Tag Archives: humour

Last time I told everyone how I got over my writers block by creating a plan. Sadly, my happiness was short-lived, as I became so obsessed with Twitter that reading, retwitting and commenting on tweets has left me with literally no time to write. I was perfectly content with spending hours laughing about other people jokes, not realising that I hardly wrote any of my own anymore. My followers list kept growing and the few jokes I twitted, got retwitted dozens of times. As far as I was concerned, I was doing well by collecting fans who will eventually read and love my book. Right?

My family certainly agreed. They are very supportive of everything I do.

“Oh, you are going back to school? We are so proud!”
“Oh, you are quitting school? Wise decision!”
“Gonna be a sculptor? You are so talented!
“Kiteboarding sounds like fun!”
“Getting a divorce? We never liked him anyway!”
“You are the best actor we know!”
“Two new jobs in one year? You go, girl!”
“You have a blog AND a Twitter account? You are a social media mogul!”

So it was a huge shock to the system when my agent took me out to dinner and proceeded to give me the third degree about “wasting time on Twitter”. He was adamant that I “quit that nonsense” and “finish the book instead”. I tried to protest and paint a vision in which thousands of Twitter followers will be eagerly awaiting the release of my book, to which he asserted that if I spend all my time twitting, there will be no book to speak of.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had an inkling that constant twitting, retwitting and following was possibly a massive waste of time. I also became concerned that I started “speaking in tweets” in my regular life and interrupting engaging conversations with “I’ve got to tweet this!” So, I did the unthinkable and listened to my agent’s advice.

I am happy to report that, of course, I didn’t listen to ALL of his advice. I have since completely ignored the bit about “pacing myself”. Instead, I made a quick Excel spreadsheet that has set out a goal of a thousand words per day and I have been tracking my daily progress there. It’s like my own NaNoWriMo, with a slightly more manageable goal and extended deadline.

I am also happy to report that I am now nearly Twitter-free and instead completely obsessed about the two lines (blue-the goal and red-the progress) creeping up across the page. In fact, I have managed to use this new bit of inspiration to average nearly 1,500 words per day! The first draft is at 38K words and I’m on track to hand my surprised agent a thick printout at the end of January.

I can only hope that nothing else distracts me in the meantime. Like archery. It’s so cool! I have tried it the other weekend and got a couple of arrows in “the gold”. Do they accept 40-year olds to Olympic teams?

Hi there! I know, I promised to write about plot development a week ago, but now that I am a writer, I also have writer’s block. I even talked about it in a writers support group. Everyone’s got it – it’s like a rite of passage. We also bitched and moaned about lack of time for writing, probably for a good couple of hours. I then twitted about it.

I am, however, happy to report that I seem to be completely cured! I have written a couple of thousand words in just the last few days, and that’s in the evenings, after a hard day’s work. How did I get over the block, I hear you asking? Deceptively simple – I wrote a plan. It’s technically a chapter outline based on a plot, but in a way it is a plan of how I will write this book. I can hear the “organic” writers protesting, and maybe it wouldn’t work for everyone, but for me it has been a breakthrough. The organic writing still happens, it’s just that now I know what to write about.

I started with writing my ideas for a plot on post-its and plastering them on a long wall in my house. I did one row for the main plot and put subplot ideas in other rows. The finished plot ended up looking like this:

The photo above shows the plot after about a week of staring at it, reading about plotting, conflict and character arcs, and staring at it again. I found a huge number of plot holes in the beginning! For starters, my protagonist lacked motivation. It didn’t bother me at first – I rationalised that because it’s a comedy the motivation is not needed, after all Beavis and Butthead are not motivated, right? Then I thought about it. Beavis and Butthead’s burning desire to score with chicks made them worthy of a feature film. I thought about other comedy protagonists and had to admit to myself that every single one of them was motivated, even the lazy ones.

Another problem was sporadic appearance of subplots and support characters. By sticking pieces of paper on the wall, I was able to see easily where I completely forgot about a character for a few chapters. I added ideas on post-its, moved them, threw some out, added more. I used little blue stickers to break the plot into 20 chapters. I used a five-act structure, which is really a variation of the classic three act structure: life as usual (setup), confrontation, and resolution. I marked out small conflicts leading progressively to the ultimate “everything is lost” moment and the eventual solution to the problem.

The plot and chapter outline will probably evolve as I go along, but for now they are great tools to help guide my avalanche of verbiage into a coherent story. Best of all – look Ma, no writer’s block!

Hi there everyone! (by “everyone” I mean ten or so people that have subscribed to my blog in the two weeks it was up and live).

I have to apologise for the misleading advertising of my intent to publish Shizzle, Inc online, chapter by chapter. I thought it was a pretty clever idea, to get some fans for the eventual publication of a sequel. I expected that maybe in a year or so I would get enough followers to get interest from an agent or publisher.

What I did not expect, is that by sheer luck (not unlike that Isa, my protagonist, encounters on a regular basis), I would run into a literary agent while filming a commercial. Or that he would agree to read a few sample chapters. Or that he would like them enough to agree to represent me.

The only problem, the agent did not think it was at all genius to publish my book online – not if he can sell it to a publisher. He did criticise my plot and wants me to improve it before submitting, so it is still possible that the book doesn’t sell and I revert to the original plan, but I sure hope not.

So, in the meantime, I will blog about my experiences of trying to be a writer (which I think is way harder than coming up with fiction). I will start with what I learned about plot development. Tomorrow. Cause it’s late and stuff, okay?