Reviewing in Haiku

I'm talking about: haikus

While trawling about looking for ideas on writing, I came across an interesting blog (albeit seemingly dead, and with a default WordPress theme): Reviews in Haiku. Each post is a review of something, written in haiku-form.

I’ve never been much of a haiku person, but it was a challenge I wanted to try out for myself. A link he had on the site pointed to Start Writing Haiku, which is a wonderful document filled with beautiful lines. I think I must discover this form of writing more.

That said, here is a review in haiku, for tomorrow’s review on BBC’s 2009 adaptation of Emma:

Unlikely actors–
Hot summer, lively-warm tones,
Scenes well-played: oh yes.

Stay tuned!

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From writing to editing

I'm talking about: my writing work flow

Writing processes have always intrigued me. I love reading what methods and processes various writers have when they work, if they write by hand or direct to computer, or if they hire someone to type it all, or if they record themselves and transcribe. To be sure, I’ve wanted to try many different writing work flows, but none has stuck yet–aside from what I’ve been doing when I was younger, as a writer and an editor of the school newspaper.

My writing work flow

I write on my computer, and then I print it out, double-spaced, a page per sheet. And then I take a red pen. And I massacre it with editorial marks.

What this does for me is a sense of accomplishment, at almost every stage of the writing process. When I’m done with my story, when I’m ready to clean up that first draft, a thick printout serves as my “congratulations for making it this far!” It’s closure. It’s a tangible output, something I can hold, hug, and kiss in the darkness of my room where no one will think I am odd. It’s the end. I HAVE DONE IT!

And the red markings? Oh boy. We are always our harshest critic, and seeing the page marked up with corrections, notes, and various curly stuff–it’s also a sense of accomplishment. At the end of the editing, to see the once-immaculate pile of sheets wrinkled, slightly off-kilter, and filled with squiggly lines–it is glorious. I know I did my job.

Then I go through another round, but this time there’s not a lot to go through. Things that I missed, stuff that I thought would sound better, but they don’t. Close friends might also take a peek at this stage, but it’s seldom. I’ve rarely needed to go through a third pass-through, but then the dozen stories-to-be-turned-to-novels in my hard drive were never printed out, and short stories (the bulk of my published writing) generally don’t need such an involved process.

Other interesting processes

As mentioned, I’ve always been intrigued with how other writers do it. Going through a “writing reboot” as I am, now would be the best time to sit down and familiarize myself with a new way of doing things.

I’ve heard of a couple interesting ones:

Recording oneself, then transcribing it manually or with some tool or service;
Writing everything by longhand, and then typing it out manually or by scanning it in and getting it converted;
Writing everything on different pieces on note cards, easy to switch scenes around;
Using a specific software with its own work flow.

Do you know of any interesting work flows, or do you have a particular one which works for you?

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Building the habit: writing on demand

I'm talking about: blogging at Whimsical.nu.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve said that I’m “getting back into blogging” and then failing. I’d have to succeed at some point! Where that particular point is, I’ve yet to find: but recently I’ve come across various articles (starting from Smashing Magazine’s Blogging for Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides) revolving on having an editorial calendar for your blog, which have served as inspiration to train myself to write on schedule.

As a child, I used to write stories, or parts of stories, every day. That changed when I got into college, and ever since then I’ve been struggling to write. As an adult, there are so many things that get in the way: jobs, responsibilities, chores, and the fear of failure. So I either never get around to writing (non-journally writing, that is), or when I do, it feels like nothing more than a chore.

I’ve read something a long time ago, from Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, which I haven’t really done: writing on demand, on schedule.

The important thing is that at the moment, on the dot of the moment, you are to be writing…

There is a deep inner resistance to writing which is…likely to emerge at this point…. This will begin to “look like business” to the unconscious, and the unconscious does not like these rules and regulations until it is well broken in to them;… If you consistently, doggedly, refuse to be beguiled, you will have your reward. The unconscious will suddenly give in charmingly, and begin to write gracefully and well.

- Dorothea Brande, in Becoming a Writer

Most professional writers (journalists, authors, professional bloggers, what-have-you) probably do the same thing–they have trained themselves to write on demand, to write according to a specific schedule. I’ve never really done this before, although I keep a journal I write regularly in.

It’s time to try and take this to another level, and train myself to write on schedule about other things other than my life (heh). It’s not exactly creative writing, but it’s a start!

Enter Whimsical.nu’s editorial calendar!

The current week in my editorial calendar plugin!

So that’s my blog’s calendar week, using the WordPress plugin Editorial Calendar (with the CSS slightly hacked). I’ve decided to plan out my blogging schedule, and since my blog has five main topics, they fit nicely into one week’s worth of posts (weekends kept free-for-all, but likely to be quiet unless there are time-sensitive things to be written about). Jonathan Thomas’s post at ProBlogger on How to Develop a Niche Blog Content Plan was a good read when I was coming up with this schedule.

The colors should be self-explanatory and correspond to the colors I’ve always had for my blog’s major sections:

Miss Monday – for posts about life, living, and various other personal odds and ends
Tech Tuesday – geeky rambles about the web and tech subjects
Writing Wednesday – musings about my writing pursuits
Thursday Text – for posts on reading and books
Fun Friday – what better way to wrap up the week with games and fun things?

Yes, those are very cheesy weekly names ;) I won’t be renaming my categories or anything, they’re just a cute (uh…) moniker for my blogging week. Based off from Jonathan’s post, Mondays and Fridays are light days, so I’ve reserved the Girl and Gamer posts for those days. The Writer category for Wednesday just felt right, I put Reader on Thursday because I like having a backup plan using Booking Through Thursday, and, well, Tuesday was what’s left for tech posts. ;) It’s just a nice coincidence that I found good topic-related words to pair up with the day of the week (okay, except for the Writer category).

Initially I thought of going by post type–such as a review every Wednesday and a list every Friday–but as I started to work on the calendar itself, it just made a lot more sense to do it by category as there’s less resistance: I don’t have to re-acquaint myself with a different color legend. That said, posts for each category will run the gamut of types from reviews, tutorials, and even simple photo posts.

It will be challenging to keep to the schedule and have a post for every day of the week, but a challenge I’d like to start. I already have a couple post ideas for some of the incoming weeks, and none for some categories–so it seems the challenge will come early!

As they say–it only takes two weeks to build a habit. Let’s see how far it takes before this becomes a habit for me. ;)

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On writing

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my literary writing pursuits, and the sad fact is that there’s nothing really to write about. November is coming ’round the bend, as is NaNoWriMo, and I’ll admit to a little envy at those who are participating this year. I’m not; I’m not ready, and I have a couple of things on my plate that would make writing 1,700 words a day difficult, when those words need to be in some form of coherence and cohesion for a novel.

But the fact is, I’ve been keeping an eye on my “natural” writing habits, and reflecting on and off on patterns that I’m seeing. A lot of this is connected to some of the “revelations” (if you will) from my 5:30 AM exercise (which I wasn’t able to do for very long, but long enough). To quote the exercise again (emphasis mine):

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically.

I’ve gone through my morning writing, and my “unconscious” writing could probably be categorized into three groups:

Journal-esque; things that happened to me, and written in a journal style instead of in a literary vein (i.e. fictionalized). Roughly 27% of my writing fall under this category.
Essay; musings, ideas, speculation, no real story behind them. Slightly less in number than journal-style writing!
Literary; quite obviously fiction! A number of them were fictionalized versions of a few real-life events, but most of them were “original” scenes and sketches. Around half of my writing was in this category.

Actually going through them was a bit of a revelation in itself; I’d expected the general numbers, but didn’t really expect essay-style writing to be almost up on par with journal writing. I only had a smallish number to work on, but the results actually mirror some of the “impulse” writing I’ve done (for example, for One Word, for One Sentence) in the past, and continues up to now.

From these, I have both an affirmation, and a somewhat disheartening revelation.

I’ve always known that my writing and literary interests tend toward the fantastical, the lyrical, the heights of emotions. Most of my snippet writing revolves around the latter: joy, love, passion, hurt, anger, despondence. More than half of my writing have a fantasy element to them: if not outright fantasy, then hints of it. So from what I’ve seen, this is really the area that I should be working with when I write stories, because it is here where my subconscious gravitates to when freewriting.

As for the disheartening revelation: I (currently) don’t have the longevity to write a novel.

I’ve realized this (from the aforementioned exercises) quite a while ago. But I’ve honestly tried to ignore it, because I want to write a novel. Trying to come to terms with the revelation that I don’t have the capacity to write a novel was difficult to stomach. Goodness knows how many times I’ve joined NaNoWriMo, both “officially” and “in secret”. I still have files upon files of half-baked “novels”, all abandoned in the middle (or, more precisely, all over the place–I’ve never written “in order”).

The longevity can be worked on, certainly. But it isn’t something that will come easily, not anymore after I’ve neglected it since college. I don’t think it’s truly lost; but it’s buried too deep for me to dredge out in, say, a month of frenzied writing, or continuous false starts on writing a novel.

So instead I will go back to my “roots”, ease up on the pressure, and do what my habits seem to point me towards: short story writing. Certainly not as glamorous as a novel (“hey, I’m writing a novel”) but, baby steps! And I do enjoy the quick sketches that I do. Graduating from short shorts to a short story looks to be quite sound, eh?

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See Angela write.

I know, I know. I haven’t posted here in goodness knows how long, and that’s a shame–all on my end, of course. I haven’t blogged, and I haven’t written much over the latter part of the year, and that includes journal entries.

I hardly know what to write about anymore, although there’s still that urge within me to write. I suppose I will be writing forever, after a fashion. Sometimes, I think, parts of me are all terribly out of sync. At some point, I am courageous, and bold, and I will write without being afraid of my subjects, my prose, or my inner critic…but then those are the times that I don’t have anything to write about. And so I write about mundane things.

And then other times, it’s the other way around. Scratch that–it’s that way most of the time.

Sometimes I wonder, if people need a tragedy in their lives, in order to write. A good many writers have either gone through tragedy, or suffer depression, etc, before they started writing, or during the period of their writing career. Is that some sort of prerequisite? What is it that goads people to write? Is the tragedy in their lives the catalyst?

Why am I even asking–of course tragedy can be a catalyst. I’ve written copiously when I’m depressed, out of a need to relieve myself and let all that pent-up emotion out before I explode.

Does that mean that, right now, as I’m writing this “comeback” blog post, I’m depressed?

4 Comments

5:30 AM Writing

I’ve started a new habit: I wake up at 5:30 AM to write.

The alarm goes off at 5:25 AM, and then I drag myself out of the bed to fire up my computer, open StoryMill, hit Command-Shift-F for full-screen, and start typing away. I haven’t gone through the ones I’ve written yet, but they’re usually just a couple of paragraphs each, with typos all over the place (I hear Typinator going off about once every other minute, correcting my typos). That’s what happens when I type with sluggish hands and with my eyes closed.

Why am I doing this? Basically for two things:

to train my body to write creatively again, and
to find out which kind of writing I instinctively fall back on when most of myself is still not functioning properly.

I got this activity from Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. I seem to remember talking about this a long while ago, but as I can’t find that entry, I must be dreaming (I swear I’m fully awake now though). In chapter 5 of the book, she tells us that we “must teach the unconscious to flow into the channel of writing”.

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet…your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.

And so I write. I’ve actually “cheated”, and I think I know the answer to #2 (what writing type I fall back on) but we’ll see how this goes. In any case, I don’t see any pattern yet in my morning writing; it should come out in a month or so, I’m gauging.

The good thing? As early as now, I feel like I’m finding what my writing voice is. I already know, in a way, but I’ve written in the same “voice” at least thrice already (and I only started this week). Writing while my brain’s still muddled with sleep has its rewards, for all it’s difficult to get words in order sometimes. :D

4 Comments

Blogging

My blogging here is rather sporadic, something which I’m quite sad about. One reason for that is probably that I’ve grown disenchanted (again) with my layout, for all that I loved it when it was new. I’m still trying to come up with a new layout, but it isn’t easy.

I’m trying to get more into blogging, though, and I’m sure as soon as I actually decide on a new, better, more readable layout for Seasonal Plume I’ll be back in the game. (I’m actually thinking of going so far as just downloading a theme and using it… I’m trying to resist, though.) However, I do have two new “blog projects”.

The first is Frontend Friday, over at my tech blog, where I talk about various things related to frontend stuff: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other frontend issues. I’m still trying to feel around as to what topics are interesting, so feel free to suggest.

The second is I’ve just accepted an invite from Tech Blog Philippines to be a contributor, and in time you should see a couple of posts from me on there, probably revolving mostly on things I find interesting but wouldn’t exactly fall in the realm of what’s “bloggable” in Indiscripts–I’m sure there will be some overlap, but not by much.

As for creative writing…I’ve fallen into a funk again. Sigh.

5 Comments

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.

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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:

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.
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.

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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.)

Welcome to “Seasonal writer”

My writing work flow

Other interesting processes