is...
Kulsuma!!!
Congrats! Email me at muchlanguage (at) gmail (dot) com, with a name and mailing address.
Thanks to the unavailability of internet last week, I didn't do a giveaway, so I'll be making it up with two books this week. Also, this is the first giveaway this month, so it's open to everybody and their sister!
Today I'm giving away 2 craft books:
WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES
For me, the reading was a little dry and it took a while to get through it. (I'm not a big fan of non-fiction.) Also I wasn't totally sold on the types of scenes listed in the book.
I thought the book was really thorough. It showed a few highlights of the business side: whether or not you need/want and agent, what the agent does, what happens all the way to publication. And it took me through the entire creative process from first draft to final edit. I especially liked that Ingermanson and Economy described (and showed benefits and drawbacks for) a set of creative paradigms:
Seat-of-the-pants
Edit-as-you-guy (like seat of pants, but with pauses to edit periodically)
Snowflake (start with big picture and fill in more and more details)
Outliner
WRITING & SELLING THE YA NOVEL
One of my fave things about WSTYN is that Going never acts like the way she describs is the only way. She points out possibilites and even the repercussions in some cases. (For example, of course you can have sex in your book, but be prepared that some people are nto going to like it.) Going also includes teen feedback on simple questions like "Who's your favourite character and why?" which is useful if you haven't been YA yourself for a while and would like to find out more about what teens today like.
Personally, I was quite thrilled to find that she builds her stories idea-character-plot, as it seems that many people go idea-plot-character. Nice to know I'm not alone.
RULES
1. Entries are open to everyone, follower or not.
2. You can enter until 11.59 pm EST on Wednesday.
3. Entries are open internationally.
4. To enter, tell me what's your creative paradigm? How do you attack a first draft?
(PS, Thanks for the love on my Sad News post.)
3 comments:
I attack a first draft simply by doing it... writing, writing, writing. (And maybe editing a little along the way, too...)
I'm a total pantser. I just sit down and start writing. I usually have a general sense of who the main character is, and it's good if I have a vegue idea of where I want the story to go, but really I just write and figure it out as I go. Normally somewhere around 15-20k words I figure out what I'm actually writing about and go back to start over. From that point on I write in more of a circular pattern, writing and revising at the same time about 3 chapters appart.
This last novel that I wrote, I wrote a first draft and didn't like it. So I wrote a second draft that I just finished. I had some ideas in the first one and wrote mostly from my head. It was a mess. The second draft I did an outline that I ignored once I hit the middle. I am starting to think that my style is changing, but mostly things just flow out of my head and outlines don't keep me within bounds.
Post a Comment