On fiction: course started, and how I will approach it
First lecture is now online, the online writing course has officially started. Yay!
So, what's so great about this? We'll have lectures each week, but we could have watched them on youtube. That however's not the point. Writing is not spectating. The idea is to have, each week, 1000-2000 words of a fiction piece, to submit to the other attendees for critique. Also, by the end of the course each attendee must have written a story of at least 30K words.
There are about 10 course weeks.
Right about now, the arithmetically minded notice a problem. 10 weeks, each with at most a 2000 word submission, translates to a 20K text. And indeed, Sanderson says, expect not to be able to show the complete story to the writing group during the course.
But I'd really like to.
Fortunately, one of my bad habits comes to the rescue. It appears my first drafts are very sketchy; they rush from event to event, pausing little for description, say. Reviewers are likely to pick up on this, and mention that so-and-so needs fleshing out. So I'm thinking, submit the rushing texts to the group, so that I can show a complete skeleton of the story each week. Each week I get feedback of what needs extra developing, so that by next week I can add it to the text.
The fleshed out texts I'll put, in sequence, here. So Rendezvous with NECA will be, as a first step, serialized on this blog, in chunks of about 3k words each week. Meanwhile, on the course website, I'll have another, more compressed but in a sense complete, version of the story. So then, onwards!
So, what's so great about this? We'll have lectures each week, but we could have watched them on youtube. That however's not the point. Writing is not spectating. The idea is to have, each week, 1000-2000 words of a fiction piece, to submit to the other attendees for critique. Also, by the end of the course each attendee must have written a story of at least 30K words.
There are about 10 course weeks.
Right about now, the arithmetically minded notice a problem. 10 weeks, each with at most a 2000 word submission, translates to a 20K text. And indeed, Sanderson says, expect not to be able to show the complete story to the writing group during the course.
But I'd really like to.
Fortunately, one of my bad habits comes to the rescue. It appears my first drafts are very sketchy; they rush from event to event, pausing little for description, say. Reviewers are likely to pick up on this, and mention that so-and-so needs fleshing out. So I'm thinking, submit the rushing texts to the group, so that I can show a complete skeleton of the story each week. Each week I get feedback of what needs extra developing, so that by next week I can add it to the text.
The fleshed out texts I'll put, in sequence, here. So Rendezvous with NECA will be, as a first step, serialized on this blog, in chunks of about 3k words each week. Meanwhile, on the course website, I'll have another, more compressed but in a sense complete, version of the story. So then, onwards!
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