Lounge II (The Lounge Strikes Back)

[Sarah B she/her]

On 1/1/2021 at 9:25 PM, kais said:

I'd say here since everyone is looking here already?

My bad, I thought the thread for buisness of writing and publishing was for editor/agent/querying only. I'll post writing craft questions there next time. 

Thanks again!

[shatteredsmooth]

So I have each of the 3 WIPs I've been going back and forth between in different fonts and formats, and I find it helps me sort them out in my head. Like the short story is Courier New single space / block format, my novelette is Georgia 1.5 space, and my novel is Times New Roman double space.  I've heard people say changing the font can help with creativity or getting past blocks, and changing it to Courier New for that short story seemed like it helped me with voice and tone in some way. 

[Robinski he/him]

Reading Excuses has a F-cebook page.

Here's something I put up today for some inspiration.

https://www.facebook.com/readingexcuses/posts/3718696331509692

[Snakenaps she/her]

Found your new story prompt:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/aditya-singh-chicago-ohare-lived-three-months/index.html

"A Californian man who was "scared to go home because of Covid" lived undetected in Chicago's O'Hare Airport for three months, according to multiple reports."

Forget The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and kids living undetected in a museum. Time to go with man living in an airport. 

[Sarah B she/her]

What do you think of a new thread specifically for what you're reading and what inspires you about it or what you intend to do or avoid after reading it? 

It might be useful to compare notes on good examples for different writing skills. I know I've gotten some great suggestions already when the topic comes up in other threads. 

The idea just hit me while reading The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin. Little things she does in her prose are just SO GOOD. Its Intimidating and inspiring at the same time. I don't know how I've missed this book until now. 

[kais]

16 hours ago, Sarah B said:

What do you think of a new thread specifically for what you're reading and what inspires you about it or what you intend to do or avoid after reading it? 

It might be useful to compare notes on good examples for different writing skills. I know I've gotten some great suggestions already when the topic comes up in other threads. 

The idea just hit me while reading The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin. Little things she does in her prose are just SO GOOD. Its Intimidating and inspiring at the same time. I don't know how I've missed this book until now. 

I think we had a thread like this a while back. I've got no issues either making a new one or performing thread necromancy.

[Turin Turambar]

When I realize that writing 1500 words/hour is not normal. To put it in perspective, I used to sit down for two hours each morning and write a chapter (plus a little bit in the afternoon). At the same time, my first drafts are utter trash. That's what drafts 2-ad infinitum are for. 

[shatteredsmooth]

19 minutes ago, Turin Turambar said:

When I realize that writing 1500 words/hour is not normal.

I wouldn't call that abnormal.

I can write 1,000 to 1,500 words an hour when I can actually focus and have the story clear in my head. Yes, it's trash, but that is what revision is for.  I'm in a few writer discord servers where we do timed sprints. We enter your starting word count in the begining, and the final word count when time is up. Then the bot calculates how many words each person wrote and ranks them (inspires a little competition). I see quite about half the people I sprint with can average 400 to 500 words in 15 or 20 minute sprints.

I notice the people who write the slowest tend to be the ones are the ones who self-edit as they go and produce cleaner drafts. 

It's not something all writers do, but I think there are plenty of speedy drafters out there. 

[Silk she/her]

Yep, I'd say I can do 1000-1200 words in an hour in the right situation (i.e. have a decent outline or am far enough into the draft to have discovery-written my way into knowing what I'm doing). 

[Mandamon he/him]

21 hours ago, Turin Turambar said:

When I realize that writing 1500 words/hour is not normal.

Yep, same as the others. With a fully fleshed outline, I've done around 800 words in 20 minutes that are not trash at all. I can expand that to close to 2000 in a little over an hour wiht only minor editing later.

[Sarah B she/her]

Thanks for sharing that video! It's encouraging to see, even knowing how fast Brandon writes :-)

Last year I was writing about 400-800 an hour and decided to start pushing myself on my first nanowrimo attempt because I couldn't find 2-4 hours a day to write.

I now write about 1600 in an hour of varying quality. I think this has stayed my cap due to nanowrimo and trying to get my daily words in an hour.

Still working on endurance. After 1-1.5 hours my brain produces pure gibberish :-) I am amazed at authors who can write 3 or more hours at a stretch. 

[Robinski he/him]

4 hours ago, Sarah B said:

Still working on endurance. After 1-1.5 hours my brain produces pure gibberish :-) I am amazed at authors who can write 3 or more hours at a stretch.

Ahem, yeah, I can't concentrate for longer than about half an hour at a time without needing to step away. I used to be able to. My smartphone has totally transformed my ability to concentrate, and not in a good way. I firmly believe that future generations will be practically disabled in their ability to concentrate as a result. It's happening already, been happening for a while.

[shatteredsmooth]

I forget if I've talked about it here, but I'm currently in a writing mentorship program called Pitch Wars (https://pitchwars.org/. Some of the people in are group, including me, put the draft we started with and the draft we ended with in a thing that compares two documents and tells you how similar they are. ( https://desklib.com/writing/compare/ ) It's intended use is to check for plagiarism, but it is also really a cool way to get a general idea of how much you changed on a revision. 

Mine was only a 22% match. 

Over the course of two revisions, I changed 78% of my book. When I started this program, I was already on my 4th draft. I bet if I compared my actual 1st draft to the current one, there would be even less of a match. 

Now, this is just based on words and sentences. The program isn't detecting anything complicated like plot structure. But still. I made a lot of changes to that book, and that is exactly what it needed. Everything good I have ever written has drastically changed from my first draft to my final. The works that end up getting shelved are the ones where I don't really change much from draft to draft. 

For me, and many other writers, revision often involves not just making minor adjustments here and there, but drastically changing things. Taking out entire scenes and chapters. Rewriting scenes or chapters. Changing dialogue.

A majority of the other people in Pitch Wars who checked their documents had made changes as drastic as mine. One person was only a 10% match. I think the person who came up with the leas changes was a 50% match.

In order to improve, I think many writers need to be willing to rip their work apart  and rebuild it over and over to make something amazing. Something that will stand out in an extremely competitive industry. 

It's not easy, but worth it. 

(also, Pitch Wars is why I didn't get to any critiques last week. I had a deadline. I'll be catching up this week and next).

[Mandamon he/him]

10 hours ago, shatteredsmooth said:

Mine was only a 22% match. 

Interesting. I just ran the draft 0 first write of Facets through compared with the final version and it's only a 21-31% match (not sure which number you're looking at).

[ginger_reckoning]

Hi, sorry to drop off the map for a bit. this semester is turning out to be a lot busier than I expected, so i am going on break until april. I'll be excited to see you then :-P

[Snakenaps she/her]

24 minutes ago, ginger_reckoning said:

Hi, sorry to drop off the map for a bit. this semester is turning out to be a lot busier than I expected, so i am going on break until april. I'll be excited to see you then :-P

See you then!!! Good luck!!!

[ginger_reckoning]

15 minutes ago, Snakenaps said:

See you then!!! Good luck!!!

Thanks! 

[Robinski he/him]

Yeah, good luck  

[C_Vallion she/her]

7 hours ago, ginger_reckoning said:

Hi, sorry to drop off the map for a bit. this semester is turning out to be a lot busier than I expected, so i am going on break until april. I'll be excited to see you then :-P

Good luck!  

[Silk she/her]

10 hours ago, ginger_reckoning said:

Hi, sorry to drop off the map for a bit. this semester is turning out to be a lot busier than I expected, so i am going on break until april. I'll be excited to see you then :-P

Good luck! 

[Robinski he/him]

So, apropos of not a great deal, I'm putting this here instead of at the head of all my upcoming critiques. I just can't process the amount of critiquing that I do now from week to week and continue at the level I was producing in terms of calling out inconsistencies, line-level stuff. 60 minutes plus per critique just isn't sustainable when I'm trying to do my own writing, and to push harder at that writing. Being in a second writing group doesn't help! 

Having said this, I hate the thought of not completing all the crits (gotta collect them all). So, I'm going to work on a new technique--possibly based on a pro forma--and see how that goes. My crits might come over more superficial, I'm afraid, but hopefully still will be useful. I very much doubt they will be any less direct  

Happy writing!

[shatteredsmooth]

23 hours ago, ginger_reckoning said:

Hi, sorry to drop off the map for a bit. this semester is turning out to be a lot busier than I expected, so i am going on break until april. I'll be excited to see you then :-P

Totally valid! Looking forward to seeing you back in the spring! 

[Snakenaps she/her]

My calendar reminded me of something cool today: one year ago, I first joined Reading Excuses! What a year it has been! Crazy to look back and see how much I have grown as a writer, despite all the turbulence and chaos.

Here's to another year! 

[Robinski he/him]

Happy REbirthday!

[shatteredsmooth]

On 2/25/2021 at 5:33 PM, Snakenaps said:

My calendar reminded me of something cool today: one year ago, I first joined Reading Excuses! What a year it has been! Crazy to look back and see how much I have grown as a writer, despite all the turbulence and chaos.

Here's to another year! 

Yay!!! Glad you are here. :-)

 

@Robinski Great meme!