The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Process

  • No Fear

    self_esteemThis year has been crazy awesome, and it’s changed me accordingly. It’s quite possible that I, myself, am crazier than I started out at the beginning of the year. Or maybe I started out this way. You have to be at least a little nuts in the first place to choose writing as a career.

    Over the course of the last year I’ve written countless blog posts, more than a dozen short stories (thanks in large part to this blog), and another novel. I’ve also gone through edits with a fabulous professional editor on two other novels. Over the course of all that, I know I’ve improved as a writer. I think it would be impossible not to get better with all that going on. (more…)

  • Becoming Technical

    It’s hard to say how, exactly, my writing has changed in the past year. Most of the writing I’ve done has been in new, uncharted territory. This past year I put a pause on creating new content and instead have been working on editing my novel, writing blog posts, and buying guides. So, I suppose, if I were to judge how my writing has evolved, I’d have to say it became a lot more technical in nature.

    I’ve learned how to write to fit somebody else’s guidelines. Or rather, I’ve honed that skill from when I was a college student. I’ve learned how to research. I’ve learned that I can only write so many technical articles before I’m ready to snap and give up on writing altogether. I learned from that lesson and resigned from my second job before I did something drastic, because let’s face it, writing is just too much fun to give up on. (more…)

  • Serious Face Is Serious

    The biggest changes in my writing happened in the year following my mother’s death. It’s been almost two and a half years now, and sometimes I still feel like my writing is suffering from that fallout.

    Although suffering probably isn’t the right word. I feel that each year I improve as a writer, so my writing isn’t suffering – but my characters are. I used to be pretty nice to my characters. If I made them feel pain, it was usually short-lived. If I challenged them, usually the choices weren’t hard.

    Not so much, these days. (more…)

  • The last year or so…

    Hello everyone! What a great way to make an introduction to this blog, by explaining how my writing has changed over the past year.

    The first and most recent change is I’m writing here now. Yay! I’m looking forward to sharing this space with some of the great people I’ve gotten to know over the past several months.

    The biggest thing that happened to my writing life was participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time. And I totally kicked its ass. I don’t know if what I wrote is any good, but I know that before November, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to write fifty-thousand words in a semi-coherent structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Now that I can mark “Write a novel” off my bucket list, I have a lot more confidence in my writing than I did before.

    This year I’ve written a lot more than I have in the past couple years combined. Thanks to good friends, I’ve been motivated to take some of the crazy ideas bumping around and to put actual pen to actual paper and get some of them written down. Most didn’t pan out to anything more than interesting diversions, but just the process of regularly writing again has given me a focus that I sorely missed having in my life.

    I started out the year by beginning a journal full of whining and angst, and ended the year making the planet die a slow and suffocating alien death. I call that progress.

    Hopefully this time next year, I’ll have a lot more to say about how my writing has changed and improved. The biggest and best change this year though is that for the first time in a long time, I feel like I can actually call myself a writer. And that’s pretty cool.

  • Confidence: It’s a Friend Thing

    I’m a guy who’s never been good at making friends.

    It’s not that I’m a hermit, though my family has speculated as much. And I honestly enjoy the company of others. In the past year, I’ve discovered that I’m actually quite fond of people. Who knew?

    But what has always tripped me up in the past is some deep-seated insecurity that has set up shop in the darker corners of my brain. Whenever I would start to hang out with people on a regular basis, I would inevitably begin to question their motives.

    In my mind, new-found friends were always humoring me. When they would invite me to do things, I was sure it was only out of a sense of obligation or pity. After a particularly enjoyable conversation, I’d go home and dissect the exchange, highlighting all the areas where I’d either sounded like a fool or come across as an arrogant ass. Whenever I would get a compliment, I would immediately deflect it and chalk it up to false, albeit well-meaning, kindness.

    (more…)

  • A New Year’s Self-Evaluation

    You never stop learning as a writer. I firmly believe Hemingway when he says “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” As you read, write, and then read and write some more, you change as a writer.

    Sometimes, that change is barely perceptible, like a rock in a desert that moves only a couple of inches a decade. Only by looking back at the trail can you even see movement. Other times, change comes in spurts. I think a lot of us at The Confabulator Café are at the stage where our writing changes in spurts.

    Go back and read your writing from a year ago. Look at its rhythm, tone, voice, and even its content. Chances are, if you were to write that same passage today, there would be something different about it. Language, structure, or something else would change. Maybe there are passages you wouldn’t have written, at all.

    (more…)

  • New Year, New You? (Week of 6 January 2013)

    Winter is a time when things reset, readying themselves to be born anew when the weather warms up, and for assessing what needs to be done. And 2013 has a great deal of promise for us here at the Cafe. Several regulars have been published and are continuing to be published in the months ahead.

    But we wanted to take another look back over the past year and see if anything’s changed for us. Are we still writing in the genre of our choice? Why? Has our writing changed? If it has – why? On close inspection (or just off the top of your head) do you think you’ve changed as a writer? Grown? Gotten more or less confident?

    Why?

    Our awareness as writers has shifted, certainly, and it’s time to take that deeper look and see if we’re still the same as we were last Winter. Can some cycles be broken or should they be embraced?

    Pull up a chair, wrap your hands around that warm mug of tea, coffee, or cocoa, and let us regale you with our thoughts. We promise it’ll be informative.

  • No Mercy

    Week Two of Nanowrimo is supposed to be the Mighty Mountain of Doom. It is the hump, the long slog, the place where plots go to die. Where the trail is littered with the desicated carcasses of Wrimos who, upon discovering they lack the necessary fortitude, lay down to die.

    I thought I had dodged that particular bullet. Walking into the write-in tonight I blithely announced that my story was going great! The rest of my life was going to hell, what with the laundry and the dirty dishes and library books that have to be finished before I return them and the pot of inedible soup I made this weekend and the small electrical fire and needing time to write this blog post and an employer selfishly wanting me to work on their projects rather then my own, but the story was just fine. I grabbed some junk food, sat down, opened my notebook, and….

    I got nothing.

    Well, that can happen, so to jumpstart myself I began looking at yesterday’s writing to see where I had left off. And then I looked a little further back. And back a little more. And came to the horrifying realization that all I have written in the last four days is a couple of decent scenes glued together with a lot of brainstorming as I looked for a way out of this plot hole — excuse me, plot Grand Canyon.

    It’s a lot of words, but these are not good words. Mind, they count for Nanowrimo! They all add to word count! But they don’t advance the story.

    A farbled along for a few pages tonight, enough to meet my goal for the day, and with a heavy heart left the write-in pretty early. As I was walking home, I suddenly realized that these two characters are going to meet and exchange critical information because one is going to look up the other in the phone book. I had been brainstorming about psychics and hacking into the drivers license database and hiring a private detective, and all I need is a phone book? Seriously?

    So yeah. Week Two. Week Two has no mercy, and really nasty sense of humor.

  • Start. Stop. Fix it. Ugh.

    I can keep this week’s post very short.

    The easiest thing about writing? Writing. Telling the story, inventing characters, creating places and events and conflicts and disasters. Delving into the motivations of the cast of sundry folk that make the plot twist and turn.

    That’s easy.

    The penultimate hardest part? Starting. Pushing past the inertia of not writing to start writing again. Once I remove the chocks and get the wheels rolling, I’m good. But I stop and start (which I shouldn’t, but I do) and that initial start is…very tough.

    The absolute worst part? Editing. Not copy-editing. That’s stupidly easy, and I do it on the fly. But going back and editing the actual story? Uh…how do you DO that? Maybe that’s  Which is why I haven’t bothered…yet. Gotta start that some time, but…see penultimate hardest part for my issue with that. 🙂

  • The Plot is Both Easy & Hard

    Where should I start? When does it end?

    Boom. There’s the hardest part about telling a story for me. It’s by no means the only thing I find difficult about the job, but it’s incredibly difficult to look at the tangle of a plot and find the right place to start. Too soon, and it’s impossible to get sucked into the story. Too late, and the reader flounders for a hold on the story.

    Then there’s wrapping it all up. Not every subplot can be tied up in a bow, but there needs to be a feel of completion. It can’t be too abrupt, but you don’t want to end the story four times. You also don’t want to drag the story out too long. If the antagonist has been defeated, the couple reunited, then the story can’t go on for another 100 pages just because you like the world.

    If we’re going for the easiest, its when the story just moves. There are highs and lows in the process, but there’s definitely a middle point when I’m just flying on the whole thing. I’m in love with the process at this point, when plot points are hooking together and  characters are exploding formed and expressive on the page. It’s the artsy part of writing.

    There’s minutiae of writing that can be difficult. Finding the time is a pain. Pushing through the parts that don’t flow sucks. Sometimes the story gets boring. Sometimes the story is wholly useless.

    But the plot. Managing the plot is both the hardest and the easiest part of being a writer.