Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer. I read ahead to the exercise results interpretation, so it's spoiled for me; but I think I know what the results are for me anyway. I've come to the conclusion that I'm more of a short story writer than a novelist. Gasp!, oh noes! and general bellows of outrage! -- the eye-opener met with quite a bit of resistance.">

Whimsical.nu

Welcome to a Whimsical Blog~

Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl, geek, reader, writer, gamer
Choose your poison ♥

Better late than never

A happy, hopeful new year to all!…even though it’s past mid-January already.

I pretty much disappeared after mid-November–from my writing log, anyway–mostly due to a lot of things happening at the same time. Some of them are personal, but most of them were work-related and season-related. I flew home to the Philippines on December 20, flew back to Singapore on the 27th with family in tow, and took them around until January 2, when they went back to the Philippines.

Even with all of that, however, I was able to finish my 50 Books for 2007 challenge. Just barely made it! The above link also goes to the full list, which admittedly still needs a bit of sprucing up: one more thing that I haven’t gotten around to doing. I am starting a new 50-book challenge this year, and have so far read two books. In time I’ll put up my challenges page, which will link to all the challenges I’ll be doing that are reading- and writing-related.

I also got to 50,000 words for my NaNoWriMo novel this year, but I wasn’t able to finish the memoir; there are still a lot of events to go through and a ton of editing to do once that’s over. I’m not abandoning it, however — I’ll continue to work on it as I go along. The exercise has definitely been one of the longest-running writing exercises I’ve ever done since I graduated high school almost eight years ago. I’ll have to make sure this keeps up.

6 Comments

NaNoWriMo Day 8: Trudging along

I hadn’t written more than 700 words the two previous days, but as Singapore is on a holiday today, I tried to catch up. I did pretty well, I think:

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=20299]

That’s almost half of the goal by the eighth day, which isn’t bad at all (this might still grow within the day, as it’s only 9pm). Unfortunately, I’m still not half into the 2.5 years that my memoir is supposed to cover. Granted, there shouldn’t be too much after the first year, but I’m unearthing a lot of things from my journals as I go along that I never really know.

There are two things that are bogging me down from going through the events:

  1. Research. There’s a lot of journal entries to wade through, both relevant and irrelevant to the memoir, but things I need to go through anyway.
  2. Processing. This does chronicle a trying time in my life, and going through my journals is painful and troublesome.

I’ve come to the conclusion that creation itself is also scary. It’s not just the pain that going further in the memoir is going to give me, but also the general reluctance and fear that comes packaged into translating something into writing. Already I’m running into decisions that I’m putting off until the second draft: decisions and questions like, should I be as faithful as possible to what really happened or can I combine certain conversations together in order to conserve space? and how do I filter out effectively all that’s not needed, or how do I compact these into shorter, more concise scenes?

Already, I see that whatever my output for this month is, by the second draft, it’s going to be cut by half. I’m going to have to wade in with a highlighter and highlight important scenes and ideas and emotions, and find out how to make it more concise (see Questions Number One, above) and cut off the rest. I also see that I am going to need a printer, and lots of scrap paper. Oh joy.

2 Comments

Thoughts on the Memoir (Day 4)

So today I think I overreached myself a bit; my Excel report card told me I would finish by November 13 if I kept this speed up. That’s because I’m now at:

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=10466]

I stopped myself from writing more this afternoon mostly because I don’t want to suddenly inexplicably burn out, and because while things are getting “interesting”, I want to think about things a bit more. The first painful part of the story is “over”, although I feel that I wasn’t able to treat it correctly: not objective enough, not emotional enough. That sounds rather contradictory, but I’ve yet to find that balance.

I’m writing the memoir mostly in chronological order, although I’m ending up going back to a few previous scenes again and again to add/modify a few things as I remember them. I currently don’t have any chapters whatsoever, and sadly I’ve also needed to combine a few conversations or jump a few events just for the sake of moving the memoir along. Even so, I feel that I haven’t given things proper focus. As the writing progresses, I feel that I’m going to go back to the start and tweak with things, as well as add a few more things here and there, to minimize the sudden jumps (i.e., “The next week…”) and to provide a bit more insight into feelings. I’m going through it so quickly that I think it reads almost like an adventure story, although it really should be more about emotions, motivations, and the like.

The challenge here is the source. I’m basically going through my journals to grasp how the events moved along, but as I had not written about it for the longest time, I’ve had to rely on a few chance mentions and memory, both of which aren’t very detailed or clear. I do write at length about it once I had started, but right now my memoir is dealing with that point in time when I’m not writing much about the situation.

I feel that once November is over and the actual draft is done, I’ll be spending December editing the hell out of the memoir, and removing whole chunks of text, rewriting a few things, and rearranging how the story is told. At the moment I feel that a lot of the start is dragging, and that I should find a better way to “show” how things are without going on and on about things practically a day at a time. 10,000 words and I’m only at the third month in a timespan of almost three years. That’s not really easy reading. (Not that it’s meant to be easy reading.)

2 Comments

Day 2: Changing POVs

The second day of NanoWriMo has come and gone. I’m off to retire, but I wanted to write a bit before I did. I’m going along rather splendidly in terms of the word count goal. I stopped as I hit some faintly problematic stuff in memoir-writing: that is, research into the exact sequence of events and things. It’s still a little slow going.

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=4278]

One thing to note, however, was that I changed the point of view of my story in the middle of writing it. Since this is a memoir, I’ve been writing it in first-person perspective. Unfortunately, a few problems came up, namely:

  • limited knowledge; or, inability to provide a bigger perspective of each scene, and
  • it increasingly felt a little too close for comfort.

The second issue is due largely to the fact that I am writing about a certain time in my life: it’s currently a bit too “close” to me. Since the point of this exercise is also to do some post-processing of that situation, I decided a more objective, distant voice would better suit this scenario.

Hence, now I am writing in third-person omniscient, and I have a chunk of text greyed out in my text that needs to be converted over to that POV in time, as well as expanded. I kept it in since it’s really part of the story, I just need to do a rewrite.

The Wikipedia entry for Point of View actually has the exact same scenario that I am using (although it’s an advantage in my case):

The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story. A variation is where the narrator is a character in the story; a small amount of the story might be told in first person.

I kept the first part of the memoir in first-person; the introduction/prologue, if you will. I will probably expand this in time, but for now it will have to do — I don’t want to go in and edit it since that might bog me down.

2 Comments

NaNoWriMo 2007

It’s that time of the year again — it’s National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know what it is… where are you been, seriously?

It’s also that time of the month where I always set myself up to fail, apparently. I’ve joined almost every year, but after writing about a few couple thousand I slack off rather horribly. This year isn’t different, as I have signed up again for the 50,000 word challenge.

However, what I’m going to do will be slightly different. Starting November 1, I’ll be working on a memoir chronicling a certain time in my life. There are three things that I’m hoping to “hit” with this:

  1. do some internal processing of the events and emotions that are related to the subject matter,
  2. for memory’s sake, so I have something to look back on that will hopefully be a little more coherent than my journal entries, and
  3. if my journal entries on the subject are any indication, I should be able to win NaNo this year!

It should be good as both a writing exercise and a way to process the events. I probably won’t be posting much snippets from the novel, as it’s obviously something that’s highly personal in nature, but I do hope to be blogging about the experience of writing the memoir itself.

0 Comments

Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

Madeleine L’Engle, 1918 - 2007

Why does it seem like a lot of my favorite YA authors seem to be leaving Earth this year? I just found out that Madeleine L’Engle died last September 6, at the age of 88. Of the books she wrote, the ones I read and loved were her Kairos books, principally the ones with the Murrys. (Of the O’Keefes, I’ve only been able to read An Acceptable Time).

Lenneth posted a wonderful interview with her: Allegorical Fantasy: Mortal Dealings with Cosmic Questions. I practically couldn’t tear my eyes away from the interview — I felt it had great meaning to me personally, both as a writer and a Catholic.

I’d like to highlight some lines that I felt were very meaningful for me:

[Writing and praying is] not a matter of feeling like it, or waiting when I feel inspired, because both in work and in prayer, inspiration comes during rather than before.

…Freedom comes on the other side of work. If I want to play a Bach fugue, I must practice scales. If I hope for any transcendent experience in prayer, I have to have just done my ordinary, everyday prayers, which is the same thing as practicing my scales. I have to write every day. Freedom and discipline, rather than being antithetical, are complementary. Permissiveness, either from others toward you or toward yourself, ends up being restricting and crippling. If you choose to be a writer and a mother, you have to be incredibly disciplined. Otherwise you won’t manage. Discipline does not imprison you.

This is truly something that I personally have to work on, even though I’ve read this same thing from various places and books, and they all say the same thing. And yet I still don’t get to write on a daily basis — creative writing, that is.

We’ve got to be free to fail. … We live in a world that insists we be successes. If you’re not free to fail, you’ll never be anything but mediocre. You must try to do more than you can really do. Sometimes, you do do more than you can really do. That’s the marvel of it.

I feel there is a lot of truth in this statement, and frankly I feel this is where my biggest difficulty lies, especially in writing. I might go into this in depth at this blog some other time, but basically I’ve been coming to the conclusion for some time now that my biggest barrier in terms of writing is my fear of failure at what I most want to do.

I remember seeing, once back in the Philippines a month or so before I moved to Singapore, these beautiful new editions of her Kairos books. I wanted to buy them, as I didn’t have my own copies (the ones we have are really technically my sister’s) but I didn’t as I was moving. I really should have bought them.

2 Comments

Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007)

Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007)

I was shocked when I opened my email a few days ago and read that Lloyd Alexander died last May 17 in his home in Drexel Hill, just two weeks after his wife Janine died. He was eighty-three.

He was one of my favorite authors as an adolescent, and his Chronicles of Prydain continue to be an important part of my bookshelf. I find myself always going back and reading them, for the adventure and the sheer wonder of it, and for the thought-provoking themes and quotes one can gather from the rich writing.

I will be looking forward to The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio, which is his last book and set to be published this August. He said that he had finished his life work with Carlo Chuchio. I am both sad and happy at the same time–it truly is bittersweet.

I found a wonderful quote from him about writing:

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

How does one do justice to what is in one’s heart?

2 Comments

Blogging and Creative Writing

I found this article by Lorelle VanFossen on Digg a while ago, about blogging being about writing. I couldn’t agree more, although blogging and creative writing have different goals and different means of getting to those goals. As I read through her 30-item list, a good number of them called out to me, having been victim/champion of those items previously.

So now I give you my top three blogging and writing similarities, as well as my top three blogging and writing differences, given her list.

Top Three Blogging and Creative Writing Similarities

  1. Don’t Just Show, Show and Tell. This is also item #1 on Lorelle’s article, taking its cue from the ever-popular saying “Show, don’t tell.” I’ve always been touting along that same phase for a good while, but sometimes you just have to know when to quit showing and start telling. A nice long dialogue where you show subtle nuances in your characters’ personalities just don’t cut it when your story almost reads like a script. Nor is action upon action upon action very interesting unless your story should move that fast. A good balance between showing and telling is important, using criteria such as importance of the scene as well as time and pacing of the story.
  2. Make Your Point in the First 200 Words. (Item #4 on the list.) This is one important feature of news writing, which I did for a short time when I was younger; news writing requires you to put all important information in your lead paragraph. For creative writing, you had better grab your readers within the first few paragraphs, if not by the first sentence. Introduce your conflict, start foreshadowing, whatever rocks your boat. But make your point, and make it memorable.
  3. Write With Conviction and Passion. (It’s placed last, at #30.) This isn’t a tip or anything of the sort; conviction, passion, and love for the story shines through from the words you weave. Your passion makes your story different and original; any seemingly formulaic plot is given life and originality by the passion the author has in the story. Write about what you believe in. Write about what you love talking about. Write about what you want to shout out to the world.

Top Three Blogging and Creative Writing Differences

  1. Don’t overuse your words because they’re not like blog keywords (see item #2). More often than not while writing we gravitate towards certain words and use them time and again. Shake out of that literary bog and try challenging yourself to use words that would better fit your scene; reading your story out loud will help you pinpoint which words are overused and which should be replaced to better fit the nuances of your scenes.
  2. Write about what strikes your heart and not what you know. Unlike blogs which share information (see item #12), creative writing should call to your readers’ emotions. We’ve all been angry, sad, happy—it’s the creative writer’s task to evoke strong memories and impressions of those emotions in order to affect the readers. If we’re looking for the latest in genetics engineering, we’ll look it up; don’t get bogged down by explaining every fact if it’s not essential to your story.
  3. Don’t write like the way you talk, (against item #23) unless you’re writing in the first person point of view and your character should sound like you. But don’t write like a textbook — find the style that suits you as well as your story. Dry, or flowery? Lyrical or hard action-oriented paragraphs? Your characters may have accents which make their speech unintelligible, but make your point and then let your readers understand them without having to resort to explaining every other phrase!

And oh, for the love of all that is good, if you’re a blogger who’s also into creative writing, please don’t blog the way you write your stories. We don’t want to hear about the scent of the roses as you step gingerly into the wide arch of the heavy door, breathing in to control your wildly thudding heart, anticipating the scene that would greet you when you lift your eyes to the…

You get the point.

10 Comments

The domain hath returned, plus blog musings

Phew, seasonalplume.net (the domain) is finally back! It propagated sometime last night while I was sleeping, but I’d been too swamped in the office to comment about it. You can still see this website via the indisguise.org address, but now my real domain is back in action. I’m happy. Those two days were absolutely nerve-wracking.

But naturally those two days isn’t a complete waste: it spurred me on to re-evaluate Seasonal Plume, specifically its contents and architecture, the way it’s served (and designed). Of my three blogs, I suppose Seasonal Plume is the most “hazy” — even with tacking on the “writing and literary blog” handle to it, one might say I’ve always been trying to feel the waters and find the best Seasonal Plume reincarnation. Let’s face it: friends will read my haphazard rambling at my journal, and users of my scripts will always take a peek now and then at my scripts archive; but writing? And someone who doesn’t have 39857394562 bestsellers already published?

Those two things have been in my mind a lot more frequently over the last two months. One might say that I just need to read the 872398435 articles on “how to blog effectively” and “5872985679 tips on blogging” or whatever else the Internet spews out of its (significant) mouth; and I actually have. But I guess, coming from a time when the blogging phenomenon was juuuuust starting, I’m a little old-fashioned in the sense that I need more than just a blog in my website. A blog is a blog is a blog, but what about the content? (*hides from other bloggers*)

That’s why I kept fluctuating between a “regular-style” blog (like the Blue Semi-colons theme and the Wet Sponge theme), and a “blog-style” blog (like this one right now). That’s why I never seem to know exactly what to write here (it’s already complicated by having two other blogs after all).

The forced downtime of my domain somehow triggered a few decisions within me, and now I have an actual direction. It will take a bit of time before these soopersekrit plans actually take place, as I’m still laying everything out (plus I don’t think I should change my blog’s design just yet). I’m rather content about the decisions/plans I’ve come up with, though, so yay for that.

5 Comments

On giving up half a dream

I’ve decided to admit to cheating when I started reading Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. It’s light reading, and I would have finished it already were it not for a certain book activity which I tried doing. I cheated and read ahead to the results interpretation, so the exercise is spoiled for me; but I think I know what the results are for me anyway.

Basically, the goal of the is to help you determine what sort of writing you’re more inclined to do. I’m sure that sounds like a no-brainer, but sometimes, I find that my brain ignores what’s right there in front of it. To cut it short, in my case, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m more of a short story writer than a novelist. Gasp!, oh noes! and general bellows of outrage! — the eye-opener met with quite a bit of resistance.

I suppose a part of myself has always known that I’m more inclined towards short stories than a full-length novel: there are lots of signs pointing to it. Previous finished work has always been under 25,000 words; I am irresistibly drawn towards exercises in brevity and enjoy writing them immensely. But I resisted; ever since I was a kid, I’d wanted to write books, and here was a book who was forcing me to see that I wasn’t really up for it. Or at least not yet.

The result was a long drought in writing. A subconscious strike? Maybe. I’ve been thinking more about it recently, though, and the more I think of it, the more I realize how I’m essentially strangling my writing and holding up practically every single creative thought-process. Because The Dream feels so difficult to reach, I subconsciously stopped reaching for the smaller dreams that may, who knows, one day lead to The Dream.

So, two days ago, I started fleshing out a short story plot, letting characters wake up and tell me their stories. I think I like this new phase.

I’d like to share something from the book that I’m still digesting:

…if you confess so much you are likely to go further and talk of the things you mean to write. Now words are your medium;…but your unconscious self…will not care whether the words you use are written down or talked to the world at large. …You will have created your story and reaped your reward…you will consider it as already done, a twice-told tale.

And before I leave — the culprit has been found: my namesake Angela was the one who nominated me for the Philippine Blog Awards (thank you!), who has just released the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards Finalists list. And, even more surprisingly, I made it. o.o;; I have no words as of yet to explain what I feel (such is my plight a lot of times these days). My co-finalists are: Far From Neutral Notions, Ironwulf.net: En Route, Midori-X, and Noel Perlas. You should check out all the rest. Good luck to everyone! *pompoms*

2 Comments