Happiness Matters - Attempting The Sentence

Over the last few months, while I've been struggling with Family Trust, a new novel idea has been begging for attention. Every now and then I'll give it some of my muse's time and I'm always thrilled and excited by what I get. I had explored my main character, her love interest, her father and her love interet's ex-wife. I have a good handle on all of them. I understand my theme and each of my characters demonstrates a different point of view on that theme. The setting is familiar (Wellington) and every time I revisit the elements it gets twistier and twistier.

So I decided to start working through the Think Sideways lessons for Happiness Matters to get some structure to the preparation with the goal of putting together a query and synopsis. Since I already have the idea the first lesson is about building The Sentence. To build The Sentence sounds easy enough.

Characters who need something, opposed to characters or forces set to keep them from getting it in a fascinating setting with a twist. - Think Sideways.

Holly says to start by defining your protagonist with an adjective and a noun. She gives 'young widow' and 'conscripted warrior-mage' as examples from two of her stories. She also rules out girl, boy, man and woman as possible nouns because they just aren't descriptive enough, they don't have weight or substance.

To complicate matters I think I have two protagonists and two antagonists. When The Sentence is supposed to be no more than 25 words that's a whole lot of character and story to squeeze in there.

Then again... there is a reason The Sentence is so valuable.

Family Trust - A Stumble

I had a little stumble over scene 14. It lost me a day of writing and almost lost me a second day. The scene has conflict, it has a twist and it has a point (which I now think is the change that must happen in every scene) but they are all quite subtle. Now I think the scene element that is lacking is setting. They are in a kitchen, sitting at the dining table. Not exactly riveting stuff. I'll throw the characters who are in conflict into a figurative room full of dynamite and they will provide the spark.

I was able to have my feet catch me as I stumbled by jumping over scene 14 and straight onto scene 15. Just a bit of blending and polish was needed for scene 15 and the next couple scenes are the same.

Though I had drawn up my synopsis, which is proving it's worth, I've stumbled over a muse bomb that may alter things. As you may have gathered from previous posts I'm absolutely terrified of things that may alter this synopsis. I may be more scared of carrying down the path I'm on and getting myself even more muddled. I've done that before and I will not repeat my mistakes. Now to find out what Brigid's father was up to before he died.


Number of revision hours completed: 4 hours.

Cat, Colour & Chocolate

I've come across some great new blogs in the last couple weeks and had to share.

a cat of impossible colour
Andrea is a Zimbabwean author living in New Zealand who has just sold her first novel 'Ngozi'. Not only does she show photos of her stylish clothes including coats in almost every colour but she has some great advice on writing, like her latest post Working from home and staying sane.

will write for chocolate
First we had Will Write for Wine and now I have discovered Inkygirl's Will Write for Chocolate. It includes a weekly comic strip following writers and some great writing advice. Inkygirl is also into writing challenges having launched her own Write 1,000 Words a Day and Write 500 Words a Day.

Writing, Learning & Networking

Subscribe to the Kiwi Writers blog to get posts like this and many more each month! That's right, it's not just on during SoCNoC.

If you’re reading this then you’re not writing. To be a writer you have to write, you have to keep learning and you have to network. If you’re reading this you’re probably learning and you’ll probably check in at the forums so you’ll be networking too.

If you’ve started to seek out information about writing online you will have come across some great writing communities that are helpful, encouraging and a fun place to be. If you’ve been hanging out in writing communities for a while you’re probably spending a large chunk of your time keeping up with the activity. You may even find that you’re not writing as much as you’d like because of it. This becomes more obvious when you participate in challenges such as SoCNoC and it’s easy to put the blog and forum reading to one side for a month but that doesn’t fix the problem for the rest of the year.

Read more...

Family Trust - Who Said What?

Today I used Online Stopwatch to keep track of my writing hour. I knew that I was in that kind of writing mood when I would write for a bit then look for a distraction before going back to writing and I didn't want to cheat myself out of time. It worked really well. I finished off a brand new scene and began cutting and pasting bits out of the last draft for the next scene. There's a lot of stitching to go on for the scene to come together but it should be an easier one.

I was thinking a bit more about the he said, said he discussion and realised that when a characters name is involved I prefer 'said John' but if it's he or she I prefer 'he said' to 'said he'. I might have to see if Grammar Girl has ever covered this topic. In this episode about How to Use Attributives Grammar Girl seems to use the conventions that I prefer: said John, but, he said.


Number of revision hours completed: 3 hours.

Family Trust - Scene: What Is The Point?

There are a lot of new scenes in this draft of Family Trust and something I'm learning to do with each scene is to find out what the point of the scene is. I have my Sentence Lite telling me the POV character's motivation, the setting, conflict and the twist but I need to know what I'm writing to. This is what I've lacked when a scene gets waffly and things just seem to happen because... I felt that happening with the scene I began today.

Every scene should have a point, should build up to that point and then shift on from it. Without that point a scene loses momentum and falls flat. The point will progress the plot or develop character and it may do both. Other things can happen in the scene, other conflicts, other twists, other things to progress plot and develop character but there will be one that stands out for that scene, one that is driving the scene.


Number of revision hours completed: 2 hours.

Family Trust - He Said or Said He

I couldn't start in on July's revision count on the very first day of the month. That would have been far too sensible. Instead I started today and after polishing some of the 11th scene I began on the 12th. It is a complete cut and paste from two scenes of the previous draft. I kept the dialogue almost intact but had to rewrite the internal dialogue and some actions so that the scene would make sense where I've put it.

I remembered something from when I edited the first third of the last draft in hard copy. Should you write: "Join us!" John said. Or: "Join us!" said John. I don't think there is a right answer to this, I think it's mostly a matter of style but I wasn't using them consistently and it was bugging me. I decided that because the tag 'said' should go mostly unnoticed by readers, the purpose being to identify who spoke, that 'said' should come before the person's name. When reading the dialogue the reader is looking for a clue to who is speaking and is more likely to pass over 'said' in search of the name than to pass over it when looking for the next sentence. It would almost be like a double full stop in a telegram: stop stop.


Number of revision hours completed: 1 hour.