This website went live late last week, and reached its current form yesterday, thanks to the much-appreciated efforts of my work colleague Doug Martin. It has all the posts from my old blog, as yet mostly uncategorized. If you were subscribing to the old blog using an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you should update it to point to this site instead, since I don’t expect to post to the old blog except for a “please go to davidalexlamb.com” post.
Reflections on January 6, 2021
As part of learning how to write, I have been reading Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller , her reflections on 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshops One section talks about how she works “from images, to scenes, to incidents, then situations and finally plot” in contrast with either pantsing or the usual kind of plotting. The images often arose from her subconscious, her “Silent Partner;” plotting is essentially knitting together the scenes and incidents into a coherent order, adding new material to connect the old. Diana Gabaldon describes a somewhat similar process, and in a brief conversation with Nalo Hopkinson on the 2015 Writing Excuses Retreat cruise she told me she writes this way, too.
All of my NaNoWriMo novels started with images or very brief scenes. So after the riots on January 6, my reactions crystalized around a small number of images.
What is a Bridging Conflict?
For NaNoWriMo 2018 I wrote a murder mystery set on a starliner. With all the freewriting and deleted words stripped away, it turned out to be a little over 22k words, a novelette by SFWA standards Its main contribution to my development as a writer was that it contained a complete albeit sketchy plot – my first NaNo project I could consider finished in some reasonable sense. For this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo I intended to start turning it into a full novel, but I didn’t have enough prep time to do all the planning my research on writing mysteries showed was necessary. So I’ve been slogging through more research, world-building, plot outlining, figuring out what the various antagonists are doing – all of which is reasonably fun, but over the weekend I got frustrated with not having actually started the story. So I drafted the first chapter.
The story just didn’t work.
More on writing mysteries
My 2018 NaNoWriMo novel was a murder mystery set on a starliner. In April 2019 I was contemplating revising it, so I wrote a summary of some Internet research about writing mysteries, mostly from Writing Excuses. I wound up going a different direction, but now I am coming back to that novel. So I’ve read a wider variety of internet sources, listed at the end of this post, and have synthesized what I learned into a summary of my own. I strongly advise that you read the original sources, too.
Worldcon: Monday August 19
On this last day of Worldcon the sessions I attended were
- Bigotry is not allegorical: strategies for writing and reading
- Well-meaning vs ‘plain dealing’ villains
- Keeping the show on the road: low Earth orbit and beyond
- Martian landers
Unfortunately I have no notes on the Martian landers talk, because the lights were down for the presentation and it was so fascinating I didn’t want to risk missing anything while note-taking.