Tag Archive - novel writing

Too much magic

November 9, 2009 in Journal with 9 Comments

I scratched the words across the yellow page of my legal pad in red: Too much magic. Underlined it. Then I looked at my manuscript, sat back, and realized I had a problem.

But, let’s come back to that in a minute. First I want to talk about how I got to that point.

Lately, I’ve been reading books on screenwriting. Not because I want to be a screenwriter (I don’t, at least not yet), but because those brave men and women who write for the small and big screens understand storytelling better than 99% of the world. They certainly understand it better than I do, so I’m learning a lot along the way.

Why do they understand it better? Well, it’s because they have to. Their job is to distill all of the elements of a good story–the dialogue, characters, narrative, plot, all of it–into a thick reduction sauce that goes down smooth. It’s got to taste slow cooked, but has to be done in microwave time. They don’t have 400 pages to tell their story. They have 110 if they’re writing for movies. Less if they’re writing for TV. That means they must force the story down to its essence, which is ultimately what the audience cares about and will invest themselves in. If they do it right. Continue Reading…

I come from the future. No, really.

October 13, 2009 in Journal with 4 Comments

In the book world, life happens in 12-month cycles. We live in the future because we must, not always because we want to.  It’s a necessity, this living in the future, driven by the demands of the whole rumbling machine we call publishing.

It’s a fascinating process and I wish more readers could see what I do on a daily basis. If they did, they would appreciate the massive amount of time, talent, money, and dedication required to pluck inspiration from the sky, turn it into a story by tying words and emotions together, and then transform it into something that transports them to another world even as they sit on their couch nursing a cup of tea.

Most people don’t know that it takes a year (or more) to bring a book to market. Well, I mean they know it does, but they don’t really know. It’s like saying we know it takes several years for a good wine to go from a harvest of grapes plucked from a sunny slope to a raised glass as friends sit around a table. Until you stop to consider it, the whole business is easy to pass over without a thought. You don’t really think about the planting, the cultivating, the harvesting, the crushing, and the other bits, because the maker did his job all out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind.

So let me show you my side of the world for a moment. Continue Reading…