d like to have another 10,000 words or more before I get there.  There’s a chance I’ll struggle doing that.  I might have to go back and add more detail to a few of the scenes.  I tried to avoid having too much detail—maybe too well.  Books describing every tree in the forest in exacting detail annoy me and I often end up putting them down—usually for good.

One of the most encouraging aspects of the writing I’ve done is how the words have come more easily the more I’ve written.  I had read that writing improves with practice and I believe I’m finding that to be true.  Here’s to hoping the improvement continues.

Aloha.

Tags: reflections, WIP, Writing

When I first made the decision to commit to writing a novel, I looked for web sites or blogs created by other authors.  I found several good ones.  Those blogs led me to other blogs created by agents, editors, and even sales people from publishing houses.  What surprised me was how helpful and genuinely nice these people were.  I don’t know why that should surprise me.  I suppose when I hear the title “agent,” I think of people like Scott Boras, Drew Rosenhaus, and Ari Gold from Entourage.  Reading these blogs made my desire to write a novel grow—I want to work with these people!

Every day in Google Reader and Twitter I find dozens of articles or blog posts with priceless information for an aspiring writer.  I find myself wondering, what did people do before the Internet? I guess they must have bought books and taken classes.  But how did they know which books or classes were the good ones?  They didn’t have the Internet to find reviews and ratings.

In the first few first posts I read was a list of books every writer should own.  At the top of the list was Stein on Writing by Sol Stein.  What an incredible book!  If you are a writer and have not read this book you are guilty of malpractice.  Stein divulges the secrets and techniques he has developed over decades of writing and editing best sellers.

Photo by SapphireblueOne of the things every writer has been told is, “Show don’t tell.”  Most of the time the person telling you that stops there.  Great!  Thanks for the help!  In one of my favorite chapters in the book, Stein explains what this statement means and gives some outstanding examples.  My favorite is a quote from a John Updike story.  A hack writer like me would write, “Polly loved to dive in her swimming pool.”  But a brilliant writer like Updike writes:

With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurtled her body from the rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair.

Amazing.

Throughout the book Stein states his preference for literary fiction as opposed to what he calls “transient fiction.”  Read this book and he will come close to convincing you that literary fiction is the only form of fiction worthy of your efforts.  Sadly, I just read a post at Pimp My Novel stating that things are not looking good for literary fiction.  The public’s preferences being what they are, big publishing houses aren’t buying much literary fiction.  And for the books they are publishing sales are usually dominated by a few titles in the genre.   One of the dominating literary fiction books mentioned is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  I read it a few years ago and I would recommend it highly.

Stein has written many other books, both fiction and non-fiction.  I’ve got How to Grow a Novel sitting on the table next to me ready to be read in the next few days.  I’ve also purchased one of his novels, The Best Revenge.  Reading excerpts from it throughout Stein on Writing whetted my appetite for it.  I’m betting his fiction is as excellent as his non-fiction.

Ciao.

Tags: blogs, books, Writing