Magical Words: Writing With A Baby

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Babies not only pull at your heartstrings, they pull at your hair and your time. I have five sisters, all of whom decided to have children therefore I’m blessed with a lot of niblings, so I’ve been around a lot of babies. Only one of my sisters committed to retaining a career after having children; the rest have decided to be primary caregivers to the next generation, sometimes holding down a job, but mostly depending on their significant other to provide the hours outside the home needed for income to cover housing and food while they covered the hours needed inside the home to create healthy, well-developed adults from their mutual commitment when they decided to have children.

Doing something on top of children, let alone when the offspring is at their most neediest, always amazes me. Babies are WORK. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Many potential authors think that when they have a Baby they will also write their Novel.

Many potential authors are delusional from the future lack of sleep.

Catie Murphy discusses her commitments, both to her novel-writing career and her child, in the Magical Word post from March 31, 2011, “Writing With a Baby”. The comment section includes a comments from others holding down the dual career of author and parent.

By the way, happy Women’s History Month.

The URL, for those that prefer the cut and paste method is: http://www.magicalwords.net/cemurphy/writing-with-a-baby/

Magical Words: Bashers vs. Swoopers

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I’m pretty sure everyone reading my blog at this point knows if they are a plotter or pantser. I’m a mix – plotter – extremely so – for long works … which is one of the reasons I think they never get done; I get caught up in the wonder of worldbuilding. On the other side of things, I’m a pantser for shorter works – embracing the joy of writing quick flashes to get story ideas out. Right now I trying to see if I can plot with one sentence for a chapter outline, a very lean outline of just one or two dozen thoughts, then pants each chapter back-to-back.

I’m still, after all this time, learning to write effectively and productively, as well as embracing into the joy and wonder that has kept me exploring writing for so long.

Edmund Schubert in his Magical Words post from June 8, 2012 raises a similar question – “Bashers vs. Swoopers.” These are terms Kurt Vonnegut used to discuss writing styles. Swoopers write quickly, like a flash or Nanowrimo, planning to fix-things-in-post and Bashers move forward one written then hardened then polished sentence at a time. It’s an interesting thought.

URL: https://www.magicalwords.net/edmund-r.-schubert/writing-styles-bashers-vs-swoopers/

WRITING EXERCISE: Comment below on your writing style below. Are you are plotter or pantser; swooper or basher?

My Attempt: I’ve already covered the plotter vs. pantser above. As to Swooper or Basher, I’m about halfway between. I do a lot of internal editing as I go. I guess I write about half as many words as actually make it to the final computer screen by the end of the first draft. So not a willy-nilly breakneck past down the hill in a soapbox cart, but not a snail-pace crawl of back-stitches with two steps back for every step forward. After the zero-draft is done for pantsing flashes and blog posts, I read it through – then copy it to a different program which will make it appear differently on the screen and read it again. Then post it. After all these aren’t sales product. Short stories and novellas – they get REAL drafts – multiple passes with days and even weeks of “rest” time before the next pass. So I am a Swoop-Basher in both plotter and pantser mode.

Writing Exercise: Backloading

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Kalayna Price introduced an interesting wordsmithing concept in the Sept 27, 2012 Magical Word post “Backloading for Power.” Go read it, because we are going to work on this for today’s writing exercise. (URL: http://www.magicalwords.net/kalayna-price/on-wordsmithing-backloading-for-power/)

WRITING EXERCISE: From your work in progress, choose a paragraph that could use more “umph” and use the Backloading technique. Comment below on how it went.

Magical Words: Plot vs Premise

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Tax season has started, so today is short and sweet. “Distinguishing between Plot and Premise” by NYT bestselling author Carrie Ryan, posted to Magical Words on April 2, 2012.

What is Plot and what is Premise – and are you confusing the two?

As magicalwords.net seems to have been removed after remaining up for half a decade, let me summarize the post for you.

Premise is short. Someone asks you “What is your story about?”, and you break out your elevator pitch. Let’s use Above the Crowd as the example. “Aliens kidnap Earth women as a reward for battle/sport entertainment slaves, but the women are not docile nor happy to remain as slaves.”

Plot is more a synopsis, the series of events creating the book arc. How the women feel waking up, the men choosing their women, the women discovering their purpose and going “all the nope”, both of them adjust to each other and falling in love, both of them sneaking the new tech for eventual escape, the aliens reacting, etc.

You need to know the distinction between premise and plot, as you might fall in love with a premise, but it just doesn’t work as a story – the premise goes nowhere.

Make sure, when you write, you don’t just have a wonderful world-building fact, but a story to build around it.

Find out, you may be able to hunt down the Magical Words post in one of those “we save the entire internet” sites – URL used to be http://www.magicalwords.net/carrie-ryan/distinguishing-between-plot-and-premise/

Magical Words: If a character screams…

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“If a character screams while off the page, does anyone hear them?” a Magical Words post by Kalayna Price from September 17, 2011 discusses secondary and tertiary characters offscreen lives. How much should a writer know about them? Are they leaving the room to pick up kids from school, from work, or burying a body and should you as a writer even care?

An interesting read, with fun comments like Lyn Nichols answering the title question: “Oh Lord, I hope not. I’d have to stop torturing them!” More useful was Daniel R. Davis saying “The rest of the world doesn’t stop because your characters do.” Which means, your character may be dealing with the craziness worthy of a novel, but people still go about their lives.

Again the URL is: http://www.magicalwords.net/kalayna-price/if-a-character-screams-off-the-page-does-anyone-hear-them/