The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Nonfiction Essay

  • Outlining for Dummies, or Why an Outline Is Not for Me

    Throughout my life I have been presented with the daunting task of creating an outline. High school English teachers treated them like they were the be all and end all of papers. No good paper could be written without a clear outline in place.

    That was problematic for me. My brain doesn’t function from an outline. How do I know what’s going into that paragraph until I’ve already written it? As I write, I discover that the point I wanted to make actually belongs four paragraphs down. Which, I’m sure my teachers would insist would present itself as I outlined.

    It doesn’t. Not for me. (more…)

  • Reader Accessibility

    Years ago, if you wanted to contact an author, you waited until they went on tour. Or you sent them a letter or more recently you sent an email. These things were likely all filtered through an agent so that the author didn’t have to deal with it all.

    Now with Twitter accounts, Facebook author pages, Tumblr, and blogs (and I’m sure several other forms of social media) readers have the chance to directly interact with their favorite authors. Some authors are heavily involved with their followers. Maureen Johnson, Cassandra Clare, and Melissa Marr all frequently respond and retweet questions from followers on Twitter, which is really cool.

    As a writer, this is both something I look forward to and dread. It would give my readers a direct line to me so that they can tell me how much they love my books, so that they can worship the ground I walk on.

    It also means that they can tell me every place I screwed up. It means they can point out where they think I could have done it better.

    And you can’t please everybody.

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  • Being Real

    I have nothing to say.

    Inaccurate: I have a lot to say about how I feel about fiction writing, the goals I have for next year, or even the mild bitterness about my ex-husband’s support of those goals. But my immediate urge is to self-censor all that:

    This is a community blog; no one needs your bullshit. You’ve already used that “writing is hard” meme a dozen times. Making goals is a recipe for failure; just go with the flow. Stop thinking in thoughts separated by a semi-colon.

    I’m willing to bet if I pull up the Google Machine right now and search “writing self-censoring,” I’ll already find a dozen topics on the ways that writers shy away from opening themselves up on the page. I’m not going to do that, because it would be another reason not to write about it.

    (more…)

  • Narration in The Hunger Games

    First person narration is a style that has its pluses and minuses. While restricting the reader’s perspective to one person lets us get to know that one individual better, it usually limits our view of the wider world and leaves other characters flat and uninteresting. When comparing the book and movie version of The Hunger Games, the central theme is how each media uses Katniss as the narrator.

    A quick confession, I saw the movie before I read the book. I know, I know, a shame onto my family. While the book confines itself to Katniss’ point of view the entire time, one of the advantages of the movie is the ability to follow other characters around. The time spent in The Capital is particularly enhanced by not being stuck in Katniss’ head. The behind-the-scenes look at The Hunger Games give us a different look at what the Games really are about. While reading it’s easy to become focused on surviving, because that is what Katniss is focused on. The movie never lets the viewer forget that it is just a game to most the people.
    (more…)