• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Alyssa Majestic

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.

RK Wallis

Full Member
Blogger
Joined
Feb 15, 2019
Location
Australia
LitBits
0
Australia
Alyssa's newsletter popped into my email today. I thought this was a good analogy (by a published author). It's my experience too:

"Revisions are where the real magic happens. Throw away the notion of writing a perfect first draft. Just like you wouldn’t solve a jigsaw puzzle by pulling pieces out of the box and setting them down in order, from left to right, one at a time—you don’t write a book that way, either.

Instead, you scatter all the pieces on the table and start working on the edges of the puzzle (the outline, or the framework of the novel) and then you tackle one section at a time (one plot thread, or one character arc, or one red herring), building and building until it all finally fits together. It can be overwhelming to conceptualize a book all at once, but when you break it down and take one element at a time, it’s easier to manage in your brain. At least, that’s how it works for me!"
 
Yes, good advice and insight too.

I was so mightily relieved when I heard published authors admitting they hadn't got their whole book mapped out from the first to the last word.

OK, so it doesn't make the job very much easier but it certainly makes it considerably less daunting.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • The Joy of Lit Mags
    While my first novel is tentatively making its way towards agents who already have too much to read, ...
  • Advertising and Social Media
    There has been much discussion in writing circles about how much a writer has to self-promote these ...
  • Future Abstract: Fights at Night
    SATIRE ALERT: The following abstract is entirely fictional and does not represent actual events or s ...
  • Great Novel Openings Quiz
    As writers, we all know how important it is to grip the reader from the very start. Intriguing, surp ...
  • In The Summertime
    In the early seventies, I had a semi-Afro hairstyle and a shaggy beard. . I thought I looked like th ...
  • Working with a Literary Agent
    The Querying In a previous post I mentioned that I was back in the query trenches. To recap, my earl ...
  • Danger! Danger!
    What is perhaps the most feared creature of the Borneo rainforest, I hear you ask? Who is the King o ...
Back
Top