I am sorry

I am sorry that it's been so long since I put anything up here. There has been so much going on in my life that this has taken a step back from my life. As you can see on the right hand side the bars have changed. NaNo 2013 has gone and my total 2014 word count is now up.

Now, in other news, my little project (The Youngest Guardian) is now on week 12. If you've missed the start, here you go: http://penguinsandninjas.wordpress.com/first-draft/week-1/

If you are much further than that, well, there's the drop down list at the top (kind of) and navigation buttons at the bottom of the page.

Have fun.

Happy Writing.

Are you a "Planner" or a "Do-er"?

What's the difference? Well, I'll tell you that technically, these are terms that I think summarises all writers out there.

Planners
Planners are the kind of writers who like to plan out how the story will go. It may be case that they have a story outline, or they have a start and and end, or scene by scene breakdown  of each chapter. Planners may have a basic outline of their story but they in some way know in which direction their story is going.

Do-ers
Do-ers only have the name of all or some of their characters. They may have a general idea of where their story is ending but they have no idea what's going to happen next. These types of writers prefer to be surprised by what comes next. A woman singing badly out of tune or some crazed idiot demanding to be locked away from the fairies? Who knows? The writer doesn't.

Personally, I am a do-er. Planning a story, to me, sucks the fun out of writing. I like the surprise of not knowing who's going to turn left or right, of not knowing if somebody's going to jump when told or tell the instructor to jump themselves. What I enjoy about writing stories is the mystery of it all. If I planned out every scene, or the general story arc, I wouldn't want to write it because it's already there. I tried that once. The story died horribly in a pit of flaming death.

But the point is that planners make plans to do with plot. Do-ers may make plans about characters, but not usually about plot.

So, which one are you? Are you a Planner? Or are you a Do-er?

Happy Writing

First drafts

My first drafts always seem to lack the meat that every story needs. They consistently exist of the bones plus a little fat, but not the meat. For some, I know that they have the problem of getting everything in there and cutting back. But for me, it's a case of getting everything that happens down, then expand on this with emotions, thoughts, actual meat.

I'm not sure how many other people have this problem of including too little information the first time around, but I like working this way. The first draft let's me get the story down, let's me get the main cast of characters that are going to participate within the story. I know what happens first, second, third and so on.

The second draft is when I start to expand on this. I add thoughts, emotions. I tweak what happens to accommodate extra material in terms of character and history. I add tiks, nervous habits, family members. The second draft is when everything seems to flourish.

What I've heard people say before is that the first draft is just to get the story down. Seriously. You know what direction you want your story to go in? Write in. Forget about your character's emotions, thoughts and desires. Have them reacting and acting to the events that take place and get the story down. In the second draft you can bulk it out and make it better. You can humanise the characters then.

That's what my second draft of Redux is for, humanising the characters so that you, as a reader, feel more sympathetic to what happens to them.

Happy writing.