Today's post is about two different kinds of conflict. One is the conflict between a writers goals and the realities of life (calling back to last weeks post), and the other is on conflict in your story. First, on goals. Like I said last week, goals are awesome. Set them. Small ones are good until you know you can meet them. I thought 500 words a day was great. I'm still going to try to hold to it, even though Ive failed miserable this last week *grin* Inevitably, life is going to ... Read more »
General Writing
500 Words a Day – Goals and Discipline
So, of those of us who have tried to write a novel, who has reached a point where you are having problems finding the motivation to go on? Yes, you in the back. You in the front. You in the second row, with your hand down? You're lying. It can be hard to keep writing. It tends to come in dribs and drabs, a spurt of a few thousand words here, a good week there. Most of my completed books were written in four or five spurts of really good inspiration. There are writers, who will remain ... Read more »
Time, length and time
Shadows of the Grey Tower has been in Limbo since December, due to basically Writer's block on my part - I needed a way to transition between two points in time. Five years needed to pass, the main character needed to grow up, and while not much important occurs in those five years I had maintained a relatively continuous flow of narrative. So, in the end, five years of novel time consumed 1700 words of novel length and two months of writer time. It also resulted in my spending a good ... Read more »
Thoughts on Dialect
When I started Shadows of the Grey Tower, I decided to experiment with something I don't work with a lot - dialect. Most of my characters generally speak english, sometimes at varying vocabulary levels, sometimes mixed in with other languages, but I never really tried to create dialects before. For Grey Tower I had five distinct cultural groups that were going to play into the story to varying degrees, and only one of them was going to be speaking a truly different language. While I decided ... Read more »
So here we are
Welcome to Faolan's Pen. My name is Glynn Stewart, known in various places on the internet by several derivations and half-translations of Dubh Faolan or dark wolf. I'm an amateur author, with several novels completed and being shopped around and two current works that I intend to think of as 'in-progress' for the sake of this blog. For the moment, this blog will include occasional snippets from those works in progress, updates on how they're going word count wise, and the trials and ... Read more »