Monthly Archives: April 2017

How To Write a Novel in 60 days + 24

Posted on by under authors, creative writing, dailies, e-books, fiction, Uncategorized, writing

Not only can you write a novel in 60 days, but it only takes a few hours a day. And that leaves you more time for watching cute animal and baby videos.

I am about to give you a formula that you can use to write a novel in 60 days, plus an extra 24. The extra days I will explain later. This formula is predicated on math, but  the formula is something you can play with, adjust, and toy with as your mileage will vary.

But it does give you a road to discipline yourself, something a writer needs. Especially me.

It works like this. An internet search will tell you a novel is anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 words. It is not a law, there are exceptions, we are using this as a guideline. Let us use 90,000. It is not difficult to write 1,5000 words a day. Of late that has taken me three to four hours, depending on what little roadblocks I encounter. If you write 1,500 words a day it takes 60 days to reach 90,000. Feel free to do the math, that was never by strong suit, but the calculator has told me 60 is the answer.

See how easy that was. For many who have not tried writing a novel because it seems overwhelming, the math says it is doable in 60 days.

So what are the extra 24 days for? After each five days you take two days to review your previous 7,500 words, using this time to edit, correcting grammar and spelling, and doing so in painstaking, letter by letter, period by period if necessary, manner. Do that for the first day and the second day make notes of how you want to the story to move forward and of what you want your characters to do next.

I pause here to remind that there are two approaches to writing fiction. One is to map out the story ahead of time with outlines and everything necessary to where you only have to fill in the details. I can’t do that, too much work. I prefer, like Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard, and many others, to make it up as I go, trusting the characters to let you know what happens next. So that is what I do the second day. Make notes for the next few chapters. And I run with it for the next five days.

So after sixty days of writing and two days after each set of five days you have written a novel, have done the editing and rewrites and you breath a sigh of relief, congratulate yourself, and eat a cookie. Take six days for your vacation to the Bahamas and you have 90 days. Since a year is over 360 days, you can actually write four novels a year with 24 days in the Bahamas. You are prolific. You are as crazy about writing as Stephen King. Scary isn’t it.

As I said, it is a formula, a place for you to start and tinker with. Good luck.

I wrote the following e-novels before I figured the math. They are found at Amazon here.

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What do Kafka and Virginia Woolf owe their fame to

Posted on by under authors, books, dailies, fiction, fiction writers, Uncategorized, writers

Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf both had emotional problems, but they had more in common than mental issues. Both are literary icons today, but neither were much regarded in their time. So how did they go from obscurity to masters of storytelling?

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and though his short stories were published in magazines beginning in 1909, he did not set the literary world on fire. He died at the age of forty to tuberculosis. Before he died he told his best friend Max Brod to burn all his writings; to not even read the unpublished stories, just burn them.

Had Brod followed Kafka’s wishes we would never have heard of him. Brod kept the writings and it was not until the 1930’s, years after Kafka’s death in 1924 that his works were translated from German, and not until the 1940’s when the French existentialists, primarily Albert Camus and Jena-Paul Sartre discovered Kafka and extolled his works.

It was a chain of events over decades for Kafka to be found, to have his works praised, to have is work admired, respected. He died not knowing his legacy to literature.

Virginia Woolf, born one year before Kafka, in Kensington, Middlesex, England, died at age 59 from suicide in 1941.

At the age of thirty She married Leonard Woolf in a marriage of convenience. They were part of the famed liberal Bloomsbury Group of artists and intellectuals. The Woolf’s published Virginia’s book with their own Hogarth Press. (Perhaps all writers should own their own little publishing company). She only sold a few hundred of her books before her death. Had they not had that press, she may not have been published.

But the feminist movement of the 1960’s and 70’s brought fame to Virginia as women saw in Woolf’s books much fuel for their fire, due in large part to Woolf’s 1929 book A Room of One’s Own. The awakening feminist movement reawakened the novels of Virginia Woolf, decades after death, raising her from obscurity to world wide fame.

There are other writers who have gone from obscurity to literary prominence and honor. The message is just write, that is a writers job. Many popular writers of their time have been forgotten. The only things you can control is you keyboard and your imagination. Whatever happens, happens. It would be nice to have a friend like Max Brod though. Thanks Max.

My e-books, a couple in obscurity despite good reviews found on Amazon

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Was Tristram Shandy, 1723, the 1st post modern novel

Posted on by under authors, books, dailies, fiction, Uncategorized

Post modern literature,  according to literary scholars,  came about following World War II. In the above link many examples are listed, and like anyone with a list, not all will be agreeable to everyone. Some of the titles stretch the concept.

Of course post-modernism is often difficult to categorize, and the link I provided in above paragraph doesn’t get to the heart of it.

Much of post modern literature revolves around the author, the narrative, and nature of fiction. It is experimental in nature, it looks inward, is playful, chiding the author, the story, and the reader. Think Donald Barthelme, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, just to name three of many.

My favorite novel is The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, proprietor. It is about  J. Henry Waugh who works for a small firm of accountants and bookkeepers. He likes B-girls and delicatessens and loves playing his creation-a baseball game played with dice. He has created teams, players, and results, not only of plays, but of histories for all his players. The game is as elaborate as any novel. As we get deeper into the story the more the players take center stage and J. Henry Waugh slowly disappears from the story until all that is left are the characters Waugh created who now have a life of there own.

Robert Coover is the author of the novel, but Waugh is the creator of the game-of course Coover is behind it all- and Waugh disappears, his (Coover or Waugh’s or both)characters are important, they are of interest, not the author. This is one of the playful non-narrative narratives of post modernism.

What is the nature of fiction? Of the author? Post modern writers play with these ideas through satire, humor, digressions, and all sorts of tricks.

But the nine volume The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne was written between 1759-1767 was not written post World War II, but two centuries before anyone heard of post modernism. Yet Sterne’s Shandy is bawdy, satirical, and has all the signs of post modernism. Shandy sets out to tell his biography, but his stories go off in so many tangents, he never gets around to his biography. Midway through his third volume he seems apologetic for not having gotten past the first day of his life. And now he realizes a year after starting this biography that he has 364 more days of his life to cover. He will never catch up.

The post modernist traits to Stern’s epic indicates to me the old Peter Allen song, Everything Old is New Again. As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun.

I don’t belive my e-novels at Amazon are post modern, perhaps not even modern, but there might, perhaps could be, but probably not be . . . well who likes categories and pigeon holes anyway.

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