I took a few days off writing.

I know this is one of the cardinal sins of NanoWrioMo, but it couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t personal tragedy, or even terrible work schedule that got me into trouble, it was lack of structure. As just about anyone who knows me can tell you, I’ve gotten pretty good at writing the first two to three chapters of any given book. I can also do you a decent short story.

Problems arise when it comes to the Big Swampy Middle*. As much as anything it’s that I have no idea where things are going, so I don’t know what to make my characters do. I’ve been doing seat of the pants writing for a while, and it’s not really working for me. My last effort, the Shadow Library, had a couple of really good chapters.

The rest was an abomination against all things.

It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it was close. The problem was I had nothing to hang my story on, nowhere really to go. So I have recently been sent Larry Brooks guide to story structure and I’ve pent the last few days studying it properly. This will probably lead to me failing NanoWrioMo, but I don’t care because the plan is to get a better book out of it. There will be a review up of Larry Brook’s Story Structure – Demystified up in the next week or so, with a detailed look at how I applied it to the new project.

Which, you might have guessed, is called The Downside of Being Dead. I can’t tell you to much about it, except that I’m enjoying writing it, and that there are dead people walking around in it.

Right, I need to do some writing, because I’ve been a terrible slacker. If you need some better advice on writing than I’ve been able to give you in the last few weeks, I can’t recommend either Mur Lafferty or Carrie Heim Binas’s respective blogs enough. Listen to these ladies, your writing will be better for it. Mine is.

*With thanks to Jim Butcher for the term.

Tags: advice