question of the week – 5/9

Last weeks question was:

How do you remember your plots or ideas before you can write them?

And although I warned you that you should answer it to get more impute, well, that didn’t matter.

Anyway, I’ve had a few ideas about how to save plots, and hardly use any of them.

• The most obvious one, that everyone says, is to write them down in a notebook. And although, yes, I have a notebook of a few plots, I’ve found that doing that is just too difficult. The notebook is upstairs, under my bed, and I generally get plots or refine plots downstairs. Although this probably sounds lazy, going upstairs, finding the book, writing it all down, and everything is really hard. (I do, however, have the original idea of Shad in that book. Scary what I thought it was originally.)
• Notecards. Don’t do this one but if you have a notecard box by your computer, then write the plot on a notecard and just save it.
• I’ve always wanted a giant whiteboard by my computer, so I could write down whatever I pleased, and keep track of all sort of things.
• Post them on your blog. (*slight snicker*) I actually had a plot, thought it was brilliant, wrote it up as a blog post, changed my mind about the brilliance, and did nothing. Recently, I went back and reread it and I actually think it might be doable.
• Then, of course, my favorite one, do nothing! The brain is a great storage device and two things I’ve heard in my eight years of writing. You will always have a lot of plots (unless you’re in college) and you will be changing your plot a lot before you finally place it on paper.

I’m sure there is also a way to do this on the computer, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet. I’m still thinking about that.

This week’s question is a two-part question actually. You can answer each part as you deem fit.

What attracts you to a particular title in general  and how do you pick a title for your chapter/story?

As always, I’ll be writing this sometime between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, but feel free to drop a reply any time.

Question of the Week, 5/01

I said I will return and I have.  (No, that post about Shad was not me returning, if I hadn’t figured that out.)

Last week I asked the question: What books are your favorite and why? The reason behind this question is that if we can identify what we like about books, then we can mimic them in our own writing and write pretty decent stories (hopefully).

So, one my my all time favorite books is Firebird. There is two reasons behind this book. Reason one is that I like how who is the good guy changes. Up until the time I read this book, the good side was always the one the main character was on, and the bad was the one against the main character. That is not true in this book. Unfortunately, although I have tried on several occasions to mimic this, it has come to nothing.

The other reason why I like this book is because I like the telepathy. Again, I have tried to mimic the telepathy and that has had more success, mainly in ETOLT however. This interest in telepathy might actually go back to Star Trek and my early days of writing. But I think Kathy Tyers did an awesome job with that whole series and only wish she’d write more. (hinthint)

Another one of the best books I’ve read is Calico Captive. This one I believed impressed me because it is not my normal genre of reading and it still kept me captivated. Let me put it this way; if you want a good example of how to keep a reader hooked, read that book. The secret, I think, is because I kept asking myself, “What about this?” and because of that, I kept reading.

Still feel free to answer this question (on that post), because many of these posts do get seen long after they have been written and a good list of books is always a treasure.

Moving on.

This week’s question is:

How do you remember your plots or ideas before you can write them?

Edit: You can find the answer here.