Writing – The Craft of

Please Prompt Me

/ Lisa / 7 Comments

I am tasked with coming up with some writing prompts. I’m promptly challenged.

This is a topic I’ve talked about before, but keep coming back to. A wonderful, artistic friend, Lisa, over at satsumabug.com sent me writing prompts on a regular basis and I had fun with those. What I found, though, was that I picked the topics that interested me rather than ones that challenged me as a writer. I’d grab something fun, scribble a little, and feel like I met my obligation. I learned that those fun little interludes were great for warming up my brain so I could then dive into whatever my work in progress was. Rather like priming the pump.

I can also see lots of uses for them. To warm you up, as I mentioned above. To make you think about specific ways to write something you might normally struggle with, such as setting, description, dialog, etc. To force you to try a different style than what your normally do, such as present tense, first person, and so on. So I see them as beneficial even though, as I confessed above, I might not take advantage of these as I should.

One conference I attended gave us prompts with five minutes to write each one. For a half hour session she gave us four prompts, which meant she only had ten minutes that she had to actually speak to us. Supposedly the prompts were to encourage us to free-style write, to release the subconscious. Personally, my problem has always been more reining in that rampaging subconscious and imagination. For this upcoming event, I definitely do not want the audience looking at prompts as filler for speakers who have nothing to say.

A more relevant question for me at the moment though, is what should the prompt be? Reminds me of a creative writing course I took many, many years ago. The teacher told us to write about a peanut. I thought that was silly until I wrote and had fun. But really, trying to come up with an original prompt that will stimulate the imagination, not be something that’s been done thousands of times before, and that actually challenges a writer…well, I’m clueless.

Though I’m fascinated by asking writers to write a scene in a tense they normally don’t write in, because writing in present tense is so difficult for the majority of writers. I do believe, pondering prompts in this blog has given me at least one idea.

And I’d love your thoughts on prompts in general.

Word Conundrum

/ Lisa / 7 Comments

Which comes first, the final edit or the readers?

I have become hooked on the Game of Throne series and noticed that there are places where I skim. In some spots there will be paragraphs of names, as in before a battle starts, when the author lists everyone who’s there. I don’t really care; I want to see the fight. Plus, with all the names I’ll figure out who they are if they show up again.

The point is though, that I skim whole sections. And there’s that old adage that if the reader skims, that should be the part the writer leaves out.

And there’s my dang conundrum. By the time readers are skimming and making note of that in reviews, the book is out of my hands. There’s nothing I can do about it. Hopefully an editor is honest enough to point out the places readers might be tempted to skip, but obviously that isn’t foolproof. On top of that, what one reader finds boring another will not. If you left out stuff everyone skims you’d probably end up with two pieces of cardboard with great cover art and just empty space in between.

That leads to the old dilemma about editing: how to stop. It used to be once a book was published there was nothing more you could do. If there was a typo or a long passage people skipped, it was there for posterity, or at least until the next printing. These days, the temptation is to take the book back, make changes, and republish it.

Think about the chaos that could cause. Multiple versions of your book. And think about the temptation to revise in a series. You could be working on book three or book ten and realize you should have added a character sooner, or tossed in something in book two that would allow you to justify what you want to do to your character in book eight. Readers would be so confused. A clue that existed in version two of book one isn’t in version three, and on and on. I imagine the writer would be pretty confused, too.

However even though it’s possible these days to edit forever, obviously you shouldn’t. Still though, there are those skimming sections that I bet authors wish all the readers pointed out before publication. It’s too bad we can’t do a preliminary publication, similar to an audience screening of a movie. Something where more readers than just five or six would weigh in.

Oh well. Meandering brain this rainy afternoon.

A Presence on the Web

/ Lisa / 3 Comments

I attended a seminar at the Northwest Book Fest about websites. The speaker said a website is an author’s home out in the internet, and a place where the author has control and doesn’t have to worry about a host disappearing or changing rules. I understand all of that, plus all his other points.

When I like an author, I look them up online and visit their website just to get a feel for who they are. I rarely purchase books directly from their websites, and should probably rethink that, to keep funds local rather than automatically going to Amazon. Some of those sites actually add to my interest in purchasing a book. Some websites are awful, and leave me thinking if the author can’t put more effort in than that, why should I bother to buy? Especially if it’s an author that I haven’t read yet. That always makes me feel guilty, rather like judging a person by their appearance, which I know better than to do.

As I look at websites by authors, I realize the ones I like are the ones that feel like visiting a friend, a place to hang out, a place with interesting things to read. The ones I don’t like are the ones that simply shout ‘Buy my book! Now!’

I attempted a website once. As far as I know, it’s floating around out there somewhere, lonely and forgotten. Why? Because I paid someone I knew $200 to build it for me, and when I tried to research how to optimize search engine results, realized I didn’t own the domain name and so couldn’t do any work or make any changes. When I went back to the web builder, she never responded to any of my queries. A failed attempt and a learning experience.

Now I’m debating the merits of having a professional website built. By a reputable company, with options for continuing to work with me after the site is built, for doing research and search engine optimization for me, and so on. Starting at around $6,000. Those of you who know me, know I am cheap. Hence the $200 website. And look where that got me. Yet I’m torn.

Are websites really that valuable? Are they as necessary as people believe, to get your name and work out there? Do you, as readers and authors, look at author websites? I know one fellow author doesn’t feel websites are valuable, but then her blog has her name as a title, so people can find her if they type in her name. This blog doesn’t have my name on it, so there’s no ‘home’. But I like the name of my blog and don’t want to change it.

Ah, the dilemma. Ah, the cost.