![thenelsontwins:
theatlantic:
6 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
Read more. [Image: AP]
Excellent.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0sevcgD2Z1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
6 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
Read more. [Image: AP]
Excellent.
(via callmeshiny)
Musical notation by Ludwig van Beethoven (I)
What I find interesting is that the crossed out sections look like they’re faded - as if this was old stuff he was revisiting (I have no idea if that’s true or not - I’m a writer, I make up stuff all the time la la la).
But I’d like to think that it’s the same deal as when I wrote stuff 10 years ago and I’m revisiting it now and going OMG WHUT HOW DOES THIS CRAP EVEN D: and crossing EVERYTHING out with BIG BOLD BLACK MARKS while laughing maniacally before finally writing down how things SHOULD have happened.
(Well, except that I’m not Beethoven, of course, so even what I write now is probably not, you know, like Symphony No. 7 or something.)
New study shows that a moderate amount of alcohol actually makes people (at least men) more creative, or at least respond creatively more quickly, than those abstaining. “A moderate buzz loosens a man’s focus of attention, thus making it easier to find connections among remotely related ideas,” says Bryan Nelson at the Mother Nature Network.
(via emergentfutures)
While 1) the context is BioWare’s universe and 2) it’s talking about “fanfics” in particular, these tips are applicable to not only fanfics in any universe, but writing - or story-telling - in general.
February 2012 will see the debut of Arc, a bold new digital publication from the makers of New Scientist.
Arc will explore the future through cutting-edge science fiction and forward-looking essays by some of the world’s most celebrated authors – backed up with columns by…
For those unfamiliar with New Scientist, it is one of the top science magazines out there and my absolute favorite. But what makes me excited about this, of course, is the science-fiction/speculation aspect of the new publication - and even more exciting, it’s from folks who know how to report hard science, so it won’t be pure fluff.
I’ve often debated with others why the flavor of science-fiction produced in the last decade or two have not seemed as “ground-breaking” as the early masterworks, and one hypothesis has been that the science has been outpacing the fiction - there is so much cutting-edge research happening now that seems even beyond simple imagination that it’s almost difficult for the layman to invent something which science may not already have a potential solution for. I would be very excited to see what they manage to put together in Arc!
(via emergentfutures)
Good article about writing productivity - Ms Aaron had a young baby, but you don’t need 4am breastfeeds to procrastinate from writing.
It used to take me a week to write a 5-page essay. Even writing things I want to write, I spend a lot of time staring at the screen. Please teach me to not be a terrible person.
This is an interestingly “scientific” way of going about something that most people have always taken to be purely an “art form” - as in, they feel that pure inspiration and talent carries the day.
It turns out that I’ve stumbled upon many of these points already, but it was still very informative by providing a clear realization of them and a formal strategy. Some opinions and thoughts on certain points of the article:
- Knowledge: I encountered a form of this on a macro level with The Devil’s Dues. I wrote the first half of it “on the fly” (as in, each chapter was separately planned from the last), and then, due mostly to Winzler’s proddings for sneak peeks, I ended up “outlining” the remaining chapters in semi-detailed form all at once. (<3 Winzler) While I never start any scene or chapter without having it outlined to that level in my head already, writing it all down this time allowed me to keep my critical points (the ones I absolutely had to hit in a scene) straight and reminded me of details for later chapters when I finally got to them in 3 months. On a micro level, while Winzler may often call me a “writing machine”, this is essentially why I’m able to put down words at the pace that I do once I get started - it’s because all the time spent working out the scene and its details have already occurred before I ever put the first word down. So, I would whole-heartedly agree on the efficacy of this particular tactic.
- Time: I both love and hate the comparison of keeping logs of your writing hours to running any other independent/consulting business. The hate comes, of course, from the knee-jerk reaction that writing shouldn’t be a business - that is, about churning out words solely for the sake of a count - but obviously, if you are or would like to be a professional writer, that is precisely what it is. I don’t think there’s any use in trying to deny that, and only a lot of heartache involved if you’re trying to lie to yourself about it. There’s no reason there should be some stigma to it either, as long as you’re happy with your results - plenty of artists produced some of their greatest works on commission.
A second note about the subject of “Time” is that I wonder if that initial hour might be simply the lag of “tuning” your brain to the task at hand. It’s been long suspected now with lots of compelling evidence that people who multi-task actually lose quite a bit of productivity to inefficiency, because the brain does not instantaneously switch from task to task to task; it takes a little while to “ramp up” and load the information and resources it needs to deal with the new subject. Thus, when you first put away all your other daily errands and finally sit down to write, part of that first hour is simply spent on getting all of your brain’s resources focused and in-line with what you’re going to be doing now. - Enthusiasm: While I started to hit upon this in the “Write my favorite parts first” section of Kicking Writing Funk in the Face, I like how concisely Rachel has put it here. I whole-heartedly agree with her assessment that if you’re not interested in writing it, then most likely your readers won’t be very interested in reading it (not always true, but if you can avoid making writing a grind, why not). This attitude is behind everything I write - I typically take a chainsaw to everything, down to the exact words I’d leave in a sentence. While that level of detail is probably more owed to my OCD than anything else, on the level of scenes, I think it’s very important. There are many methods, styles, and techniques to work around problem scenes … it’s worth the time to explore a bit before forcing yourself to “commit”. (“Commit” is in quotes because I think it’s also dangerous to become so wedded to a part that one doesn’t consider the alternative that problem spots could potentially be ironed out by removing it or altering it significantly. As much as I love any scene, it must always bear the possibility of being axed depending on how everything else works out in the story.)
- Comment #9 by C.S. Lakin: I thought this was important to point out, as it references an issue I mentioned above, which is what attitude one might hold about the relationship between writing and word count. The comment mentions this article, That Controversial Topic: Word Count, and for the most part, I could agree with its sentiments. But, like this article, I think that it is dealing with the extremes of the question - it acknowledges the point of the system forcing authors to focus on a superficial metric rather than the authors themselves believing it, but I think it would be also fair to say that word count is also a measurement of simply how much progress you’ve made, and doesn’t have to be a necessary evil in the sense that it doesn’t have to be evil at all.
While I agree that one should certainly not be required to pad a chapter/story/book to be of a certain length, it’s generally the case that anyone will need a certain amount of words to construct a world, inform the reader, round out the characters, and allow a certain number of events to happen. Regardless of whether this takes 40k words or 50k words or 100k words, one still has to move past the 2k word milestone or the 10k word milestone. It could just as easily be a sign of encouragement for writers to know that they have managed to produce a tangible amount of the work they have in mind. So, rather than focus on either the evils or benefits of such a system, I feel that one should use it simply as what it was meant to be - a metric. One does not berate the ruler for being a tool of measurement for cloth, and the cloth’s quality should in no way be related to the ruler’s purpose.
As for the rate of writing, and/or forcing oneself to write everyday regardless of inspiration, I think that this is purely a subjective strategy, just like every artist will have different times in which they’re creative, and choose different modes of expression. I personally will go through periods where I feel the itch to write every day, then need some days of rest, before picking up the frenzy again. I also have periods of depressive cycles, where if I don’t write something, no matter if I don’t have inspiration at the moment or not, I’ll feel unproductive and even more depressed (not in the clinical sense, but in that I feel unmotivated to start - this is the static friction that I need to overcome, not kinetic friction). In order to avoid this downward spiral, I’ve found it useful to actually throw out a small handful of words every day or every other day - even just 100-500 words is enough - rather than allowing myself to lapse completely. This way, when I feel like I’m in a slump, I can look back and go, “Oh, it’s really not so bad, look, I’ve produced plenty of stuff over the last few days! I can just throw out another bunch of words right now and I’ll actually have maintained my current pace.”
So, rather than saying one should either always write something everyday, or that one should only write when one is inspired to, I would say that people should simply explore different methods - even if it means finding inspiration from other people when you want to produce something but don’t have inspiration yourself (such as I outline for my own strategies in the “Make some enthusiastic friends” section of kicking writing funk) - and always be sensitive to the fact that your methods and techniques may very well change over time. At every stage of your life, you’re evolving, and what may work a decade ago may not work now, not to mention how your goals may shift (either from writing as a hobby to as a professional, or vice versa, in which case your strategies will most likely have to shift as well). But I think the basic key is that, if this is what you want, that you keep an open mind, remain flexible, and keep trying.
In conclusion, regardless of whether you’re trying to put down your own personal masterpiece or have to crank out 60k words for a publisher, I think this article provides a concrete strategy for not only getting started but producing something, hopefully to completion. Regardless of the motivation behind your writing, experiencing writer’s block is one of the most depressing and frustrating experiences possible, and while this article focuses primarily on speed, I think it also provides essential tools for getting anything written at all.
Rather, Yudkowsky’s Friendliness Theory relates, through the fields of biopsychology, that if a truly intelligent mind feels motivated to carry out some function, the result of which would violate some constraint imposed against it, then given enough time and resources, it will develop methods of defeating all such constraints (as humans have done repeatedly throughout the history of technological civilization). Therefore, the appropriate response to the threat posed by such intelligence, is to attempt to ensure that such intelligent minds specifically feel motivated to not harm other intelligent minds (in any sense of the word “harm”), and to that end will deploy their resources towards devising better methods of keeping them from harm. In this scenario, an AI would be free to murder, injure, or enslave a human being, but it would strongly desire not to do so and would only do so if it judged, according to that same desire, that some vastly greater good to that human or to human beings in general would result (though this particular idea is explored in Asimov’s Robot Series stories, via the Zeroth Law). Therefore, an AI designed with Friendliness safeguards would do everything in its power to ensure humans do not come to “harm”, and to ensure that any other AIs that are built would also want humans not to come to harm, and to ensure that any upgraded or modified AIs, whether itself or others, would also never want humans to come to harm - it would try to minimize the harm done to all intelligent minds in perpetuity. As Yudkowsky puts it:
“Gandhi does not want to commit murder, and does not want to modify himself to commit murder.”
- From the Wiki article on Friendly Artificial Intelligence
(Yes, just like in my other re-blog, I think this too is potentially an interesting topic and resource for writers looking to tackle future scenarios!)
I thought this article would be a nice complement to the one mentioned in my last re-blog on Drone Ethics. I had been reading up on FAI for completely different reasons just a day or two before, but it seems to me that quite a bit of the ethical questions tied up with robot usage also relates to the AIs which drive them. While FAI is dealing with something far more advanced than drones - where the AI is capable of experiencing such complex things as “motivation” - nevertheless, when one even begins to contemplate scenarios where robots are able to make certain command decisions in the field, one will have to consider what sort of AI will drive them and how it will decide between its potential actions.
- December 19
- , 2011
Robots are replacing humans on the battlefield—but could they also be used to interrogate and torture suspects? This would avoid a serious ethical conflict between physicians’ duty to do no harm, or nonmaleficence, and their questionable role in monitoring vital signs and health of the interrogated. A robot, on the other hand, wouldn’t be bound by the Hippocratic oath, though its very existence creates new dilemmas of its own.
Robots wouldn’t act with malice or hatred or other emotions that may lead to war crimes and other abuses, such as rape. They’re unaffected by emotion and adrenaline and hunger. They’re immune to sleep deprivation, low morale, fatigue, etc. that would cloud our judgment. They can see through the “fog of war”, to reduce unlawful and accidental killings. And they can be objective, unblinking observers to ensure ethical conduct in wartime. So robots can do many of our jobs better than we can, and maybe even act more ethically, at least in the high-stress environment of war.
This is the first paragraph of an article in the Atlantic about the ethical dilemmas around using robots or drones for military purposes. Important read!
(Though the reblog quote says it is the first paragraph of the article, I added another paragraph from a little later on for balance and to indicate that the article is quite thorough in treating all aspects of robot utility, both the good and bad.)
It is a little lengthy for casual reading (I’m only halfway through it right now myself, but will have to finish it tomorrow as I have an early morning conference call to wake up for), but beyond the very important and insightful points it targets, I had the odd thought that it is also an excellent resource for any writer looking to tackle future scenarios, from the near-term to the far. Even if a speculative fiction writer does not invent full-fledged sentient or fully-autonomous robots for their future, there is no doubt that we will become an ever-increasingly automated society, and this is a great peek into all the difficult questions that arise on all levels - in international agreements and laws, in national level politics and economics, in society and individual psychology, etc.
Each point is clear, pithy, and succinct. I won’t say it’s easy reading due to the subject matter addressed (and the extra thinking it engenders), but it is very well written and easy to digest.
(via emergentfutures)
“You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
“A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn’t build it it won’t be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in.
“The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.”
It’s NaNoWriMo, and it’s that time of the month again. Read the whole thing at http://nanowrimo.org/en/pep/neil-gaiman
augh so far behind BUT I WILL PERSIST. Here, everyone, have some writing inspiration from one of my favorite authors.
Keep going, I’m cheering you on! :D \o/
(Unfortunately, I will probably have to drop, not from lack of inspiration or drive, but from some Real World issues that have cropped up recently. :( But I will keep waving the pompoms for you! *\o/*)
But I still have a zero word count, because I only worked on the outline today. But tomorrow … tomorrow I will put the first official words on paper!
Since we’re pretty much close to the halfway point already, I have to up my initial ante … I guess I may as well go for the gusto. I have no idea what my schedule is like tomorrow yet, but as it’s one of the last few weekend days I have left and work is promising to be very busy this month, I’m going to go for 10k tomorrow. Just to see what happens.
(I’m almost beginning to think I should lobby for some on-line write-in, kind of like the virtual troncon - just do a chat/livestream with all the other tumblr nano writers as we’re all chipping away at our word counts!)
Over a third of the way into NaNoWriMo, and look how many words I’ve written for it so far!
ZEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
*twirls*
(Comic strip courtesy of Winzler)
I realized the other day that I forgot one crucial aspect of maintaining a manageable writing load - keeping things short. Thus, I added a section called “Keeping things short - and making sure they stay short” to my Kicking Writing Funk in the Face experience.
dw-t:
“Kicking Writing Funk in the Face” or “I Do What I Want”
So, I promised this earlier in the week to a few, and it’s late by some days because I ended up trying to write a whole treatise on the subject instead of a few bullet points. Sorry. Hopefully, <snips>
Yessssss, awesome. Thanks for taking the time to write this up. It seems we’re fairly similar in our anxieties (I put pressure on myself to deliver and then nothing gets done) and how we write (I can’t write anything linear; I have to write scenes and then attempt to stick them together). I felt a lot of what you said applied to me and that made it all the more helpful.
I’ve never given my fics to a beta reader. I think mainly because I like to believe I know what I’m doing and I’m pretty confident in how I want the story to go, but it would also be interesting to get early feedback. I would do it to get actual critique, on structuring and voice and whathaveyou, because those aren’t details people usually comment on in reviews.
Being aware of number of hits/reviews/etc. does help my motivation but can also destroy it when someone else writes a 2 paragraph story that gets a million comments and I put out a full fic that will see 6. I try not to compare myself to others…I write what I want and if someone else likes it as well, I consider it a perk, but sometimes it’s hard not to question what is wrong with my writing when I see things like that. If it’s a matter of improvement, then I want to know how I can improve. If it’s a popularity thing, then it can’t really be helped.
As for reading/watching something exciting…I actually seek out B-movies and horrible fanfiction or cheap romance novels. It’s probably terrible, but seeing what those people produce gives me a boost of confidence. I know no matter how awful I think my writing is, it is definitely better than that.
Cool, glad that we at least have the solidarity going for us! :D
Yeah, I think my biggest problem now in which a beta would be really helpful is consistency. Usually so much time lapses between the sections I write (and I am so impatient when reviewing my own work) that I sometimes end up with conflicting details. It used to be that I had the hardest time with verb tenses too - oddly enough, a year or two of text-based RP fixed that right up. o.O Whodathunkit.
I can hear you on the matter of comparing hits, etc. I dunno - I’m not exactly immune to that, but I think I’m better than most people at simply turning a blind eye to comparison and just concentrating on my own progress. Even in things like taekwondo, I’m usually measuring my progress only against my own past levels instead of other people’s. One thing, maybe, is to just turn off the counters? Winzler showed me a neat setting in AO3, at least, where you can tell them not to track your stats. Then there’s no temptation for comparison anymore. (A sidenote on this is that my work tends to involve a lot of analysis on what might produce viral hits and what produces a flop - I’m more aware than most of the vagaries which can affect people’s responses! So I rarely take disparate hit counters personally anymore.)
Bahahha! Well, I would say, good for you - use whatever you have to in order to get yourself going. :P I figure, as long as you’re not being an ass about it, you dangle whatever carrot you need to in front of your nose to keep pushing ahead. And actually, I think those are great fodder. If it was me: 1) the amount of inconsistencies, plot holes, character-assassinations, and sheer !!! would instigate quite a bit of creative thinking on my part (out of simple reflex), and 2) sometimes, my imagination is sparked more by implausibility than more logical movies and books. The campier, the better!
So, I promised this earlier in the week to a few, and it’s late by some days because I ended up trying to write a whole treatise on the subject instead of a few bullet points. Sorry. Hopefully, in the best case scenario, it’ll actually help, or in the worst, at least provide some solidarity for a too-common ailment. :P
This is totally me and this huge fanfiction that I still haven’t finished. When I sat down and started writing, it was just gonna be one chapter!
This. ALL THE TIME.
WHY DOESN’T THIS WORK FOR NANOWRIMO I ASK YOU
