This is a little detail I’ve noticed recently, while writing a scene: I tend to not describe what I call “one-time” characters. You know, these characters you’ll see once in the novel, then never again—or so much later that it’ll always be time to give a more accurate physical description about them if they’re important enough at that moment. The taxi driver that has only one line of text to say, the new manager that the main character will only meet briefly before being fired from the company… I like to call them “courier-types”, too, because I often use them to carry a message or fetch a more important character; in themselves, they don’t have any role.

I did a word count on my novel yesterday. As the software I use (TexNotes Pro) allows me to create separate notes instead of a huge file, I also did a word count per note, each note holding a chapter. Roughly, my chapters are around 3200 words long. I must admit that I have absolutely no idea whether this is too long, too short or just about right, since I’ve never took the time to count words in chapters of a published book to compare. It’s just the way things are at the moment, in what is my first draft.

I have the feeling that my chapters aren’t “long”—I often end them on (semi) cliffhangers, and I have a natural tendency to not make gazillions of scenes occur in the same chapter, since it’d then make it too crammed and complex. However, this made me wonder: what’s the average length, anyway? It probably has to change depending on the kind of story told, and I very much doubt there’s any “law of writing” about this (except “don’t make chapters containing 100,00 words each”).

In any case, out of curiosity, what is an accepted number here—or rather, what’s your own accepted number?

Y Tags: chapters | word+count | writing

When I was younger, my dream was “to become a writer” (or should I use the word “author” here, since I was thinking of novels and of nothing else). To be honest, this is still my dream, and this is the reason why, after all these years, I’m still pumped up about writing. I’m a very cyclic person who jumps from one interest to the other in a matter of weeks, months or of 2-3 years at the most, but writing has never left me. Even when I’d spent time playing MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs, half of my interest in these was that I could write the adventures of our characters afterwards, or make up “parallel” or “intermediary” stories. I still have boatloads of these. It was still writing.

I had almost forgotten having entered my e-mail address on wordpress.com for an invite. Today, right out of a far away galaxy, an invite popped in my inbox. And now I’m wondering: “What will I use it for?” There are many, many domains of interest I could want to make a blog about, yet I remain so undecided right now. It’s like a big birthday gift that I don’t dare use yet, in fear of spoiling it.

In any case, I’m giving myself a few days to think about it more and decide what I’ll be blogging about there, if only to test it and see by myself, not only through reviews made by other people. I’m already a big WordPress fan, after all; even though I’m used to having total control over my blogs, this still seems like a nifty opportunity for anyone who’d want to give a try at blogging without having to deal with a much more basic system.

So far, I’ve had a look at the interface, and it seems to me more pleasant to use than the old WordPress dashboard, with an integrated WYSIWYG editor (what we’ll be getting too for WP 1.6?). Far from perfect, but already lss ugly. I know, it may seem shallow, but I like having a nice layout under the eyes when I spend half a hour writing and translating a post. I’m only human, after all, and my eyes can do with the relief.

Y Tags: blogging | wordpress

My previous post about chapters overhaul made me wonder if many other writers do that—keeping their drafts?

I’ve noticed that I tend to do that a lot, not to force them into a manuscript later on, not in the hopes of using them for something else, but simply as memories, so to say. I file them into “old drafts” folders, and months or years later, I’m always glad to be able to read them again. These aren’t necessarily short drafts; sometimes, they’ll be entire chapters that I’ve rewritten, or that I’ve decided to not integrate at all into the story anymore. There’s a stash of short stories in these folders as well, of course.

I’m not sure why I do that. Perhaps I don’t like the idea of losing weeks’ worth of work, or perhaps I appreciate being able to reflect on my former ways of writing, to see how I’ve evolved. I get this feeling very often when I take back texts I’ve typed in English four or five years ago: it allows me to realize how much I’ve improved since then, and this is an interesting thing.

I’ve already wondered if I just shouldn’t trash these drafts completely, in order to not get “influenced” by them in any case, but I know I’d regret it in a few years from now, since I always do.

Maybe I’m just some kind of weird collector when it comes to this!

Y Tags: drafts | writing