Tag: novel

A Quick Edit Update

On By Dan HarrisIn Sci-Fi and Fantasy, WritingLeave a comment

I’m now four chapters into the first-pass edit of my novel, the goal of which is cutting out any obviously unnecessary text and just getting an initial feel for if the plot and character arcs hang together and make sense. I’ve been a bit surprised by how familiar these first few chapters are, and how little I’ve actually managed to cut – I can only guess that I reworked them quite a lot last year, before I moved to my later approach of just hammering out the scenes and not even reading them afterwards.

I’m expecting that’ll change soon: I’ve got my eye on chapter seven, which I think is about 3,000 words of nothing relevant to the plot happening, just some slow-burn character development. Pretty sure I’ll be able to tighten that up to about 1,500 and merge it with chapter six.

Editing’s fun!

The Avengers, and Shared Fictional Universes

On By Dan HarrisIn Sci-Fi and Fantasy, WritingLeave a comment

Saw The Avengers over the weekend. I was a little worried it wouldn’t live up to the massive amount of hype, but happily it did.

BEST. MOVIE. EVER.

For anyone who hasn’t been following what Marvel did to build up to The Avengers there’s a great summary of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on Wikipedia. This kind of cross-pollination of characters across multiple storylines to place them in the same universe hadn’t been done in cinema before, despite being very common in SF and fantasy. (That I’m aware of at least. Correct me in the comments!)

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From Hackery to Publication: Edit is Go

On By Dan HarrisIn WritingLeave a comment

So my resolution to wait two months before editing lasted . . . 43 hours. Oh well.

First up was running through my scene synopses from start to finish, checking for flaws or holes in the main plot arc.

(A note on synopses: as I’ve been drafting, I’ve written a one-sentence summary of every scene as I finish it. The index cards on the Scrivener corkboard – see here for previous on this – make this an absolute doddle. But I digress.)

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Retro Futurism

On By Dan HarrisIn Sci-Fi and Fantasy, WritingLeave a comment

Nice post on io9 here.

I’m drawn to the Anachronista category – the others don’t do a lot for me. I’m no good at history so hardly qualified to suggest alternates. Cheese is . . . well, cheesy. And I think there are enough people writing steampunk – the best example of it, China Mieville’s work, doesn’t even get called it because it’s so much more as well.

But anachronista, that I could do. The next book I’ve got planned is somewhat tinged with this – it’s a Chandler-style detective noir, but set in the same technologically advanced far-future universe of my current WIP.

It wouldn’t quite fit the anachronista mould the io9 article talks about, as it’ll be stylistically redolent of 1930s/40s/50s pulp crime lit, rather than actually containing any technology that you might have found back then. But still – that’s one of the things I love about SF, the scope to combine it with another genre entirely and come up with an interesting hybrid. I’m looking forward to writing it.

Downton Galactica? Battlestar Abbey? It’s all Culture and Character, Folks

On By Dan HarrisIn Sci-Fi and Fantasy, WritingLeave a comment

Great article on Tor.com here.

This piece reminds me of one of the best pieces of advice for science fiction or fantasy writers that I’ve ever read. My sieve-like memory for detail doesn’t allow me to quote or even paraphrase the source, but the essence of it was that in the best SF/F the science or the fantasy isn’t the centre of the story. They’re the framework, the setting, and probably certain plot drivers, which surround the actual heart – the people and civilisations interacting, the personality and culture clashes which resonate with the reader because of their familiarity. 

Iain M. Banks is the master at this, in my opinion. His Culture novels – the name itself flagging up the key theme – are anthropological masterpieces, often based around one civilisation (the Culture) being far more technologically advanced than the other that they’re interacting with, and dealing with the political and sociological fallout of even the most benevolent interventions. We can all recognise the parallels in that, I think.

“This has all happened before, it will all happen again” indeed.

The Dreaded Edit

On By Dan HarrisIn Writing8 Comments

I’m nearing the finish line for the first draft of my WIP – just two chapters left to write. Eight scenes, eight or nine thousand words. Should be done sometime next week. And then . . .

The dreaded edit. Now, seeing as how this is my first novel, I’ve not been through the editing process before. A lot of writers I’ve read on the subject seem to treat it as a necessary evil – but evil nonetheless. Read more…

Limbering up

On By Dan HarrisIn Writing2 Comments

I’m delighted to discover that splurging God-knows how many words – of questionable value – onto this blog didn’t lessen my ability to actually write something useful. It may even have loosened the old brain muscle, got the juices flowing, as I just banged out a thousand words in forty-five minutes – the final scene of chapter 20 of my WIP.

It’s a particularly poignant and saddening scene, I think, but one I hope I’ve managed to infuse with some kick-ass bravado. We’ll see. A snippet is in order:

“Skin darkening from white through dusky grey to black, veins of putrid green splitting his flesh, eyes glazed and glistening, Abe smiled. He would give them submission.

And he would take from them everything.”

You show ’em, Abe.