Link Roundup For 18 June 2011

Writing edition

• Reminder: The Clarion Write-a-Thon starts in a little more than a week.
• Chuck Wendig tells us what’s on his shelf of writing advice and asks what on yours.
• Robin Laws explains the choices in prose style in his latest novel.
• Monte Cook looks at the effect that spaces have on his writing.
• John Scalzi lays out what it takes to have a writing career like his.

Update

Fitness: Ran 7 miles
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 306 words, 247 seven-day average, 258 average, 20678 total

It's About Connections

I have fallen in love with TiddlyWiki.

I’ve long been a fan of wikis. I was active on the very first wiki, the Portland Pattern Repository, back before Wikipedia was started. I’m a synthetic thinker, so its no surprise that the hyper-connected nature of wikis appeals to me. They allow me to de-linearize information in a way that just works for me.

I didn’t get TiddlyWiki at first. I knew I wanted a personal wiki to keep track of information for Dying Kingdoms. A few searches mentioned it, so I decided to give it a try. At first, its sheer simplicity confused me. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. And then it clicked: It’s a multi-dimensional notepad. It’s an entire wiki stored in a single file that I can edit from any web browser. And when I keep a copy of it in my Dropbox, it becomes magic.

I started out using it for Dying Kingdoms. By dropping in information from the various documents I had and creating links between them, I started to draw connections between setting elements. Patterns that hadn’t been obvious in separate linear documents suddenly jumped out at me. I started to think how useful it would be to keep track of materials for games that I ran. And then I realized what else I needed to use it for.

So now when I sit down to work on the novel, I set my timer for one Pomodoro. If I hit my 250 word mark before the timer goes off — which I usually do — I open up my magic notepad in a web browser and spend the remaining time following links and filling in holes. Gone are the piles of text documents I was using to try to organize my thoughts. In their place is a whole other brain devoted to this book.

Update

Fitness: None
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 262 words, 262 seven-day average, 264 average, 18506 total

It's Not a Novella Either

I’ve stopped referring to it as a story. I’ve started calling it “the novel.” Under the Nebulas classification scheme it’s technically still a novelette, but there’s no way I’m wrapping things up in the next eight hundred words.

In 2008, I interviewed Monte Cook for Inside the Game Designers Studio. At one point, Monte said that while he’s writing he doesn’t like to talk about the story to other people. Telling it to people, he said, absolves you of the responsibility to actually write it. That made sense to me before; it makes absolute sense to me now. I’ve talked to a few people about the story, and each time afterward I’ve felt my need to write about it diminished. I have gotten some valuable insights from these conversations, and I don’t regret doing it, but it’s a reminder that I need feedback about the words on the page, not about the ideas in my head. Which is why I’m not going to talk about the story here until I’ve written it.

I will probably talk about the process and the structure, since I can’t spend as much time working on something as I am without talking about it at all. Posting my progress here has been a powerful motivator, so I will continue to do that as well. But I don’t want to lay out elements of the fiction until I’ve gotten at least one complete draft done. At the current pace, that should be around the end of September.

I will mention that the working title has changed. It used to be called World’s End. Now, I think it’s called Sun, Moon, and Stars. Which is how I’m going to be referring to it in my updates.

Update: Biked 10 miles
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 268 words, 245 seven-day average, 265 average, 16699 total

On Writing

Ryan Macklin asks:

Tell me of three or five books that have had an impact on your writing. Tell me what impact that was, in concrete terms if you can. (Could be any books — novels, books on writing, RPGs, tech books, etc.)

It’s a trite answer, but first on the list has to be Elements of Style. William Strunk, Jr.’s exhortation to “omit needless words” has been the most important influence on my writing. When I’m writing well, I’m asking myself, “Does this word add anything? Does it carry its weight? Would the sentence be as good without it?” This habit has been reinforced by the writing-focused chapters of Steven King’s On Writing and almost all of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, but Elements of Style is what started me down that path.

It’s not a book, but Building Great Sentences has had a more recent influence on my style, particularly in my fiction. Professor Landon introduced me to cumulative syntax, showing me its strengths, revealing ways to avoid the mock-Hemingway/Mamet style that my unadorned prose would fall into. I recommend the first half of the course, where the meat of the material is, as I found the latter lectures less densely populated with useful techniques.

The references above are mostly about writing, though the bulk of King’s book is about being a writer. Along that line, I’ve found Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird a reassuring account of the context that surrounds writing. Writing is about sentences and paragraphs, grammar and structure. Being a writer is about doing the writing. That process is rarely pretty. As readers, we get to see the end result. As a writer, you have to love the process. Even when you hate it.

All that said, nothing has influenced my writing more than Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It’s the reason that I’m writing as much as a I am. I never thought of myself as an uncreative person or as a failed artist. But what The Artist’s Way helped me realize is how close to the surface my creativity is, how little I needed to do to open myself up to it, and yet how often I didn’t do that. So I stopped not writing, and I wrote.

Update

Fitness: Ran 3 miles + 30 minute workout
Writing: 395 words, 269 average

Link Roundup For 25 May 2011

These are all relevant to my current writing project.

• Josh Roby talks about what the city provides in gaming and in fiction.
• China Miéville waxes eloquent about cities in his fiction.
• Terry Odell tells writers of fiction to resist the urge to explain.
• Kathryn Craft explains how to earn your info dump.
• Robin Laws offers an injunction against creative paralysis.

Update

Fitness: Biked 10 miles
Writing: 81 words, 267 average