Craft || The mechanics of our passion

The writing process is far more than just slamming the words of a first draft down on paper, though without that step, there is no writing.

There are innumerable popular arguments against self-editing and self-consciousness during writing, but they only apply to the first draft stage of writing. All of the other stages involved in making a finished product should be highly self-conscious.

Ok. Here's my problem and I hope you can help nudge me in the right direction...

For many many years, during school and then later work, I never wanted to write but I would get these bright and inspirational flashes. Parts of stories. The beginning to a story, the end, scenes, and much more. Yet I never acted on them.

I'm sure most of you that have written anything have asked someone to read it.  That part isn't usually difficult; there is usually someone around willing to read a few pages.  Where it gets difficult is when you start to produce more stories, longer stories.  Book attempts, novellas, etc.  People will flip through twenty or so pages, and make the dreaded comment: "I liked it".

Some methods for turning so-so readers into editors exist, what methods do the aspirants of write-on use?

I'm having trouble formulating a personal heuristic for deciding whether to hyphenate compound words that are not in a dictionary -- i.e. that i'm just basically making up.

The whole business of hyphenation does not seem like it's done logically...

Face it, it will. The much-celebrated "first novel" displayed at bookstores is merely that author's first published novel. It's far more likely to be his second, third, or tenth novel, overall.

So don't let the stress get to you.

Different ways of creating and managing background information and characters have been mentioned on this site before - in an article by Andrea concerning the use of index cards, in article by Jaxon talking about using existing GroupWare products and finally an article by Janra questioning how much background detail is actually required.

In this article I describe how I manage the process and ask you, friendly readers, to tell me what works for you and why.

I've discovered that organising my characters for a new book, is a considerable pain. They are now on file cards. I can pick out the fictional people and remember what they are like (from my notes)& how they react. I can also add notes to these file cards if my creatures have been through an experience that has affected them in some way. It's a good way to weave the threads of a complex plot. The scenes can be put on cards in a similiar way. This may seem rather an archaic way of arranging things in this age of the computer file. I do find the physicality of bits of card board helps creative thought. Staring at a computer screen for too long can become painful. I do think more clearly using this for basic plot and character structure. Try it; what do you think?

How often have you read a story and rolled your eyes as the author lists off hair colour and length, eye colour, height, girth, clothing style and colour...

But you still want your readers to have a good idea of what the character looks like, so you have to provide some physical description.

I am looking into doing some collaborative writing with a friend or two. I was hoping to use some kind of program/workflow that has been used with great success in business.

Groupware tools allow serveral users to work on documents together. Some of these programs include Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word and Lotus Notes.

This kind of workflow is also used in programming, using server applications like CVS and Perforce.

Ultimately, I would like this workflow to use the web as a centralized place to work from. There is a project on SourceForge.com in it's early stages called CoeLab, which stands for "Collaborative Elaboration". But they have yet to release any files.

Has anybody worked with anything like this. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. If this works, maybe it could be the beginning of a collaborative writing community like the free software movement.

-Jaxon

'Show, don't tell' is an oft-heard admonition to new writers, and given that a lot of people new to writing do far too much 'telling' it's probably reasonably good advice. But then there are some people who hold the invalid assumption that 'if a little is good, more must be better', and think that everything in a story must be 'shown'.

There are things in a story that should be 'told' and not 'shown'.