Write for your audience -and more

Word Count:

Monday, Dec 14: 420 

--
Ruben Bolling recently discussed Sandak's famous claim about his audience:

“I don’t write for children. I write – and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’”

This confused Bolling until he heard Jules Feiffer say he wrote for both adults and children. "Both.  I write for the kid in me."

I hugely love Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug comic and read it every week. He describes his work thus:

In addition, I realize now that when I write “Tom the Dancing Bug,” I’m not really writing for some abstract, whole “me.” I’m writing for the adult in me – that part of me that is interested in sketch comedy, absurdist humor and political and social satire.
But, speaking of plot twists, here’s the M. Night Shyamalan-type kicker at the end of the story: It turns out that even as I wrote my very grownup comic strip for 25 years, I’ve been also writing for the kid in me the whole time!
When I want to write about income inequality, I use “funny animal” Carl Barks-like comic book characters....
When I want to write about religion, I use a brightly colored, caped superhero.

---
Khiatons offers a round up of science news that seems perfect to power Sci-Fi stories. A few examples:

Carbon Farming Gets A Nod At Paris Climate Conference 

Computer learns like a human and (sort of) beat the Turing Test 

Engineers build biologically powered chip 

Google Teams Up With Scientists To Track STD Outbreaks 

Diagnosing malaria with a cell phone

This appears to be a weekly thing.  I don't think the links carried through so follow my link to Khiatons page for them.
---
Backstory: You're doing it wrong Lisa Cron explains a common problem with backstory - it stops the 'now' story and is mostly an info-dump.  Here is her suggestion:

...the protagonist’s backstory must be layered into the current action. Rather than learning about it “objectively,” readers want to experience it through the affect it has on the protagonist now, in the moment.
Here’s the secret: Backstory becomes present – and therefore active – when it’s influencing what your protagonist is doing, thinking, considering. That is the wavelength your reader is wired to respond to, because that’s where your protagonist’s motive lives. We don’t simply want to know what your protagonist does, we want to know why.

---
Jon Winokur collects quotes about writing.  For some reason, I am giving only a fragment of a quote he has collected from someone else.  Anti-plagiarism habits die hard:

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, ...

----
I don't want this blog to be only about writing. I recently watched a woodcarving video by Dennis Stallings and finally see how the eyes should be done. I have always made googly eyes or bulging eyes.  Here I see how to inset them a little.

Are women perceived as less creative?

Word Count

Sun, Dec 13: 582

--

Before getting into the article, let me say here that the double tab bar on the Sci Am website makes reading there a chore.  I copied the pasted the article into a Wordpad document to be able to read it comfortably.  As seen above, there is a 'Scientific American' bar in White and a 'Now reading' bar in black.  They took up valuable real estate on my notebook's screen.

An article at Scientific American suggests that the answer is yes.
Daisy Grewal looked at a variety of studies and found that when the gender of an architect was known, the perceived creativity of their work declined.

The participants then answered questions about how creative they thought the images were. When it came to architecture, the participants rated the images as more creative when they thought the work had been done by a man. With fashion design, there was no difference in the creativity ratings

In this and other studies, the definition of creativity was discussed:

The data that the researchers were most interested in was the percentage of viewers that applied the adjective “ingenious” to a talk, since it was the adjective most closely aligned with creativity.

...
...found that people’s general beliefs about what it takes to “think creatively” show substantial overlap with traits we more closely associate with men, such as competitiveness, self-reliance, and risk-taking.

Workers in design fields showed less bias but people getting their MBA clearly faced bias

Proudfoot and colleagues found one-hundred and thirty-four senior-level executives enrolled in an MBA program. As part of the curriculum, each executive was anonymously evaluated by their supervisors and direct reports on several dimensions, including perceived innovativeness. Looking at the evaluations in terms of gender revealed that the female executives were judged by their supervisors as less innovative in their thinking compared to the male executives

Neoverse writing contest

Wordcount:

Saturday, Dec 12: 1290 words

Neoverse short story writing contest. I don't have anything ready to enter but it looks great.  To me, as a cynical middle-aged man, it looks almost too good.  Big prizes and no entry fee. Caveat scriptor.
The stories need to be between 1,000 and 5,000 and the deadline is Dec 20.

via freedomwithwriting.

Maintaining momentum after Nanowrimo

Word count

Sat Dec 5: 544 words
Sunday, 0
Monday, Dec 7: 960 words
Tuesday, Dec 8: 730 words
Wednesday, Dec 9: 438 words*
Thursday, Dec 10: 591 words

Some Nano authors in Korea are posting their website and blogs on the Nanowrimo in Korea Facebook page and I thought I would mention them here.

Evydraws - and also writes, i presume
Simon writes, too.
Marcus Medina is nearly done and ready to publish his book.  I think it is a sequel to Yscariot: Neo-Alpha.
---
I'm a fan of AC Fuller's Writer 2.0 podcast and he recently had Helen Sedgwick, an author and lawyer, on his show to talk about various legal issues.  Among other things, she offers a free set of instructions for asking music companies for permission to use lyrics in a book.  This information is specific to the US but probably broadly applicable elsewhere.
--
My understanding of genre writing versus literature is that literature is more character-driven while genre writing is more plot-driven.  I'm not big on divisions myself, but that's a fair starting point to understand the differences.  If you are worried about plot, Angela Meadon has a post on planning and organizing your plot.

The story is set in a world similar to ancient north west Africa and the plot is loosely based on the fall of the Wagadu Empire. I realised, about 37,000 words in, that I was quickly loosing track of my characters and their goals were getting fuzzy. I didn’t know where the novel was going.
I wasn’t prepared to throw out the whole thing and start again, because I think I have some good work in there and I’m not prepared to give up those words. Not yet.
What did I do? I read.
Step One
I started with a revision of the Heroes Journey, the 12-step structure of mythical stories that just about every novel I can name adheres to. The official definition, from the link above, is:

[-deleted - follow the link for it]
I got out some colorful pencils and sketched it out for myself:
[-deleted image - follow the link for it]
Step Two
The next thing I did was to write out my plot according to the three act structure.
This is very important, I wanted my story to have a tight, compelling and satisfying structure. I want readers to be drawn in by the flow of the story as the characters move through the world. I needed to make sure that I had my three acts properly laid out from the beginning.

Seriously, there is good stuff at that link - at all of them, really, so click on over once you have finished reading my drivel.
----------
*438 words is not only less than my intended minimum but I also threw out a few hundred words of yesterday's output as well.  In addition, I had typed more in Ommwriter and accidentally hit CTRL V instead of CTRL C.  Ommwriter doesn't have an 'undo' button.  After cursing to myself, I rewrote that bit.

writing and blogging

Word count:

Thurs, Dec 3: 554 words
Fri, Dec 4: 574 words

-----

How do you describe a blog? This is almost the entire post - something I am uncomfortable pasting - but the author did ask for input, so I guess or hope that gives me the leeway to share the content.  For crying out loud, answer the question with me, so it is clear I am sharing and not taking!

But there is more too it [a blog and blogging] than that. A blog is not just about a place for the author to broadcast, it is also a place for conversation. To be a blogger is to be a part of a community of the bloggers. Different types of blogs have different cultures. The blog-o-sphere isn’t one thing. It is not something that can simply be identified.
...
We could think of a blog as a living thing. Something that is fed – primarily by the blog author – but also by those who choose to comment. Those who engage in conversation also feed the blog, encouraging the author to continue.
I have a challenge ahead of me. I want to blog as dissertation. I want to blog as data collection. But before I can do that, I need to define what a blog is. I need to define it for the lay person who is note familiar with technology. I also need to define it for my community. I need to define it for an external examiner. I need to someone make static the dynamic and living thing that is a blog.
And so, I ask my readers, how do you define a blog? What are the ‘things’ that make a blog a blog, rather than a website or a personal public journal? What makes a blog a unique digital media?

I don't think a blog can fully be described as " a journal or log that is online" even if that is the origin of the name - weB  + LOG = 'blog'.  It is used as a journal but for so much more.  I personally have six or seven currently in use and I use most simply as a simple form of content storage online.

"Six or seven blogs!", you say incredulously.  "What the heck?"

Well, three of them contain content for classes I teach.  I am uncertain how easy it would be for you to find them as I originally set them as private.  Privacy settings change all the time.  Anyway, I am not offering links. The blogs are filled with Powerpoint and Google Slides that I can use in class with the link but without signing in.  I don't like to use my password on university computers for fear of keyloggers or other password gathering malware.

So those three were in roughly chronological order but exist now only as storage.

I infrequently post content on my evolution proponent page where I argue against creationist talking points. I focus on easily rebutted creationist claims in the hope that creationists would see my simple responses and move on to new or less outdated arguments.  That's a lot to expect from a fourth rate blog by a third rate biologist. Still, I enjoy writing there.  It is not topical in the way I expect a 'proper blog' to be.

My blog Gangwon Notes was my original blog and it was my signature effort.  I was one of only a few English speakers in the rural province of Gangwondo, South Korea, so I had the niche to myself.  It was a mix of wildlife and nature posts, ESL discussion and local news and events.

This blog is focused on my efforts to be creative and also be a place for me to store research and inspiration from other creative people.

So, I have now described my blogs as places for: storage, PPT and educational resources, daily events, news, a space for argument and persuasion, and as a scrapbook.  I feel a 'real blog' should consist only of daily events and news, scrap-booking and persuasion.  It shouldn't primarily be a place for online storage.  Why I feel this way, I cannot fully say, but it feels to me like using a screwdriver as a bottle opener -it works but isn't designed for it.

reader immersion

Words typed:

Tuesday Dec 2: 532

----
There are strange things, inconsequential really, that knock you out of a story.  Often, they are so trivial that you are given the name 'Grammar Nazi' or 'Grammar Police' for pointing them out. Well, often I am.
I know that my own grammar is not what it should be and that is especially true on this blog.  I feel my blogs are a place for nearly-first drafts, for stream of consciousness writing. I do return to older posts and make corrections but they don't bother me too much here -despite my understanding that such errors will drive my reader(s?) crazy.

In works that I prepare for a specific audience - articles for the campus magazine or the like, I do reread and spell check them more carefully.  I hope I don't have too many errors of the sort listed here: 51 things that break reader immersion.  The author reads an indie book while in her/his treadmill and notes if s/he got through 40 minutes of reading or not.

Nanowrimo is finished. Am I?

 Today's total: 553 words

This is the third time I have completed Nanowrimo and the first time I was a Municipal Liaison.  I am tired of it.

The writing wasn't bad or difficult.  There were a few days where I really had to think about what to write next but mostly it spilled out with satisfying smoothness.  The 'Word-wars' and 'Word-sprints' were the toughest part.  A war or sprint occurs when a group decides to do nothing but write for the next twenty minutes (typically 20, it could be any length).  After that time, we compare word counts.  My best was 511 words in twenty minutes and others managed as high as 900 words.

This was a great way to encourage focused typing, but after each sprint or war, people would chat for ten minutes - or get coffee or do other things -and as ML, I was expected to be sociable.  And I enjoyed being sociable.  On the other hand, this meant that twenty minutes of every hour was lost to typing.  You have to type an awful in forty minutes to make up a good hour's word count in that time.

Nanowrimo is an attempt to make the solitary act of typing a social event and it succeeds.  I don't write nearly as much as I want to in the other eleven months so for me it is hugely useful and valuable.  Still, it was the unrelenting social aspect that wore me down this time.

 I had trouble with my iMac's photo-booth application.  The green screen effect wasn't as good as it should have been.

I was really swept into the literary circles of Busan and there are more writers and wannabes like myself here than I had realized.  This was encouraging and in seeing how they manage to write for more than one twelfth of the year, I see that I need to not stop.

I will not try to maintain the seventeen hundred words a day pace of Nano but will try to stay above 500 a day. 

This count does not include anything except my story.  The words of this post are not included.

In Korea, there is a strange Konglish word, "Fighting" which means keep going, or good luck.  Among my Nano friends, we said, "Writing."