My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is an odd book which is kind of a stream of consciousness rant about the ways in which an artist struggles with what the author calls “Resistance.” That in itself is not odd, there are many books on ‘the writer’s journey’ but this one reads as though it has been written by someone who is on, then off his lithium (or cocaine, whatever the cause may be.) The whole thing is a rant, sometimes it’s an enthusiastic, insightful rant and sometimes it’s just a manic bitch rant (people who are sick, or who put attending the birth of their child above their art are simply giving in to resistance) and sometimes it’s just straight out spiritual/religious mish-mash-whackadoo (and I put ‘mystic agnosticism’ on the census as my religion, so I can handle a high level of spiritual mish-mash.)

The best way to approach this book is probably to think of it as an editorial – it’s just a guy with a bunch of opinions about why a true artist takes his art seriously. If you’re pining for someone to tell you that it’s okay to ignore the world, your loved ones etc… while you work, then this is the book for you (personally, though I don’t know what on earth you’re going to write about if you avoid the world as completely as he seems to suggest.) The other warning about the book is not to expect anything on how to actually achieve this resistance to Resistance. Yes, he mentions over and again, sitting down to it every day but that’s hardly new advice though the angels and God and muses just arriving is not something I’ve heard expressed in quite that way before.

As I said. Odd.

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Maybe I’m cheating a little because, as I watched it today, I remembered how much it tugged at my heart when I first discovered it and Levni Yilmaz’s other morsels of human insight, early last year, and I realised that I’m already a step away from that person. Of course, getting to the point where watching this with merely a nostalgic chuckle is a multi-year project, in itself, so maybe I’m not cheating that much.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book immediately after being disappointed by It was the Best of Sentences, It was the Worst of Sentences, so I may have been primed to have an overly enthusiastic reaction to a book which offered such a different take on the subject. To me, Fish’s book was more like a philosophical work on how to approach sentences than a “how-to” book and (apologies if Fish is riffing on a philosophy espoused by others, this being my first exposure to it) I think Fish is really on to something.

As in any book on ‘the sentence,’ Fish parses sentences but he eschews the traditional literary terms, the parts of speech etc., and, instead, approaches the sentence as “a structure of logical relationships.” What does this mean? Well, as I understood it, it means that, rather than analysing the sentence for the parts of speech and labelling those parts and checking them against a table of what is and isn’t allowed (the traditional method,) Fish divides the sentence into logical segments and analyses each part, how each part relates to, and changes, the other parts and what meaning, as a whole, the words in the sentence actually communicate. The ‘logical’ segments I spoke of require only that you are fluent in the language the sentence is written in, you don’t need to have studied literature, nor know how to label all the parts of speech, to learn how to analyse a sentence for quality.

In short, where traditional methods focus on labelling and rules, Fish’s method concentrates on the relationships between words and their effect upon each other and the reader (the content communicated.) Fish’s method consistently reminded me of learning a new language; We can learn the rules and exceptions by rote, but we are far more likely to become fluent using an immersion approach – this is what Fish does with sentences.

Fish analyses many different types of sentences for us, by way of showing us how to do it ourselves, and we may not all agree with the sentences he chooses, but this is beside the point, they are simply samples used to show a method. Still, if we want him to tackle a favourite sentence, Fish asks that we email him (thus, bad ratings of the book based upon which sentences he chose are not only missing the point but betraying that they didn’t read to Fish’s request for alternatives.) Fish gives the reader no sense of “there, now you know everything you will ever need to know about sentences” at the end of this book, rather, he sends us on our way having provided us the tools required to spend our lives learning and improving our writing, or reading.

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My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was expecting something different from this book. The back of book blurbs used phrases like “wickedly funny” and “you’ll laugh all the way to writing better” (the former is a sentence, I know,) so I was expecting a light, new and easily absorbed, for even the uninitiated, take on the art of the sentence. “It was the best…” is lighter than Strunk and White, certainly, and the sentences that Casagrande corrects in order to instruct were, occasionally so bad they were amusing but it wasn’t laugh out loud funny (like, for example, “How Not to Write a Novel” by Mittelmark and Newman.)

I was excited by the first chapter, in which Casagrande declared, “Thy Reader, Thy God,” I looked forward to her showing us how good grammar helps us to serve the reader and she did do so but not in any particularly new way, nor in a way which would help those who didn’t already have a good deal of traditional grammar under their belts. Despite the ‘cheekiness’ of using “actual sentences” from actual pieces Casagrande has edited, albeit disguised, her adherence to an essentially traditional method of teaching grammar results in a heavy treatment of the subject.

If you have the traditional grammar background, there is no doubt that there is much to learn from this book, but it doesn’t meet the purpose I was hoping it would fulfil: a book I can recommend to those without the traditional grammar background, but with an almost religious belief that grammar is unnecessary.

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Maybe I just love a ‘ladder’ – I am a list maker – but I found the the graphs helpful because they were satisfying, they made me want to stay above that line!

After NaNo, I wished that I could keep using the site in the same way and for multiple projects but, of course, I couldn’t – fair enough, too, bandwidth for that kind of thing is expensive – even Storycraft crashes once a week, just after the chat, and that’s just to read posts! For months after NaNo, whenever I found myself thinking that the graph might help spur me on, I googled for word count apps. I found a few basic word count metres but nothing like the NaNo graphs and stats – until, finally, I hit on Write Track.

Write Track was designed by one  David S. Gale, himself a NaNo winner (2009) and married to one (2003.) David and his wife felt just as I did after NaNo but David had the skills to do something about it and put together a replacement, with some fantastic additions which take your non-writing life into account.

Here’s the Write Track basics:

1. you register (free;)
2. you create your own projects with your own target word counts and target dates;
3. the software creates a Calendar for you, giving you the average that you’d need to write each day to meet that goal and;
4. creates a graph ( a couple, actually) of your projected goal, which will gradually be overlaid in a different colour as you;
5. enter your actual word counts each day – or every few days because you can enter the actual word count for any day at any time (as long as it’s not in the future.)

Sounds pretty good, so far, but David has been both clever and  considerate and made Write Track a little different to NaNo, because it’s not actually NaNo all year round and life only puts up with that “I’m doing NaNo, how much blood is there?” crap in November, right? 

After you’ve created your project and Write Track has created your calendar, you can click on a day when, say, you have/or had meetings all day and have/had to take the kids to hockey practice and won’t/didn’t get anything done till late at night. You can ‘weight’ that day as ‘25’(percent) or even ‘0’ and Write Track will adjust the daily targets accordingly, spread over all the days you’ve allotted, and give the day in question a 25% or 0% load of the total. Similarly, if you have a day when you know you’ll have the house all to yourself and will write well all day, you can weight that day at 200% and, again Write Track will adjust the target over the whole project. Weighting and recalculating over the whole project allows you to catch up, without your feeling you have to do twice as much the next day – it’s gentle.  The daily target will also help you to work out if you are pushing yourself too hard, or not enough, with your overall targets.

I don’t have any screenshots for you because David seems to be ‘just this guy, you know?’, not a software company so it’s not presented with a slick ‘features’ and ‘screenshots’ page, but it works wonderfully and he does seem to be constantly tweaking it. Write Track is free to use, with a tasteful, unassuming donation button, which I clicked and sent him $19.95, because I’d be happy to pay that each year as a subscription for such a service.  The previous sentence should make it clear that this is not a paid recommendation post  – you’ll never find those on Narrative Disorder – or Storycraft, for that matter, I wish people would stop asking – and I don’t have any ties to the Write Track or David Gale, I simply like the software and highly recommend it.

Happy Writing!

“If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth – one a lot of writers would rather deny: The Reader is King. You are his servant. You serve the Reader information. You serve the Reader entertainment…Only by knowing your place can you do your job well….

Here’s another way to think of this: Your writing is not about you. It’s about the Reader. Even when it’s quite literally about you – in memoirs, personal essays, first-person accounts – it’s not about you…

When you forget the Reader, you get what I call writer-serving writing. It exists at every level of writing expertise. I’ve gagged on it when reading personal essays and caught whiffs of it in award-winning books and articles. I’ve been horrified to find it in my own writing. Writer-serving writing is perfectly appropriate in diaries and journals – but any writing that’s meant to be seen by a Reader must serve the Reader”

We discussed what we all thought of this theory, and whether it applied not just to the art of the sentence but to any other, or all of the elements of the art of crafting fiction.  Most were in agreement, as long as writers weren’t going to the extreme of trying to pander to the reader or ‘cash in’ on trends – though we also agreed that few readers actually want either of those things, even when it seems it may be the case. I had expected for a few of the “F… the readers, it’s not art if you do it for anyone but yourself”  gang (that’s an actual quote, though I won’t “credit” it,) but they must not have been around, this week, because they could not have resisted if they’d been lurking. Perhaps they were all off being avant garde having Mothers’ Day dinner at home.

It was an interesting discussion – if you’d like to see how it went, the transcript is at The #Storycraft Blog, here

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I’m giving this book 1 star because I simply could not push my way through it. A loved one asked me to read it, so I wanted to give it a decent chance but 33% was all the exposition I could handle. This is my first attempt at a Hobb novel, so I don’t know if she always writes in first person but I’m baffled as to why she chose that narrative perspective for this story set in a land with a grand, epic history. There is so much historical information that the author feels is necessary for us to know before we get into the story proper, that the result is a sense of one step forward, seven steps back. Each “I recall” begets another, whether it be the recollection of the POV character himself, or in blocks of dialogue as another character instructs the POV character. This, basically structural, issue is a great pity because there was a hint that the magic in this novel would be something more interesting than the magic of the “not-quite-humans-beyond-the-kingdom/s” usually is, but that possibility wasn’t enough to keep me reading.

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On the day, I’m not sure that it worked. Those who came enjoyed it, for the most part, but, also for the most part, had not read the book (some at all, some not for a decade.)  The sudden need to weed out the questions I had prepared which would not be understood without reading the book, made my job much harder and may also have skewed my view of how it went, so I’ve asked for feedback.

I have to remember, though, that I went to a book/philosophy club yesterday to which 5 of us turned up and most had not finished the book (guess who’s the girly swot) so maybe that’s par for book clubs? Even if it is par, it’s an awful lot of work for the organiser to go to if people are just as happy, if not happier, to turn up and chat with no preparation – normal #storycraft requires me to prep but not as much as a book chat does.  Maybe I misunderstood my audience but I didn’t think reading one particular writing book in 6 weeks would be even a blip in the lives of people who would be reading all sorts of books, fiction and writing books, to improve their writing. Oh well. Not all experiments work.

Anyway, if you’d like to take a look for yourself and see how it went, the transcript is here.

Beginnings, Middles & Ends, by Nancy Kress is one of the best writing how-to’s that I’ve read, yet. The book is targeted at both novelists and short story writers of any experience. Kress assumes little writing theory on the part of the reader and yet manages to be neither patronizing nor cliché when explaining basics (I swear some books are written from the same template – not this one!) Kress also takes care to emphasize that different writers work in different ways, addressing the “pantsters”, who like to write without plotting, acknowledging that, for them, most of the advice will be relevant only after the first draft is done (but it will be relevant.)

So what’s so good about this book? In short: it focuses on the writing. There’s no showing off the author’s understanding of Georges Polti, or proving that she bleeds Joseph Campbell. There are no structure formulas (three acts with seven turning points, no nine sequences, no 18 dips and crests of the roller coaster,) Kress has written a book which focuses on what you, the writer, need to know and do to organize your story’s structure. Not that there’s no theory, there’s plenty, but it’s all contextual, so it is clear how to apply it. How does Kress do this? Well – ahem – it’s how the book is structured.

The title of the book is its structure. Starting with Beginnings, Kress discusses everything that needs to be considered when writing a beginning, which, of course, touches on everything from characterization, to language, to how the beginning effects the middle and the end. She acknowledges writers who find beginnings easy and offers assistance for those who find them difficult, addressing the various reasons one can become stuck while writing a beginning. Kress then gives the same detailed treatment for each of Middle and End, followed by a section on Revision.

I highly recommend this book to any writer, whether they are new to writing and don’t know where to begin, or are wallowing uncertainly in a WIP. I particularly recommend this book to structure-phobics because, whether they think about it consciously while writing a first draft or not, a writer needs to know their craft and this book is a pain-free way to learn. I’ll be putting this one on the #storycraft Book Chat list.

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Today’s #Storycraft topic was: to plot or not to plot? In case that seems odd to you, let me explain. There are writers who outline and/or write treatments or in various ways work out at least the basic skeleton of their piece before they begin their first draft, and there are those who just sit down and write “pantster” style – by the seat of their pants – with no outline or plan.  Some writers identify strongly with one position or another and so love to discuss the question.

Personally, I’ve always been of the opinion that the the majority of writers use hybrid processes: writing a little, pantster-like, to explore characters, scenes and possibilities, then outlining (in one of the myriad ways available) then back to a little writing to explore more and see it all that as pre-planning (that’s certainly what I do.) I’m also pretty sure that most who call themselves pantsers do plot, if only in their head, or address structural issues in later drafts and, certainly several writers I know who call themselves pantsters also say they have notebooks filled with character notes and pictures of locations etc.… so I suspect that it may come down to a matter of definitions, any way.

My hope with this chat was that each ‘type’ could learn from the other because everyone needs to do what works for their story, my fear was that it would get heated, as it has done when it has come up tangentially in other chats. My experience, so far, is that many pantsters  consider any talk about outlining as putting their method down and do get quite defensive, but sometimes it’s fair enough because, to those who do pre-plan at all, the ‘pantster’ method does sound kind of slap dash and un-polished (especially when the hard-core pantsters even say they refuse to edit.) Luckily, we had none of that heat, today; everything was very civilized and there was lots of great discussion on different methods of pre-planning/plotting/outlining.

If you’re interested in reading the transcript of our Anniversary #Storycraft chat, you can find it here.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First let me say that I enjoyed this book well enough and was, again and again, willing to forgive technical issues that leapt off the page because, yes, Zafon has a lovely turn of phrase and, yes, the opening of the book is utterly enchanting and, yes, the mystery of who Carax is pulled me in and kept me reading. But I honestly wonder if the effusive critics only read the first half because, for me, it finally fell apart about two thirds of the way through – and, frankly, I could see it coming because it was a structural mess from the start.

The book is written in the first person, which is often fine for mysteries but, unfortunately, the protagonist is not a policeman, nor a private eye, nor even old enough to do much investigation beyond finding people who will tell him things – at length, in narrative, and often including information they, themselves could not possibly have had access to, particularly in such detail. About a third of the way through, Zafon gives up the lengthy dialogue and just launches into our protagonist telling us what he’d been told but, again, at length, in narrative, and often including information they, themselves could not possibly have had access to, particularly in such detail. Eventually, he gives up even the pretence of trying to stick to his chosen narrative perspective and we get a 90 page manuscript from another character, which is also in first person, except when it’s not, and which contains in it so much of what we already knew that I wondered if this had been the authors original treatment for the story and, lost for a way to work in the small amount of crucial new information, he’d decided to shove the whole thing in.

I know this is not only a mystery story, and I did enjoy the stories framing it – particularly that of Fermin, and the political aspects – but the mystery was the heart of it and the way it was presented just smacked of an author without the tools to structure it properly – perhaps he hasn’t read enough non-literary, mystery books. In fact, a lack of exposure to popular media may also explain why, when the ‘big revelation’ comes (don’t worry, no spoilers) it is such a disappointment – I had thrice picked it but dismissed it as being the plot of a daytime soap opera, not an acclaimed literary novel.

Overall, it’s a nice read, especially at the beginning, but a good structural editor might have helped to make it the great book everyone seems to say it is – but don’t mind me, I’m just one of those people that thinks there’s more to good writing than a lovely turn of phrase and an enchanting idea.

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#Storycraft is the hashtag used for a weekly online chat I host on Twitter, using the account @Story_Craft.  Writers from all over the world meet to discuss a specific topic concerning the art of crafting fiction for an hour or so. We stick solely to craft matters and do not discuss ‘the biz’ topics such as querying, getting an agent or e-publishing etc.

Because I move time zone every 18months or so, but also because it’s just a better time to catch lots of English speaking writers online, I schedule #Storycraft based on Sunday at 3PM US Pacific. At the moment, my plan is to keep doing that when I move to Thailand, but I may need to rethink that if being up and ready to host at what will sometimes be 5am, Monday, proves too difficult. If you’d like to join us and are unsure what time that makes it for your part of the world, there is a countdown in the sidebar of each page on the #Storycraft blog we also have a Facebook Page and a discussion group on Goodreads.

If the whole idea of a tweetchat is foreign to you but you’d like to chat with some writers, do take a look at the How to #Storycraft page on The #Storycraft blog.

There are many such tweetchats for writers, such as the enormous #writechat (Midday Sunday, US Pacific time) and, a favourite, #scriptchat, hosted by @jeannevb, the US version of which starts at 5pm Sunday, US Pacific time and many screen inclined #storycrafters go directly from one to the other.

This week’s #Storycraft was a doozie! We discussed the very precise and hugely important topic of the Premise (a la Lajos Egri) and the #storycrafters got stuck right in (and stuck it out, when it got tough.) I think we all learned a lot. If you’re interested, the transcript of the chat can be found on the #Storycraft Blog, here.

If you’d like to join us on #storycraft tweetchat each week, you can sign in to our room on Tweetchat.com at the equivalent of 3pm, Sunday US Pacific time (8am, Monday in my current time zone). If you’re unsure of when that is, there is a countdown on the sidebar of the #Storycraft Blog which (barring slow adjustments to daylight savings times at widgetbox) should tell you how many days, hours and minutes till the next chat. For updates in between chats, follow my @Story_Craft twitter account and/or #Storycraft Chat on Facebook.

Of course for all that, you’ll need a twitter account, so if you’re new to twitter and looking for some writers to follow, you’ve already got my @Story_Craft account and you’ll find my list of Storycraft Writers a great place to start. Of course, there’s also my personal account, @Danisidhe (pronounced “Danishee”, like beansidhe is pronounced “banshee”) and I hope you’ll say “Hi.”

Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth is an excellent guide to the craft, I enjoyed the philosophy, but I would suggest that it is more for those who are theory novices (as distinct from writing novices) because it leaned toward ‘dumbing down’ and explained a little too much, at times.

One thing that may also attract those who read to be taught how to be a writer (as against writers reading for the insights shared by another) is that he gives almost equal time to how to get ideas as he does to how to execute them. I found these ‘idea parts’ surprising and frustrating because I just don’t think they have a place in a text aimed at writers. I know lots of people say they want to write but have no ideas and so would love a book full of how to get ideas but, to me, this is snake oil salesman stuff. When I hear someone who claims to want to write ask ‘where do you get ideas?’ I’m afraid my response is “Frankly, if you don’t know then count yourself lucky not to be haunted by them and stick to the joy of reading!” If you have no ideas, then you have nothing you’re compelled to express and, I think Dufresne would agree, no piece of writing – or art – is worth anything if the writer has nothing to say.

If I could give an extra half star for his including the correction of “try and” to “try to” in his “Small Craft Warnings” chapter at the end of the book, I would!

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