The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Process

  • What Makes It Great

    There are a lot of times when I’m writing that I feel like this guy but without the spectre of death looming over me. Image borrowed from this site.

    When I read something I really like, that makes me think, that just stuns me with its elegance or simplicity or beauty, I want to emulate it. I want to know why it works so well, why it hit me so hard. I want to dissect it and hold its beating heart in my hands in order to understand. When I get frustrated, I watch this clip from A League Of Their Own.

    However, since I have very little schooling, or formal training, as a writer I don’t have any way to really dig in and get to the core of something I want to learn. The tools just aren’t there. So what I have to do is sit down and study. And study hard.

    The thing is that when I do that, it’s kind of frustrating. Actually not just kind of frustrating, really frustrating. (more…)

  • Overcoming the “A” Word

    Every writer, I’m sure, has their ups and downs when it comes to the writing process. What parts of it do you enjoy? What makes you excited to sit at the keyboard and type up a story – and what parts make you want to chuck your laptop as far as you can throw it, preferably into heavy traffic?

    For me, writing is a very emotional experience. I grow extremely attached to my characters – sometimes unhealthily so. I remember writing the end of my NaNo novel back in 2009 and bawling as I wrote the last words – I felt too sad for the characters’ relationship to end the way it did! What a terrible ending! What a way to torture two people I’d grown to love! Yet for me, that’s what I look forward to the most when it comes to writing.

    Building characters and worlds is a dream come true for me. It’s something I’ve been doing since I was a child – making elaborate worlds and equally elaborate characters. The current world I write for, a country called Pridd that has a good mix of Steampunk and magic, has become unbelievably real to me. The country has a map, a government, a religion. The rivers all have names. I have this gigantic timeline pointing out all major events so I can make sure I’m always consistent.  I’m sure if I wrote in some natural disaster – an earthquake, perhaps, that swallows part of a city whole – I would cry over ruining this amazing world I’ve created – and have an absolute blast writing about it. Writing creates a reality for me that I feel like I can visit whenever I’d like, free of charge – what a way to spend a vacation! (more…)

  • Finding a Voice

    Character dialogueJust ask Christina Aguilera or Cee Lo Green. Finding the right voice isn’t as easy as it seems.

    One of the hardest things for me to do with my writing was to find a voice. It wasn’t until I started writing a blog on a regular basis that I discovered I have my own style of writing.

    In case you haven’t read a lot of my posts, my voice is pretty straightforward. I use a lot of short sentences. I make a lot of asides. And I use conjunctions at the start of sentences — a grammatical no-no, but it’s the way people talk.

    When I write stories, my voice isn’t the important one. I hear a lot of voices. I hear the voices of my characters as they talk to one another. I hear them when they argue. I hear them when they tell me to kill the cast of Jersey Shore… oops. No, those are different voices… (Kidding, folks!)

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  • Easy and Hard — Compared to What?

    Writing is the easiest hard thing I’ve ever done. Or maybe the hardest easy thing. Either way, it has its ups and downs on the difficulty spectrum.

    Ideas are easy. We’ve talked before about ideas and how they tumble over each other to get attention. They’re a dime a dozen and show up at all hours with little work.

    Hard? Turning ideas into a cohesive story.

    Easy: Cranking out 500 words during a 15-minute word sprint when everyone around you is doing the same thing.

    Hard: Cranking out 500 words in an hour when it’s just you in the whole house, you have no idea where the story is going, there are dishes in the sink, and someone on Twitter is being particularly witty. (more…)

  • Where’s My TARDIS?

    Has there ever been something for you that can drown out the rest of the world? That can suddenly make deadlines and responsibilities seem unimportant? If you have, then you know how I feel about writing. When I get on a roll, nothing else seems to matter. This writing high is how I survived NaNo last year and how I plan on surviving it again. Okay. The writing high and a judicious application of coffee.

    There are many hard things about writing, finding the right words, editing, keeping it from becoming a cliché or something that’s already been written. But the hardest thing is to find time to write.

    It’s not that I can’t sit down and write in five minute spurts here and there. I can. But to truly become absorbed in the work I need hours, and that’s hard to plan time for. Squeezing in five minute spurts works… right up until that five minutes turned into thirty and I’m suddenly late for work. I would kill for a time turner or a TARDIS. (more…)

  • Writing is Simple but Not Easy

    The number of times I’ve sat down to write this blog and failed made me realize that basically everything about writing is difficult.

    The hardest thing about writing for me is just sitting down to do it.

    It’s like exercise. You know you need to do it. You know once you do it you’ll feel better and that it’ll be fun once you get into it. You know the results are worth it.

    But that doesn’t always mean that you’ll do it.

    It’s hard to get started but it’s also hard to make the time, stay focused on a project and see it through to the end.

    Of course I love to write, but you’d never know it sometimes. Given the choice, I will come up with a million other things to do instead. If I know I need to write, suddenly there are chores that need doing and errands that need running. Books to read or TV shows to catch up on.

    Because putting it off is easy. All the rest is hard.

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  • Whispers and Running Starts

    For me, the hardest part of any story is figuring out where to begin.

    I think everything you write, whether it be a short story or a novel or even a chapter of a novel, has multiple points of entry. The challenge is finding that introductory sweet spot that both grabs the reader and gives you a running start into the rest of the tale.

    It’s hard. And in my experience, it takes a bit of time to get there.

    Even if I know what a story is about, I have to let it cook on some back burner in my brain before I can write it down. I’m usually not thinking about some plot point or trying to figure out the twist. I’m waiting on one of the characters to say something that piques my interest.

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  • Time, You Ain’t No Friend of Mine

    I think most writers will tell you that the hardest thing about writing is simply finding time to do it. While I think we all love writing, otherwise we wouldn’t pursue it, there is always something else to do. One of the greatest things about this site is that it gives all of us an excuse to sit down and get into the writer’s mindset.

    There are so many other things that draw your attention. There is the five-year-old running around with Batman Legos showing off his newest rocket ship. There is a book, D.H. Lawrence’s novella “The Fox” which my professor demands I read and analyze. There is my wonderful girlfriend who is also trying to find time to write.

    After working all day away from your family, isolating yourself to write seems like the last thing you want to do. There are so few hours in a day, and so many things you need to do, or even want to do. In the end, you have to make choices. For some people, that means writing early in the morning or late at night. For others, it means prioritizing time. The important things come before writing, and the rest are pushed aside. (more…)

  • Strengths and Weaknesses (Week Ending October 20)

    They say that once you start doing something you love, you’ll never go to work again. So why are so many writers frustrated by a craft that they love? Maybe because — as one grows as a writer — writing gets more difficult.

    We all have strengths and weaknesses, but every writer is different. This week, we decided to see how our writers in the Cafe see themselves. We asked them to describe what is easiest about writing and what is the most difficult.

    As we move out of October and into November for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), we want all writers — ours included — to focus on their strengths. But also to be aware of their weaknesses.

    How are you getting ready for NaNoWriMo?

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • A Little (Orange) Notebook

    I’ve never been worried about running out of ideas, though I do worry about losing them. Like a lot of writers, I keep a little notebook for jotting down ideas. (And like most other things I own, I frequently lose this notebook.)

    Honestly, this notebook tells me more about my own state of mind when I had an idea, versus the idea itself. Mos ideas in there are just little notes; they might form a character later or a single scene in a larger work. The ideas usually stem from something that happened to me, or something I saw, and lets face it — if real life were all that fascinating and exciting all the time, we wouldn’t be so in love with fiction.

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