It’s amazingly hard to accept and to do critiques. When I was a music major I always had a teacher; someone that knew a lot more than I did, someone who had years more experience than I did, someone that I trusted. After years of work with the instructors, with the directors, I developed a sense of rightness, of understanding, an ability to see the gaps between was is and […]
Critiques
Translating = Editing?
I don’t understand any language other than English. But I have read some translations: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert mostly, and others. Last year I met an author whose first language is French but he writes in English. I asked why he doesn’t translate his works himself, and he replied that writing fiction is one thing, translating is another. But he’ll happily argue with his translator. I also read a book on […]
Improvising
Some time ago an experienced writer told me that he imagined that writing fiction is like improvising jazz. Then he asked me, as a (hobby) jazz musician and budding fiction writer, did I find that to be the case? I said that, as also a legit (classical) composition major in university, I felt that writing fiction is more like composing. To compose I do a similar process that I use […]
Weaknesses, of a writing style
I have a few writing tendencies which are weaknesses. I’d like to understand their source so that I can figure out how to manage them. One is the over use of the word “but”. One person that I mentioned this to suggested that I consider alternative words like ‘however’, but that’s not a good answer because I’m writing fiction, not a research paper and most alternatives to “but” are too […]
Richard Ford: Canada
I’m reading Richard Ford’s “Canada” atm, and noting how different this is as a reading experience for me, compared with “Rabbit Is Rich“, by John Updike, the last novel that I read. First off, I’ve read Updike before, and even read that Rabbit novel before, whereas I haven’t read any Richard Ford before, so I have to read for content, for the story, which I didn’t have to do with […]
Show, don’t tell
One of the first aphorisms given to beginning writers is the old ‘show, don’t tell’ claim. Like any ‘rule’ of any endeavor, especially those of creative natures, it has as its basis some helpful advice, yet you also need to understand it, and then be able to understand when to break the rule. Afaik, this rule has its source in the tendency amongst us writers to summarize or to inform […]
More comparisons, music to fiction
One of my more recent large projects is revising a 3DayNovel from a year and a half ago, and, at the same time, revising the sequel that I wrote last NaNoWriMo. These are very plot oriented stories, mysteries, action stories to some extent, and so there is a very definite structure, key points, key activities, key discussions that have to take place. And because of that I notice that I’m […]
Composition; musical and fictional
I was a classical composition major in university who came from a self-taught jazz background. Sometimes I think about the differences between writing fiction and writing music. Music has a life of its own. These days if you compose something you probably have a synthesizer and MIDI and you record what you’re working on into a computer. Then you can have it play a version of what you’ve written, let […]
Writing with flow
Ah, the holiday season. This year, in spite of not traveling for Christmas, I took more time off work than usual and, combined with not losing hours driving or sitting in the airport/airplane, I’ve had more free time. Some of this time was taken up with things that needed doing; family activities, three days taken up with shopping for a new car, and a good thirty hours or so used […]
Feeling the rough edges of a first draft
Writing has many different feels. Sometimes your head is really in the scene, you’re part of the story, and the words are just descriptions of what you experience as you live the story. Other times the writing is pieced together over time, in different sittings, and you scratch and claw it together. ~ I finally completed a short story that I started last spring, something that I felt close to, […]