The WordPunk website asks genre writers and editors which technologies they use in their day to day writing and/or editing lives. My personal response (quoted in the article) is as follows:

“At university, I used a secondhand manual typewriter. This was the early nineties. I used to balance the machine on the end of my bed, by the window overlooking the river, and sit cross-legged, battering out essays and stories. It was a beast. It weighed a tonne and the clatter of its keys could be heard throughout the house.

“These days, I use MS Word 2007. I use it in page view, so it feels like I’m typing on pieces of A4. I can’t write in Outline or Draft view. They just feel wrong. It’s almost as if I need that primal connection between keys and paper, even if it is only an illusion on a screen.

“I also tend to write stories straight through, from beginning to end, rather than jump around within the narrative. This could be a hangover from writing on a manual typewriter, where there was no choice but to write stories in sequence.

“The advantage Word has over a manual typewriter is the ability to edit on-the-fly. But this can be something of a mixed blessing, as it can lead me to spend all my time tinkering with one sentence instead of pressing ahead with the rest of the story.

“I have looked at other programs, but Word seems to suit me. I am comfortable with it. I write everything in either Times New Roman or Courier New, and so there aren’t too many distracting settings with which to play.”

Read the full article here.

At around 4.30pm this afternoon, The Recollection‘s word count total cruised past that of my first novel, Silversands, to make this new novel the longest single work I have yet written – and there’s still at least another 30k to go.

A few days ago, I made the following comment on Twitter:

Just as you climb a mountain one step at a time, you have to keep putting one word after another if you want to write a book.

Now author Colin Harvey has used it as the jumping off point to discuss his method for staying focussed while working on a novel.

A novel is like a picture made up of 100,000 pixels, with each representing a pixel. Miss out a thousand words, and you have a picture with a hole in its whole … When you feel that awful sense that you’re going to fall and/or fail, stare hard at the detail and fill those pixels in.

Read Colin’s full article here.

I often listen to music while working on stories and novels. Listening to music can mask distracting noises from the outside world. It can also help propel the rythmn of a piece of writing. But the music has to be carefully chosen.

Continue reading “Do You Listen To Music While You Write?”

In this week’s guest post, Angry Robot author Colin Harvey talks about the necessity of making yourself attractive to an editor.

Generating Heat
By Colin Harvey

A few weeks before the end of last term, our script lecturer gave a talk on The Business of Scriptwriting. Much of his lecture could be applied just as easily to SF as to the film business, so with some slight amendments I’ve adapted it for this blog.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Colin Harvey On Generating Heat”

In order to write well, you first have to write badly. You have to learn your craft. It’s like learning to drive a car – you can’t compete in the Monte Carlo grand prix the first time you sit behind a wheel; you have to make all the embarrassing mistakes, the awkward stalls and occasional prangs – and the same’s true for writing.

Continue reading “Burn Your Notebooks”

All our myths are attempts to address three questions:

1. Where did we come from?
2. How do we behave now we’re here?
3. Where are we going?

Science fiction concerns itself mainly with the third question (and you could argue that the other two are the purview of religion and mainstream literature, respectively). Bearing all this in mind, here are seven things I’ve learned about writing:

1. Some days, writing is like scrabbling around in a dark pool looking for pretty stones.
2. If you want people to read your story, write about people.
3. You will be remembered for what you write, not what you fail to write.
4. If a reader has to put your book down and use a dictionary to look up the meaning of the clever word you’ve used, they may not come back.
5. Stuck for inspiration? Stop thinking about it. Have a bath. Go for a walk. Clean the car. Distract yourself and inspiration will strike.
6. Want to be a more productive writer? Give up caffiene and quit smoking. Seriously. Both are counter-productive distractions.
7. The only thing more terrifying than beginning to write, is not to write at all.

At the age of ten years old, I scribbled a story into the pages of three spiral-topped reporters’ notebooks. Covering both sides of each page, it must have totalled somewhere in the region of 30,000 words. Heavily influenced by Star Wars and Blake’s 7, the story recounted the adventures of a crew of intrepid space traders and their aged vessel, The Argo. As it was handwritten, there were no rewrites. The story progressed episodically, each new adventure or plot twist influenced by the latest book I’d borrowed from the local library, or the TV programmes I’d happened to watch the previous evening. Sadly, I’ve no idea what became of those notebooks. I can’t even remember the title of the story. The books went astray decades ago. I suppose they may be hidden away in a dusty corner of the attic, but I haven’t laid eyes on them for more than 25 years. Maybe they’ll show up one day – but on the whole, it’s probably for the best if they don’t.

One of the questions people often ask me is: “Where do you find the time to write?” When they ask this, I often think that what they really mean is: “Why can’t I find enough time to write?”

From personal experience, I know how difficult it can be to find the time and energy to be creative, especially if you have a full time day job, a mortgage to pay, and a family to look after, and I won’t pretend I have all the answers. But there are strategies you can use to increase the time you have available for writing. The three strategies listed below have worked for me, or for other writers I know personally:

Continue reading “3 Ways Of Finding More Time To Write”

Writing in the latest email newsletter from Tor/Forge Books, Cory Doctorow says:

“All creative endeavor begins with just fooling around, not doing much of anything, just noodling and letting the different parts of your mind talk to each other. Science and art and invention spring forth when we do the unexpected and so coax our brains into letting some imaginative combinations of ideas and concepts jangle together.”

This is so true. I find time off to be as important to the creative process as time spent in front of a keyboard. Reading novels, listening to the radio, watching TV – they all have their part to play in replenishing the imagination. The mind needs distractions in order to make connections. It’s like a muscle: after working hard, it needs time to recover and grow. The unconcious mind needs time to play with the pieces of information it collects, to turn them around and around in order to see how they fit together. This is why some of the best story ideas I’ve ever had are the ones that struck me while driving on the motorway or getting into the bath.