HeroJourneys

I recently started a writing group in my area. We critiqued each other’s stuff for the first time earlier this month, and I have to say that it was a great experience. It got me moving on my writing and should make it so that I write more regularly (creatively, not necessarily on my blogs ).

In February, a couple of us (the Founders) got together to come up with guidelines for our group.

Dave Farland had sent out several emails last year about writing groups, so I went through those again and pulled out the good nuggets of information.

In any case, we set up some rules about how we’re going to run the thing and our expectations. Basically, we expect people to write something new every month instead of just rehashing the same old thing again and again. We also don’t want critiques to get out of hand and so will use something similar to Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp method (which I believe is also used at Odyssey and/or Clarion). Everyone will get a turn and there will not be any cross-talking or commenting by the author.

We also decided to include a short writing exercise at the beginning of each one so that we can improve our craft and get our brains working.

Finally, we decided (for various reasons that I will not enumerate at the present time) to call our group The Point Writing Group.

We are open to anyone who is serious about writing and improving themselves.

So, if you live in northern Utah county or southern Salt Lake county (in Utah, of course), then we’d be happy to have you.

In May, I worked on updating and fixing (hopefully) the story I wrote at boot camp.

I haven’t done very well at writing here regularly, but I’m trying to make amends for that starting today.

I started a blog for the classes I teach, and so that has started getting me in the habit of doing this regularly. Plus, this is a great place to think through ideas and what I’m doing with writing.

I’ll go into more detail later this week, but for now, I’m excited to get back to this. I hope it helps me, and anyone else who is just getting started as a writer and happens upon this blog (I know, not likely to happen, but one can always dream ? )

That’s all I’m going to write for now since it is getting late. But I will say that I’m excited to start reading the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series (The Well of Ascension). I really enjoyed the first one, and also Elantris. It is really cool that he will be writing the final book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, as well. Way to go Brandon!

Well, today is November 1st, and that means that it is National Novel Writing Month. I officially started work on my novel today. I wrote one chapter and that came out to around 1900 words. So, not a bad start to the month.

I am using the general story and plot that I created for bootcamp of the Transfer Loss short story. But, I am not using anything as far as wording goes from it in writing this book. Just the ideas. I am not even going to open the document to look at it. I have my written notes and that is all I’m using. So, it will probably end up being a completely altered story from the “original”. But, I can’t see this as being a bad thing. Hopefully I can improved it.

And, since last year’s novel attempt didn’t turn out as expected, or even a coherent single novel (just a bunch of different thoughts and non-fiction stuff that I was going through), this will be my first true novel attempt. I am determined to finish it this year. And while it will probably stink, at least it will be my attempt at one story and at learning what my writing process really is.

I don’t know that I’ll blog every day during this month, but I will try to catch highlights and to explore things I learn about myself and such along the way.

Cheers!

I have not been writing very consistently lately.

I have all sorts of excuses, but no good reasons ?

I am teaching Freshman English at UVU (Utah Valley University) this year (it’s been a long time since I taught), and I have been learning lots about good writing that I had never considered before. I’ll probably go into more detail later about this, but for now, I am having lots of fun learning while I teach.

I did notice, now that I’ve finished grading their personal narratives, that people really have no idea how to write well. They think writing is like a movie: all show, no interior. Several of my students tried to use a flashback right of the bat to explain things. Others withheld information from the reader that the narrator knew at the time in order to create “suspense”. I think Orson Scott Card has broken me of my habit for doing these things (without an absolutely excellent reason for breaking the rule) during Bootcamp, but it is interesting how much I notice it now and how much it drives me crazy?