Category: Writing & Stories

Yzabel / August 8, 2005

This post has originated from an answer to Mina in an e-mail; as I was starting to go on a tangent, I kept it short there, but then thought that I could indeed develop the point a little further.There is a lingering conception in France that “writing is an innate talent”, “writing can’t be learnt”, “either you know how to write or you don’t”. I’m not sure where this comes from; it may simply be some reminiscence from our literary past smelling of elitism. Regardless, I strongly disagree. Talent enters the game to a certain extent only; the rest can indeed be learnt and perfected through advice and practicing—and, like I’ve discovered, much to my dismay, “talent” can also decay with time and lack of said practicing!In writing like in many other domains, I believe that nothing is ever completely carved in stone. Structures change. The most popular genres change. Story organizing change as well. We wouldn’t write nowadays like novelists were doing in the 18th or 19th century—well, we could, but I wouldn’t bet much on getting successful in finding a publisher for such stories, or if people do, it would then be the exception that makes the rule. Not exactly a nice dream for any young writer to aspire to.Read More

Yzabel / August 7, 2005

Recently, I’ve laid my hands on several books related to writing techniques, including the one I’ve just finished yesterday evening and the one I’ve started right after. I must say that these have already taught (or reminded me of) quite a deal of good things about writing, about how to make the readers dive in stories, rather than just placing words under their noses. This has really been most instructing; I seriously needed to get out of my rust.I remember how, ten or so years ago, we had to read the famous “classics” at school. I remember reading Honoré de Balzac, and how we used to joke about how he would take ten pages to describe a single house. While this is exaggerated, it can also give a glimpse on the way writing has changed; what was accepted and recognized in the 19th century wouldn’t work anymore nowadays, especially not for young writers who haven’t been published yet. When it comes to fiction, people want action, people want dialogue; people want to feel involved in stories along with their protagonists, and not being constantly placed at a distance by the author.This reminds me of my post here about purple prose, when I mentioned my convictions of youth that long descriptions were good. I’ve quite changed my views on this, and the books I’m currently reading are helping a great deal with what kind of techniques to use. One of the chapters I’ve lent a particular attention to so far has been one dealing with the use of scenes to convey descriptive information, rather than of narrative speech. The difference is astonishing: while a whole novel can’t of course be made only of fast-succeeding scenes, there are numerous times when replacing descriptions by more action (in its large meaning—”something happening”, not necessarily at a fast pace) will make the story more vivid.Read More

Yzabel / August 6, 2005

At first, it didn’t occur to me that this could be an appropriate topic to blog about here, but it suddenly dawned on me—it is. Even though I’ve encountered many essays in purple prose while browsing recollections of bad role-playing posts, and not too much in the novels I read—it definitely is.Purple prose is exactly something I’ve tended to cultivate, much unvoluntarily, when I was younger (younger as in “still in high school” or “even before that”), younger, stupid, and convinced that the more words I could slam down on a page to describe a situation or a character, the better my “style” would be. Purple prose is now what I’m trying to avoid like the plague, since I know that it will make everything look horrible, with the added stench of “beginner” stamped on it in bold red letters. Purple prose, as can be found on Wikipedia, is “a term of literary criticism, […] used to describe passages, or sometimes entire literary works, written in prose so overly extravagant, ornate or flowery as to break the flow and draw attention to itself. Purple prose is sensuously evocative beyond the requirements of its context. It also refers to writing that employs certain rhetorical effects such as exaggerated sentiment or pathos in an attempt to manipulate a reader’s response.”In other words, and in all honesty, purple prose sucks.Read More

Yzabel / August 5, 2005

I wanted to test it first myself before writing about it here, but as this is now done, here’s a little plug for The Writers Blog Alliance, a project intiated by Clive Allen from Gone Away and given shape to by Deborah Woehr from The Writers Buzz.In a nutshell, the Alliance (still in its beta version at this point) is to provide a place where writers who blog can gather and get more exposure, instead of being drowned in the huge mass of blogs without any hope of getting above it due to the more technical orientation of the famous “A-list”, which members (like most of us, in fact) seldom link to sites outside of their range of interest; writers’ blogs are thus naturally “excluded” from it, and can’t benefit from the linkage it provides. In the words of Clive himself in his post , here’s a more precise description:

WBA began as an idea for increasing the visibility of writer’s blogs. It occurred to me that we are all in a race for traffic, the lifeblood of blogs, but we’re losing that race because our market is smaller than that of the big guns, the blogs on the A-list. In the blogosphere, success is measured by links; the top sites count their incoming links in the thousands whereas we think we’re doing pretty well if we get a hundred links. And quality of link counts too; if you can achieve a link from a blog on the A-list, your own blog’s importance (and traffic) will increase dramatically.The problem is that writers will never get links from A-list blogs; they deal in news and current affairs, oddities and gadgets, we provide good writing that does not depend upon the latest events (I know the journalist writers are an exception to that but they need to consider the toughness of their opposition – the A-list bloggers are entrenched). We’re in a bind: without links to high traffic sites, our blogs can never rise above the cacophony of the millions of blogs, to be noticed by our potential market; but none of the top blogs are ever going to be interested in what we’re offering. What we need is a few heavyweight blogs of our own to dish out links to us so that we can be noticed.

It’s of course hard to tell at this point how things will evolve, but all in all, the project seems to be starting off pretty well in my eyes. With a grouped effort, it can surely go evern further.Y Tags: writing | blog | community

Yzabel / August 4, 2005

This stemmed from the comments left on John’s entry Blog Tips for Writers, as I was wondering whether this should be left as “simple” comments or be worth a spotlight here. I decided on an entry here.A few years ago, when I was new and naive regarding the wide possibilities of Internet, I used to have my own website, and I used to publish some of my writings there, as well as drawings. Granted, it wasn’t anything terrific, whether regarding the web-design work or the translation of my texts, but it was there nonetheless. This beginner’s website is now long gone, dead and buried along with the server on which it used to be hosted; however, recently, I’ve started to toy again with the idea of translating a few of pieces and on posting them here.That’s when the fear started creeping in me—the fear of seeing my work stolen and used, just liked it happened on several art communities I’ve been on in the past, just like it’s also happening on certain blogs, whose unscrupulous owners simply copy and paste full posts from feeds they read and try to pass them for their own. The world wide web is just like its name indicates it—wide— and the wider a system is, the more numerous the chances of seeing this kind of theft and plagiarism to happen.I know that my current website still features several of my drawings (mostly vector ones now, as I’ve switched to this mode of expression over the past two years); I’m however careful to not publish usable versions of these pictures. They’re 72 dpi, they’re not printable due to the sloppy quality this would result in. Words, on the other hands? Words are easy to highlight and copy in a text editor, words are easy to grab—unless it’s just a part of a piece that gets published, but for short stories or on poems, what would be left of them if only publishing a tiny part online? What would be the point for the reader?Read More

Yzabel / July 13, 2005

For some time, I had been looking for a nice, simple and cheap (read: not more than 50$/€, or, better yet, free) software for writing. The one I currently use is the well-known and very good OpenOffice, and I’m really satisfied with it; however, it lacks an essential component for novel writing in my opinion – the ability to navigate through chapters. When I write, it’s not from Chapter One to Final Chapter, and it becomes a hassle, once I have more than just 20 or 30 pages written, to navigate from one chapter to the other as I follow my inspiration regarding what to write at a precise moment. In a nutshell, what I want from such a software can be summarized as follows:

• Ability to organize files/chapters into an easily available single project or index, so that I can quickly sift through them
• Ability to export into a single file, for when I need a complete version to print or send
• Being close enough to a real word processor, at least when it comes to basic formatting, spellcheck and the likes
• Not being too expensive
• Having a trial version, since I don’t buy without testing first
• A bearable enough GUI. I’m going to work with this a lot, and staring at a butt-ugly software for hours can be discouraging no matter what. (I already have WordPress administration panel when I want that.)

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Yzabel / July 11, 2005

Even though this may seem an evidence to some, writing more and more lately has allowed me to finally understand something about my own ways of writing — something that may be key to many blocks I’ve had in the past. Is this something common to other writers, or am I one among few who seemingly understand such evidences very late? I have no idea. I just know that being aware of this has helped me to take gigantic steps in how I had been writing.

There’s a mistake, in my opinion, that should absolutely be avoided when putting down what I could call the “alpha version” of a text, whatever its length: the mistake of absolutely wanting to make it perfect from the start. It only leads to slowing down, to stalling, to starting proof-reading when the article or chapter isn’t even finished yet, and to ending up devoid of all inspiration and ideas, when a few hours ago they had been pressing in one’s mind. There is something very intimidating and very strong in this whole process of proof-reading, really, that will contribute to paralyzing the writer, upon realizing that she didn’t choose her words well enough. This is pretty bad. I wonder if there’s anything worse, in creative writing, than stifling one’s motivation with fears of not being “the best” from second one?…

So, my theory goes as follows: write. Simply write. Write until your fingers go numb on the keyboard or on the pen, write whatever goes through your head as long as the inspiration strikes. Do not bother about grammar rules, about spelling, about this-or-that sentence looking a little odd. Write, and only when it’s done, worry about proof-reading. You will find mistakes, you will find many things that can be improved, and it will sure take some time to fix it all and polish the text until it is finally right; however, at least it will be written, and not frozen into an attempt of correcting it halfway, which tends to kill imagination as well as your basic train of thought.Once again, it is only a theory, and whether it works or not very likely depends a lot on the people. I think I simply found back something that I should never have forgotten at first – that when taking pleasure in writing, it’s important to not stiffle one’s drive early with petty considerations such as proof-reading when the basic idea isn’t even properly laid down yet.In the end, practicing anyway makes us better at finding the right words on the first attempt…