McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Most frustrating moment as a writer
Murphy's Stunt Double:
Have you read JB's recent blog on organizing your story? Best advice I've seen in ages. Go here. http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/
Hope it helps!
LizW65:
I wrote the prologue and extensive notes for a story, had all kinds of research materials at hand, the works. Then I went and spilled a glass of wine on my laptop -- presto, no more story, no way of retrieving it. Keep telling myself it was just as well, as it was a crappy idea anyway. This does not work, BTW.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
Most frustrating recentish moment ?
Being fairly far along in planning for an alternate history mostly about a very different World War II, with a frame set in 1963 in which the protagonist was telling the WWII-period story while being stalked by an assassin from the occult-flavoured faction of the SS; when suddenly one day the relatively obscure unpleasant RL individual I had intended to use as the assassin gets elected Pope, and something that would have been a minor bit of incidental snark suddenly changes weight drastically. It leaves me in a lot of sympathy for the changes made in Stross' The Atrocity Archive, which in its original 1999 magazine publication used as its "obscure villain nobody would have heard of" Osama bin Laden.
Franzeska:
I know it seems like a big deal right now, but lots of famous authors have lost entire manuscripts and had to rewrite from scratch. Some of them even thought it improved the final work. I seem to recall a story about Steinbeck's dog destroying the first draft of Of Mice and Men, for example, and it's certainly a much tighter work than most of the soporific tomes I suffered through in school.
LizW65:
--- Quote from: Franzeska on May 01, 2008, 01:16:32 AM ---I know it seems like a big deal right now, but lots of famous authors have lost entire manuscripts and had to rewrite from scratch. Some of them even thought it improved the final work. I seem to recall a story about Steinbeck's dog destroying the first draft of Of Mice and Men, for example, and it's certainly a much tighter work than most of the soporific tomes I suffered through in school.
--- End quote ---
Sharon Kay Penman's sole 900+ page manuscript copy of The Sunne In Splendour was stolen out of her car and she had to re-write the entire thing from scratch.
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