Dog Pants wrote:One writer who stands out in my mind is Connor McCarthy. His writing style frustrates me because the grammar is terrible, but the content of the stories is very compelling. I still don't know if he deliberately writes like that or is published despite it.
Cormac McCarthy. I don't think it's that he can't do grammar/punctuation, but a deliberate style choice. Whether he's trying to be "street", attributing the entire text (not just the dialogue) to a character or just experimenting with the language in the same way that Shakespeare did, I don't know.
It would drive me insane as reader and unless you're as confident and acclaimed as he is, I don't think there's any excuse for it, as it's something which can be learned, or corrected. Stephen King did a thing in Carrie, where her thoughts were all lowercase italics with the words running into each other - which was really effective at describing her state of mind, but you couldn't read a whole book like that.
Dog Pants wrote:I wonder if the biggest thing stopping many creative people writing is just finishing a novel, because I've tried writing and find it difficult to get past the first chapter.
Sitting down and saying "I'm going to write novel" isn't how I would recommend getting into writing. Not if you want it to be fun and not just hours of staring at an empty Word document. You don't have to write the first chapter first, if the story you have to tell is big enough to fill a novel, then that first page - the one that grabs the reader's attention - should perhaps be the
last thing you write, when you are at your most proficient: because the more you write, the better you get.
I think a hell of lot before typing a single word, and I think in terms of
scenes, like in a film. When I've got it pictured in my head, I then sit down and write the most interesting ones out. Remember that scene in Inglorious Basterds with the German officer and the people hiding under the floorboards? I want every scene (where appropriate) to be that powerful, intense and memorable. So then, when I've finished, I go through it again, sentence by sentence at least three times and tweak it. And it gets better each time.
Then I note its position on a rough timeline and start writing another scene. Scenes are typically 400-600 words.
Phobia and
Springtime on Mars were both less than 400 words, and
The Gift which is two scenes and a bit of background info was just shy of 1,000. Personally I find that's about big enough for a piece you might work on over an evening or two in terms of workload, and the end product is hopefully something that's punchy without needless waffle. Less is more, show don't tell, and your readers aren't stupid - they can fill in the gaps.
I'm glad you liked the stuff I did, I have a lot more planned and spent this evening typing up a bunch of notes I'd made on paper. Having a pen and paper to hand to jot down random ideas or dreams before you forget them is a great habit to get into. Apart from those three, I have five other ideas for stories - spending a week just thinking of ideas and scribbling them down is another good thing to keep yourself interested - but I don't know whether I should post them here or on the blog.
