Writing

I’m a Winner!

Published November 30, 2009 | By M. Lori Motley

I stayed up way too late last night and took out my Dragon voice recognition again and spent about 1 1/2 hours this morning talking as fast as it would let me to get to 50,000 words! It’s not a personal best for time or total words – that was last year with over 80,000 – but I made it!

My fourth year in a row I have won NaNoWriMo! Yay!

My story still has a long way to go and a lot of editing of story-line needed. I’m a pantser and, about halfway through a first draft, the whole story starts to gel more in my head. I like it this way. I’ll go back and edit and add now that I know where I’m heading. Who was I to know that the kingdom actually floated a couple of thousand years ago? Ha ha!

I hope all you NaNoers out there are spending the day wisely and writing like mad! Even if you do not hit the 50,000 (Come on, you can do it!), you have won if you got into the habit of BIC (butt in chair) and wrote more than you would have normally.

There’s always next year. Yay!

Fiction Writing: How to Write Your Character’s Thoughts

Published June 15, 2009 | By M. Lori Motley

Here’s an article by my close friend, Melanie, about writing character’s thoughts in fiction.

In quality fiction writing it is often important to tell what your character is thinking. There are multiple acceptable methods for doing this. The method you choose depends largely on the point of view of your story, and the specific publication you are writing for.

Fiction Writing: How to Write Your Character’s Thoughts – Read More Here

The two main methods of how to write your character’s thoughts in fiction are through the use of Italics or quotation marks and commas. In the first example, your characters thoughts would be written in italics without any quotation marks. You would still put a, between the thought and the thought tag such as “she thought.”

In the second example, your characters thoughts would be witnessed the same way as spoken dialogue. The actual thought would be in quotation marks and you would use a comma before the speech tag.

Posted in Characters, Writing Help | Tagged Character, Dialogue, Fiction, Fiction writing, Writing | Leave a comment

How I Know I’m Getting Better

Published April 14, 2009 | By M. Lori Motley

Instead of working on a new project last night, I opened up the beginning of a work in progress novel and reread the first few chapters. It felt like visiting a old friend from high school, even though I wrote it long after I left public education. The sentiment was still there. I still loved the story. It was the writing that threw me for a loop.

As I read through, enjoying the story, I had to fight the urge to edit it extensively. That wasn’t in my plans for the evening and I don’t intend to work on that novel for a while anyway. The deep-seated urge taught me something however.

I know I’m becoming a better writer. I can tell easily because I used to suck.

The writing in this vampire novel that I was working on a year or two ago was sophomoric and clumsy. Adverbs danced with speech tags that made no sense and descriptions that went nowhere. It was frankly embarrassing.

Finding out that my writing is getting a lot better was bittersweet. Of course, I am very glad that I write better now than I did two years ago. On the other hand, it only shows me how much work I have to do in order to get any of my novels or short stories ready for publication. It also scares me a bit that, if I get much better in the next two years, I will have to rewrite everything again.