Good Writing Links

We weren't quite fast enough with the camera for this one. Just a split second before we took the picture, Drew was doing a perfect imitation of Monty Burns's "excellent" hand gesture. So use your imagination and pretend that Drew is saying "excellent" to these excellent writing links.

Tam wrote a great piece about the importance of writing without the safety net. This is something I started doing last summer while I was unemployed. I faced the dangerous ideas and scenes in my head and tried to do it without flinching. It was really, really hard, too. The characters were hungry, manipulative, and a strange breed of passive/agressive that made me twitch on their own, and then there were the things they were telling me they wanted to do to each other. Quite frankly, it was the sort of idea that you really wish you didn't find lurking in your mind because it makes you think twice about your own sanity. And I still pulled some punches. I still turned left toward beige when I should've kept on the dark path and maybe even turned right into further darkness for the true power of the story. And that was only a short story, people. I'm trying this again with Strings of Discord (man, I really can't find a good title for this one), but I have the sense that I'll have to read for beige in the revisions and rip away that safety net. I did a little bit of that last night as I got to thinking about how Airen would react to a situation. Beige was accepting responsiblity and meekly following the path duty and obligation laid out for her. And I couldn't write it. It felt wrong. So I thought about it, and I realized that it would be such a dangerous shade of puce if she denied responsibility and fought duty and obligation tooth and nail until it was absolutely imperative for her own survival to accept what she had rejected and would hurt her the most to listen to duty and obligation.

Tess Gerritsen also had a great post about writing, specifically about how difficult it is to write a sex scene. See above link to Tam's post about safety for further explanation of why this is tough. This is my favorite bit from Tess's post:

Why is it so much easier to write about autopsy rooms or crime scenes (which, let's face it, most novelists have actually never seen) than it is about sex (which, one assumes -- one HOPES -- that most novelists have experienced.)

Heh. It's the same sort of thing. There's saftey in an autopsy and a crime scene, strangely enough. That's detail writing, and the scope of the environment, the human body, is finite. Once you start writing sex, you have to move beyond the details and get into those pesky, infinite emotions. That's where the danger lurks--especially if your characters are troublesome and have hot pink emotions and not the easier beige ones.

I read so many great author and writing blogs that if I tried to link all the great advice and posts I found, that's all this blog would be. But occasionally I don't have much of my own to say, so I let the pros speak for me and add my own piece.