Further to this long discussion, I have been reading up on Gestalt theory and may have had a lightbulb moment regarding the lack of mutual understanding.


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I remember reading this when it was first posted, but a couple of LJ friends have picked up on it again and as I'm gearing up to start writing seriously again, it got me thinking...

The thought of regularly hitting 10,000 words a day is a bit boggling[*] and despite her protestations that quality doesn't suffer, I have serious doubts. Though ( Read more... )

There's a lot of discussion going around at the moment about the validity or otherwise of fan fiction. Now I admit I neither read nor write fan fiction, but I just wanted to pick up what green_knight said about whether or not it's art.

One stumbling block (for me) to consider it to be art is the fact that the stories do not stand alone. ( Read on... )

Just thought I'd copy here something I said in one of the advanced creative writing forums for the OU course I'm currently doing (as a student).

A fellow student posted saying:

Do critiques help ( Read more... )

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Over here, readthisandweep is talking about how creativity ebbs and flows and how to encourage it to flourish.

I've never done daily pages in the Natalie Goldberg sense either, though I do use her methods of freewriting very successfully with creative writing students. (The fact that freewriting doesn't work for me is irrelevant, writers write in different ways ( Read more... )

This started out as a reply to beyond_elechan's post here in which she looks at some writing advice posted by Jim Butcher in his LiveJournal and points out its limitations. But as the comment got rather long, I thought it would be better as a post in its own right.

As beyond_elechan says, people write in different ways, so to clearly state that a writer should ignore the ( Read more... )

Summarised and saved to memories so I can find and refer to them again, as needed.

These are some personal shorthand names for different things that can go wrong with scenes...

Characters choosing the curtain materialsIn any story, characters shouldn't be spending a disproportionate amount of time on their personal problems except insofar as ( Read more... )

matociquala's brain is not being forthcoming with the short stories at the moment. Not a shortage of ideas in this case, but in one of the comments, someone did ask where short story ideas came from. green_knight is also wondering about short stories, namely how to generate short story ideas. matociquala, of course has many successful novels to her name also numerous short stories ( Read more... )

I had my Welsh class this morning, which was fun. This afternoon I caught up with rasfc and LJ and then went for a brisk walk and had a good Think about the novels I'm supposed to be writing. By about a quarter of the way round the walk, it was clear that I need to go right back to chapter 1 with both the WIPs ( Read more... )