doug-lewars

[doug-lewars]

When You're Stuck

'If you're stuck in a scene, have a man walk through the door holding a gun' - Unknown Source. This is advice for mystery writers but a slight variation ... have a character or stranger appear from nowhere and start talking seems to work as well.

[doug-lewars]

Superbowl Sunday

Today is Superbowl Sunday. It's a day I quite enjoy. I'm not interested much in football, but it's traditional this day for people to throw Superbowl parties and indulges in all sorts of good food. As I see it, any excuse to abandon my diet for a day is good news. I won't watch the game but I won't watch my waistline either.

[doug-lewars]

Reading Out Loud

There's nothing like reading your work out loud to notice you wrote the word 'an' when you wanted 'and'. Spell check can't detect it and when silent reading there's a good chance you'll automatically see 'and' and not what's there.

[doug-lewars]

Being Younger

There are certain advantages to being older, but if I had the option of choosing, I'd opt for a much younger me. I was reminded of this today when passing a skating rink. A bunch of kids were flying around on the ice, some highly adept skaters and some beginners. Every now and then one of them would fall and bounce right up again. If I fell, I'd risk serious injury but they could get up and keep going as if nothing happened.

[doug-lewars]

Problem Solving

There's an old maxim for writers of detective fiction. 'If you're stuck, have somebody walk through the door holding a gun'. It has broader implications. If you feel your scene lacks verve, throw in something or some totally offbeat character. It needn't initially make sense. Once you've got it a bit of development will make it fit in.

[doug-lewars]

Web Site

I don't have a website but that's because I'm lazy. It's on my to-do list, just somewhere near the bottom. That said, I fully realize if I want to be commercially successful as an author, I'll need to set one up. I did some shopping around some time ago and tat the time, Wordpress was bout the most cost effective. Don't know if that's still true.

[doug-lewars]

Tech

When writing a scene involving technology, say in a university setting, it's not a good idea to go into too much detail. Many, perhaps most of your readers won't have a large background in the topic if it's particularly esoteric. All you really need to do, is scatter a few buzzwords around and that should be sufficient.

[doug-lewars]

Rabbit Hole

I've finished my writing for today. I've done so editing ... not much maybe but enough to claim I edited. Now I can disappear down the rabbit hole of research with a clear conscience.

[doug-lewars]

POV

First-person, present tense is very popular these days. I think it's useful for those striving to win literary awards; however, I suspect quite a number of readers are cool to hostile to it so for commercial success you might do better with third-person and past tense.

[doug-lewars]

Copyright vs Plagiarism

You cannot copyright an idea. Copyright law is pretty clear on that. You can, however, plagiarize an idea. Therefore if you are in an academic setting you need to be ultra careful to attribute everything to the correct source.

[doug-lewars]

Workshop

I signed up for another writers' workshop today. I figured it was free, only ten weeks in duration, and would get me out of the house. In addition, being around other writers often yields new ideas I might not have stumbled across by myself.

[doug-lewars]

AI Test

I tested AI by giving the same prompt to Chat-GPT, Grok, and Deepseek V3. The prompt was a list of authors I like in descending order or preference and the request was to find authors I might like based on the list. Of the top 5 on each list, two were authors I particularly dislike. The ability for AI to find commonality in something as loosely defined as preference still needs work.

[doug-lewars]

Memory

I don't have a great memory which means I make lots of notes. Still there are times I need to dig out old manuscripts and search them for some character just to find out if they did such-and-such and when they did it.

[doug-lewars]

Hiatus

Down for the count with the flu or a cold or something unpleasant. It's not stopping me from writing but definitely slowing me down.

[doug-lewars]

Proof Reading

It seems just about everywhere on the internet you will see advertisements for Grammarly. Is it any good? I took a look at the product and even downloaded a copy although after carefully reading the documentation I decided it wasn't worth installing. The free version offers little more than Microsoft Word. You need to pay to get the sort of features which can assist with real editing and frankly I'm not prepared to do so.

[doug-lewars]

Inspirational

While out for my daily walk I passed a church with one of those electronic display devices outside. I think the person programming it was trying to provide an inspirational message re growth and nurturing but may have failed to think things through. The picture showed a father, his daughter, a toddler, and a plant. Each held a watering can. The toddler was watering the plant, the big sister was watering the toddler, and the father his daughter. I can see what the artist was striving for, but what jumped into my mind the the reaction of the toddler and daughter to have cold water dumped down the back of their necks. They might not have felt entirely nourished.

[doug-lewars]

Paths

Don't ever feel you need to be constrained in your writing. Do you want to write about great and controversial issues? Fine. Would you rather write escapist literature? Great. Take some time to understand what you enjoy and then follow that path. You'll have more fun and be a more productive writer.