Rewriting
November 4, 2009
- At the point in my attempts to write Poetry when all I seem to be doing is revising, revising, revising...and then revising some more...sometimes to the point where I'm losing the original feeling altogether...don't know if that's an indication of something wrong, or if I'm expecting too much, too soon...All I know is that I'm not enjoying it much...BUT, I submitted some of my work to numerous ...
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August 22, 2009
- You hear a lot of writers lament the changing marketplace. One very popular lament goes something like this:"I took too long to write my brilliant wizard/vampire/whatever book and now the market is FLOODED with books that are similar to mine and no one will ever want to BUY it! AIIEEE!!!!"I'm not going to talk about that.I bring it up because I too am getting nervous about the ...
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August 19, 2009
- My good friend PJ would like to me to talk about plots, and how to make them exciting throughout.I would love to do this, but unfortunately, I know very little about plotting. When things get boring in my books, I tend to just throw in some action. Punch someone in the face, drop a rock on them, etc.This makes for good action scenes, but action is not always plot.(This is my one original ...
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July 31, 2009
- Rewriting is like remodeling your house. You have all the beautiful polished bits that you love, and in between a complete nightmare of sawdust and bent nails and spools of bare wire, and great curtains of plastic so the chaos won't spill out and infect the rest. You look up at the whole overwhelming jungle and think someday… but that someday stays a long way off for a long time…Remember, you ...
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July 21, 2009
- I was just chatting by email with my incredibly hilarious and talented friend Sean, who isn’t a huge fan of his first drafts. I totally get that. I, too, hate at least the first five drafts of anything I write. (However, I have to say that Sean’s first drafts are always a lot better than mine, so he really shouldn’t be complaining.)Revision is a necessary evil in the writing process. In ...
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June 14, 2009
- I’ve given my book talk at least 40 times, so when I received an invitation to speak at my favorite local library, Himmel Park, I thought: Time for something different. I asked the librarians what they’d like to hear. “How about something about your work as a botanist? Out in the desert. Write up a little announcement, and email it.”I got to work. As a botanist, that is, typing in field ...
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May 13, 2009
- Recently, my editor gave me a January, 2010 pub date for the reprint of my first novel, Time After Time , the basis for the Warner Bros movie starring Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen. I think more as a courtesy than anything else, he asked if I wanted to make changes in the original edition. “Sure,” I replied without hesitation, “Get rid of the dedication to my ex-wife.” Other than ...
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March 30, 2009
- Jodi Thomas is the NY Times and USA Today best-selling author of 26 novels and 6 short story collections. As of July 2006, she was the 11th woman to be inducted into the RWA Hall of Fame. She is also currently serving as teh Writerin Residence at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas.She will be on Introducing WRITERS! with me to celebrate the release of her latest book, Rewriting ...
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February 3, 2009
- It's been a mighty long time since I posted here. And I feel kind of bad, because I love Red Room. I think it's a fabulous forum full of amazing people. But, I've been busy. Is a writer ever not?My screenplay, my "baby", is getting some love. I am beyond thrilled, though we are still in the early days of the process. Making a movie is a very long road. "Hurry up and ...
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January 13, 2009
- I just finished reading two books, in which the authors, very different stylists, both avoided the repetitive usage of the verbs “to be” and “to have” as well as other overdone usages of sentence structure and sentence subjects. They dazzled. One, Annie Dillard’s triumphant latest novel The Maytrees, lays down line after line, precise, poetic, thick as slabs of homemade, whole grain ...
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