Category: Uncategorized
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Illogical
In the latest round of revisions, I’ve been dealing with issues of story logic. Why this? Why that? Sometimes people agree that there’s a problem, but I’ve noticed that different people are often stumbling over different things. Stephen King once wrote: “…if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it…
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The Things that Still Aren’t on the Page
Author and writing teacher Darcy Pattison has observed that writers have two stories when they finish a manuscript: the one on the page and the one in their heads. The challenge is bringing the two into alignment. (That’s not quite a quote, but it’s really close.) Today, that was brought home to me again as one…
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Wrestling with Transitions
Transitions. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. The first would be that I’ve just spent a half an hour struggling with a chapter opening and still haven’t found anything that works to my satisfaction. Ordinarily, this is the point where I would decide to march past this section and attack it another…
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Luxor Temple by Night
Sometimes beautiful things can emerge when you clean your desk. In this case, I rediscovered my CD of the photos from Egypt. I’d been meaning to share more of them, but got behind with one thing and another. I can’t take credit for either of these shots. My husband was the man in charge of…
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Not Wrecked!
One of the things that haunts writers when they revise is whether they are making things better or worse. My kids all liked Calyn’s story the best out of everything I’d written. So I’ll admit to being a bit nervous about how my daughters would react to the new version they read it over Christmas…
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Holiday Reading
Ever since I was third or fourth grade, Christmas has meant new books. And new books usually meant new places to travel from Middle Earth to Prince Edward Island. For this holiday season, I had the chance to visit Llyvraneth in Elizabeth C. Bunce’s STAR CROSSED. It wound up being a seasonal book as well since…
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The Dangers of Find and Replace
Don’t get me wrong. I truly love the editing tool of Word that allows me to replace character names with a few keystrokes. But keep in mind that some truly amusing and annoying problems can crop up if you don’t think through things carefully enough. For example, let’s say that you decided that a character should…
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Typing “The End” on Calyn’s Story
I have a ritual for finishing books. I don’t type “The End” until I reach the end. While I was really, really close to having a complete draft of Calyn’s story, I just spent a goodly chunk of the morning editing the last 44 pages by hand and then getting those changes into the computer. …
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Tracking Red Herrings
I enjoyed my time fielding questions during my time as guest author during my time at The Writer’s Retreat. One question about pacing made me think about how to use Darcy Pattison’s shrunken manuscript technique as a way to make sure that red herrings and clues are being distributed throughout the manuscript. In that post,…
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Ten New Chapters
I was fiddling with the ending of Calyn’s story again today and noticed that I was supposedly working on Chapter 16. I knew that wasn’t right, so I went back to discover which chapter I was really on. Interestingly enough, I only had to switch a “2” for the “1” to transform the heading from…
Kristin Wolden Nitz 