The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: knitting

  • Some hobbies just don’t translate…

    Some hobbies translate better to writing than others. For instance, my grandmother attempted to teach me to knit at various stages of my life with varying success. When I went off to college, it finally stuck. When I was writing my last novel, I thought it would be useful to have my character be able to knit—at least so far as darning socks is concerned.

    Let me tell you something about knitting, it is mind numbing. I usually work on it while I’m doing something else—like watching TV or listening to a book on tape, because otherwise I would lose all interest in the project.

    If the actual process is that mind-numbing and dull, imagine reading an entire paragraph where the only thing of note that takes place is that the protagonist darns a pair of socks. It was awful. Don’t do it.

    So I suppose a good rule of thumb for hobbies is that if it is boring in real life, it won’t translate well to paper.

    Other than writing itself, I don’t really see any of my hobbies cropping up in my stories. Perhaps if I wrote urban fantasy instead of doing world building, I would see more of an inclusion, but somehow sitting in front of a TV playing video games all day doesn’t really fit in to a sword and sorcery style novel… and I’m not about to attempt to pick up swordsmanship… that’s a good way to end up with broken or missing fingers… and then how am I supposed to write?

  • Right Brain, Left Brain

    I don’t use existing hobbies as part of my writing because they fulfill a different need. For example, I knit but I don’t write about knitting because my knitting mind is different from my writing mind. My knitting mind is calm and analytical. Sometimes I think about mundane problems while I’m knitting and this helps me sort things out. The act of knitting exemplifies problem solving through tedious repetition and slow progress. My mind while writing is totally different and may literally be using the other side of my brain. When I am writing I think in an excited way and can make big jumps between ideas. Like this…”Hey, wait maybe I could write about knitting. Perhaps a series of mystery books where the heroine is the owner of a local yarn store and each book comes with a pattern.” Note to self. Write that.

    (more…)

  • Free Legwarmers

    I have a writing routine which borders on compulsively ritualistic. I always write first drafts with pen and paper. Then I type that up. Then I read it through and decide whether to develop the idea further or scrap it. If it’s worth re-working, I make an outline and decide if the order in which things occur needs to be changed. Usually the events in my story need to be reordered somewhat so I read through a hard copy with a pen, making notes about things that will need to be changed so that the new order makes sense. Then I get to work re-writing. I give myself more latitude at this stage to flesh out things since the framework is set, but I usually don’t really add in many details until the next re-write.

    Yikes, reading that last paragraph made me feel really weird, like maybe everything I write is unread-ably overwritten. Okay, as an experiment then I will just type whatever pops into my head for the rest of this essay and not edit it at all.

    Cutting is not problem as long as I don’t care how long my finished piece is. My instinct is to tend toward brevity, so I often whittle down a written piece to around 65% of its original unedited length. As for setting goals for editing, I really don’t have to force myself much because it is an enjoyable process for me. The hardest part for me as a writer, is squeezing out that first draft. After I have something to work with on paper, the editing and re-writing stages are pretty fun. Polishing something and making it better seems possible whereas creating something out of nothing strikes me as more intimidating and unlikely to be successful.

    I just threw away my notebooks from National Novel Writing Month 2011. I had filled up five spirals. Perhaps the gratification, for me, is in the process of writing more so than the finished product. Don’t worry, I typed all my notebooks before tossing them so nothing was lost except for the paper original. With the amount of space that one project took up on my shelf in notebook form, I don’t believe I could ever have enough room to save all my writing. Besides writing, I spend much of my free time knitting. Knitting is nice because it keeps my hands busy while I think about ideas for writing. A big part of writing for me is stewing over things until I know the most appropriate way to express them. Perhaps appropriate is the wrong word, I mean the most honest way.

    In knitting there is this idea of “process knitting.” It means that a person doesn’t want to keep the finished object, they just wanted the challenge of completing it. These people usually give away what they knit. To some extent I am the same way with writing. I don’t have a strong desire to have other people read what I’ve written, but I do have a strong desire to write it in the first place.

    That reminds me, I have three pairs of legwarmers that I made that I want to get rid of because they were just first drafts. If anyone wants them, let me know.