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Useful writers' blogs

22/1/2013

at least I'm not blogging about the weather

My fifth post in my first fortnight of blogging: is this professional dedication; the typical novice's enthusiasm; or a worrying case of blogivitis, that disturbing affliction in which one's every passing thought becomes a prompt for a 200 word post that quite likely no one else will read?
So, just to show I'm not being totally solipsistic as I sit at my desk dictating into my new computer, here's a list some of the blogs I've started following to see how it's supposed to be done.

This Itch of Writing

Juliet O'Callaghan writes

http://www.mslexia.co.uk/blog/

http://shelleyharris.co.uk/

http://www.tribalwriter.com/

http://alibacon.com/blog/

Not many? Well, I'm going for quality, of course. No men? Now, that certainly wasn't my intention but I'm interested how it's turned out.

By the way, even though mine is not nearly as sophisticated, with seemingly no sidebar to list my developing links, it's still possible to comment, suggest other sites I should be looking at and to sign up for regular updates by clicking on the RSS feed link.

3 Comments

Narrative voice

19/1/2013

6 Comments

Martin in full voice

Not being an early adopter of all things technological, I wasn't in a great hurry to join the blogging bandwagon. Except for the fact that both involve using ideas to construct sentences, I didn't see much overlap between writing fiction and a blog. Would it be worth the time and effort if no one were to read it? Would I be opening myself up to spiteful anonymous attacks? Might I, through the mysterious machinations of playground politics (sorry, the freedom of the internet), be simultaneously lambasted and overlooked, and still be no further forward with what I consider to be my real writing?

Ten days in, I'm beginning to revise my opinion. The similarities are
greater than I'd – naïvely, glibbly – imagined. Because, in any kind of writing, there are always choices to be made about how to present oneself. There's always the question of narrative voice.

I'm writing as me, but as a particular version of me. Perhaps that's why I adopted the playful/witty/irritating/endearing username Annecdotist (delete as appropriate, but before you judge, please consider what it's like to spend your whole life answering to an indefinite article). It's me, with a tale on the end.

Unlike creating a narrator for my fiction, I'm not burdened with designing the details of Annecdotist's appearance and habits as these, for better or worse, are fixed. Or should they change, they do so in negotiation with me. No need to file reminders about the colour of her bedsheets or that she needs to stand on a chair to reach the spare mugs on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboards. But this doesn't mean I have no decisions to make about how I present my narrator. Far from it. It merely draws my attention to the more subtle aspects of narrative voice, that are perhaps more important but harder to pin down:

Or it may be because a voice admits us to a mind, a spirit and soul, which is distant from our own and yet the voice makes us live and breathe it. It doesn't mean that your narrator must be narrating explosions or heartbreaks, it means that your narrator must be someone we keep listening to. 'Listen!' s/he says, and we do.

Emma Darwin

How chatty should I try to make Annecdotist to entice you to listen? How authoritative? How humorous? How open? If I allow her to be too opinionated will I alienate some potential readers, but if I don't take that risk will the whole thing be altogether too bland?

I ought to be asking these same questions of the narrators of my fiction, but it seems more acute here, where I'm developing the voice in public (I wish!) right from the start. I'm curious as to how Annecdotist will develop over time and how she will feed into my fiction, if at all. Even though I do all my writing directly onto the computer, it's only Annecdotist that I identify strongly with the digital world. She's like one of those people kids used to think lived in the telly or one of those sophisticated androids from films like Blade Runner and if only I could locate the screen on my computer to fine-tune her settings, I'd have nothing to worry about.

Perhaps other more experienced writer-bloggers have sussed this one out yonks ago, or maybe your personalities are so well integrated your one-size-fits-all personas will serve you well at anything from a job interview to a beach barbecue. Whatever you think, perhaps you'd like to enlighten me?

6 Comments

Viewed from another angle

15/1/2013

0 Comments

My short story, Reflecting Queenie, has just been published at Creative Writing Ink. It's Snow White from the point of view of the mirror. (Not as dreadful as it sounds, honestly.)

As a reader, I've always loved books that bring a fresh perspective to a well-known story. Jane Eyre has never been the same for me since I came across The Wide Sargasso Sea. Looks like others appreciate this kind of novel too.

I like the way the young one's a lady, the old is a woman. I think she used to be a crone when I first met her.

My first taste of the potentially subversive nature of a shift of perspective was with Chaucer at A level. What a revelation!

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Voice recognition software

11/1/2013

2 Comments

I've recently bought a new laptop. Presumably the updated technology will make my writing life easier in the long term but, in the short term, I find the whole thing a pain. Even with my husband taking on most of the donkey work, time spent weighing up the virtues of different models followed by
learning the quirks of a new operating system is time away from writing, as far as I'm concerned, and that's before I get started on the guilt at what the rich world's lust for progress does to the impoverished south.

I wonder if creative writing would be so popular these days if we didn't have
such easy access to word processing technology. I doubt I could've managed several drafts of a 100,000 word novel on my mother's old Olivetti portable where, if I got overexcited and typed too fast, the keys clumped together in the middle. I suppose if you were to develop RSI in those days, you'd either have to hire a secretary or fall by the wayside. One way of weeding out the competition.

Due to RSI, which crept up on me in the middle of an MA course (not a writing MA) over ten years ago, I'm dependent upon voice recognition software for all my writing.

2 Comments

Is this thing switched on?

10/1/2013

0 Comments

Happy New Year!

While many people are already shedding over-optimistic New Year resolutions, I'm still writing cheques for January 2012 so I hope I can be excused for kicking off my blog with a review of the last writing year.

It's been a good one for networking, getting my short stories out into the world and progressing my novels.

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