The I'm Writing Thread.... Celebrate your pages written etc

[drewavera]

also, im not sure if this has been brought up or not, but what do yall think of books written in 3rd person, past tense? thats how i started this book and its flowing pretty good, but most of the books ive read recently are in first person, present tense...

[Snowleopard]

It's whatever works for you.
Every writer is different and comes at their story in a different fashion and voice.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

also, im not sure if this has been brought up or not, but what do yall think of books written in 3rd person, past tense? thats how i started this book and its flowing pretty good, but most of the books ive read recently are in first person, present tense...

Some stories naturally want to be in first person and some in third, and many authors use widely varying viewpoint techniques depending on the story they are telling. What sort of books are you finding lots of first-person-present in ?  I'm not thinking of any other than Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim books I've read recently.

The thing about first-person that's not necessarily the case with even a fairly tight third-person is that everything you get in it is through the perspective of the narrator, and you can do fun characterisation things with what the narrator notices, what they miss, what sort of prejudices or preferences they have and so on.  You also have to figure out exactly when the story is being told, because a headlong braindump as it's acually happening, and a journal "written" later by the narrator with room for them to pause and reflect on what they later learned and see things differently from how they did at the time, are quite different things.  Third can give you one character's thoughts, or can just be like having a camera-eye follow the action around, or you can have some sort of omniscient narrative voice in, though this is very hard to do well and not sloppily. For myself, when a story comes to me, there's very rarely any doubt what viewpoint it's in, but I am beginning to think first-person may be where I am naturally stronger.

[LizW65]

A lot of recent YA fiction is first person, present tense; supposedly this is meant to appeal to teens who tend to think and write this way themselves. I have no issue with first person--I probably wouldn't be on this site if I did  --but I find the present tense to be generally pretentious and annoying, the literary equivalent of being over-caffeinated. Instead of creating a sense of immediacy, I find it makes me jittery and anxious, and I've turned down quite a few well-reviewed books because they're written in present tense. The exceptions are the aforementioned Sandman Slim and the works of Damon Runyon, neither of which bother me for some reason.

[Paynesgrey]

I've not read those, but I'll have to put them on my list.  Present tense is often used as a Tension Generating or Look I'm Artsy gimmick, and it takes some good writing to convince me to overlook my prejudice against the tense. 

On my own stuff, I'm up to 46K.  And a good bit of that will get filled out later when I go through and take the "I told him make me sammich!" scenes and replace them with full conversations. 

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I've not read those, but I'll have to put them on my list.

Oh, I think you might enjoy the Sandman Slim books.

[Snowleopard]

I've not read those, but I'll have to put them on my list.  Present tense is often used as a Tension Generating or Look I'm Artsy gimmick, and it takes some good writing to convince me to overlook my prejudice against the tense. 

On my own stuff, I'm up to 46K.  And a good bit of that will get filled out later when I go through and take the "I told him make me sammich!" scenes and replace them with full conversations.

"But I want a sammich!" 

[Paynesgrey]

Ash for breakfast, Zeddie!  When ain't you hungry?

[Snowleopard]

LOLZ.

[The Deposed King]

Well the official word count of Admiral's Gambit is 160,584

Its now up on Amazon for sale so I'm declaring the move and celebrating the end of a lengthy novel!

http://www.amazon.com/Admirals-Gambit-Spineward-Sectors-ebook/dp/B0099RQCHU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1347499090&sr=8-3&keywords=admiral%27s+gambit

Now its time to dig in on book 3!


wish me luck!!!!



The Deposed King

[drewavera]

i appreciate the thoughts. im feeling pretty good about the third person narrative so far. i do have another question. when you do lengthy dialouge coming from a character when they tell a story, how do you use the quotation marks for the paragraph breaks? for example my character tells a story that requires about 5 paragraphs and there are some quotes inside that story, so do I throw the quotes at the beginning of the story and the end of it like a term paper where i steal info off google or do i put quotations for each paragraph? i hope this is an easy question to understand...

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

i appreciate the thoughts. im feeling pretty good about the third person narrative so far. i do have another question. when you do lengthy dialouge coming from a character when they tell a story, how do you use the quotation marks for the paragraph breaks? for example my character tells a story that requires about 5 paragraphs and there are some quotes inside that story, so do I throw the quotes at the beginning of the story and the end of it like a term paper where i steal info off google or do i put quotations for each paragraph? i hope this is an easy question to understand...

The standard I was taught at school, fwiw, is to put a quotation mark at the start of each paragraph of dialogue, but at the end of the last one only.

[Starbeam]

The standard I was taught at school, fwiw, is to put a quotation mark at the start of each paragraph of dialogue, but at the end of the last one only.

This is what I've seen in several books that have long narrative dialogue. The one that comes to mind most readily is Blackwood Farm by Anne Rice, which is pretty much almost all one character telling a story.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

So tonight I worked on several different things, about 1100 words here and there, but solved a couple of plot problems with the next thing, which always feels like work.

Normally, in my working directory for any given project, I have a file or two of notes, and a file called "plan" which is basically the chapter-by-chapter breakdown with everything that needs to go into the chapters - a sizable lump for chapters not written, and updated with what needs to go where earlier if I figure it out as I go along.  With the current multi-book series I have different files for the different volumes, so the one I fixed tonight is "plan4".  I have only just realised that given this working schema, there is a categorical imperative to take this series to nine books.  Because it is, after all, from outer space.

[gatordave96]

Made it to 168k today.  Working on the climax of the novel, at least for one character.  Wish I had more time in the average week to work on it, but you know how that goes. 

So can anyone tell me how they plan to celebrate when they finally finish their next book?  Fireworks?  Champagne?  A nice nap?