Tag: writing books

Writing

Which Story To Write?

carolyncordon

I have a friend, a member of my weekly writing group, who is working on, I think she said, ten novels at the same time. She is a dedicated writer, and I am so impressed by her output, in both quality and quantity. She writes historical fiction, and more contemporary fiction, as well as a smaller amount of non-fiction. I am in awe of her, I’m not sure is she realises that …

I can’t imagine having that many ‘works in progress’, going at the same time. I work at a crazy mixed up, slap-dash kind of pace, and feel unable to commit myself, and my concentrated time, in the same way as my friend. That being said though, I have managed to write and either publish, or have published, seven books since my first one, about fourteen years ago.

My most recently published book “Dog Buddha’s Thoughts”, which I self-published last year, is the last in a series of three books, written in the point of view of a made up dog, Buster the Dog, and I don’t think I am going to write another book in that series. I feel like that book from last year said all I had to say. But the thing about books and writing, is that inspiration can come from a wide variety of places, so really, who knows?

At the moment though, I don’t feel at all committed to writing another “Buster the Dog” book, but Buster is always there somewhere in my head, so who knows. I keep my mind open to new ideas, always! I have other, more sensible ideas for stories that may become books though, and I am much more interested in those. One is a book for the 10-14 year old reader, and it involves, amongst other things, unicorns.

Unicorns have been in my life since I was around the same age as my imagined readers for this book, and I’m certainly excited about getting that book out. It’s a positive book, about a young girl growing up and learning about herself, what she is capable of, and how her life may be as she gets older. It is set in a district based in part on the region where I live, which is also the region of a made up place, I have set another book I’m currently working on.

This particular book is a novel, with intrigue, murder, politics, and is a bit of a love story. It is slowly creeping into existence, with me adding another paragraph or two every week. As I said, ‘slowly creeping’! I don’t know if I’m going to ever finish this one. I know it will need to be at least 65,000 pages, but at the moment, after a couple of years since I began it, there are perhaps 12,000 words.

With this book, I have paragraphs in notebooks, and devices all over the place, and I don’t know whether I’ll actually be able to even find everything I’ve already written of this book-in-progress. I think if I was really committed to this particular novel, I would have got far more organised with it by now, but haven’t really done much about it at all. I think that tells me the truth about it. I still have my main characters in my head, but not so much on the page. I suspect Meredith may never come out into the world …

I’ve enjoyed writing the snippets I’ve written in response to prompts from someone in my writing group, and I definitely feel that all writing is good practice. So, if that’s true, I’m not wasting my time with this novel-in-progress, I’m in fact learning more about how to write a novel, so that when a novel I feel I must write comes along, I will be ready to do it justice.

I hope anyone reading this has found it interesting, and I would love to read about your own writing process! Feel free to leave a comment here!

Writing

What You’d Like To Know

carolyncordon

New writers are often given the advice to “Write what they know”. I don’t know who it was to first come up with that one, and I don’t really care who it was. I believe my advice, to write what you’d like to know is far better advice.

If you are writing non fiction on a subject, you will have so much more fun, and write a far more interesting piece, if you look more deeply into something you’d like to know more about. The research will be more fun and interesting, and by the end of your article or book, you could be well on your way to being an expert on the subject, with a new book to promote!

And if you’re writing fiction, have your main characters with different hobbies, or lifestyles, to what you have yourself, but that you’d like to know more about. The characters will then be new and interesting to you, and you will make them interesting to the reader, because they, and what they know or do, are interesting to you. I know about dogs, quite a bit about them, actually, but I don’t write books about dogs as the only point of interest. In my series about Buster the Dog, I write about Dogs and something else. The first book was dogs and gardening, the second dogs and mindfulness, and the final on was dogs and buddhism.

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These books were all written with Buster the Dog as the main character and they are in his point of view (first person POV). Dogs do many things that people do, but they don’t necessarily do them how people do them. In fact they often do them how people DON’T do them, and that is where the humour comes from.

I know more about dogs now, than I knew back when I wrote that first book “Dig It! Gardening Tips for Dogs”, and I know more about gardening now too. The same with Mindfulness and Buddhism, I know more about both of them before I wrote “Doggone It – Mindfulness from a Dog’s Point of View”, and “Dog Buddha’s Thoughts”. I had enormous fun researching the subjects, and thinking on how a dog would view the same things that I was learning about.

When your writing brings you joyful fun, it isn’t tedious getting the words written, it’s a good time. And talking about your books is still a fun thing to do, talking about dogs and the funny, silly things they sometimes do!

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