Hey!
As a start, I would like to apologise for not posting for weeks. My last post was on March 13, and because I’m now nearing the end of the Easter Holidays, it’s been quite a while, because as soon as a get a glimpse of motivation to make a blog post I’ll end up writing instead.
I’m not sure what to say. If you’ve read one of my previous posts, My Book! – The First Official Insight, you will have a pretty general understanding of my book, what it’s about, and why I write. I take it all back (well, most of it anyway). Now, I’ve written 55,000 words and my views have pretty much changed since then. I just read the post then, and I apologise for my vain and narcissistic ways.
I always read. There’s never a point in my life where I don’t have a book that I am reading, and right now my queue is gradually building as I am rereading Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden for school. I have to say, it makes SO much more sense the second time. In my post Knowledge Galore!, I talk about how the movie is good even though it skips a large portion of the storyline about the Hermit (you’d know what I was babbling on about if you have read the book). Now, I think this is because I saw the movie in between, but the reason I think the second time is better is because of the fact that I can mentally picture what the characters and the scenery look like. Anyway, I’m veering off topic.
As I was saying, I always have a book that I’m reading. When I look back on my writing, I notice that my style of writing reflects on the style of the author of whatever book I’m reading. For example, I’ve absent-mindedly been writing with longer paragraphs, as sometimes John Marsden has a page with no breaks, which I find can cause me to accidentally reread the same sentence eight times before I finally move on, and I try hard not to go that insane. Even as I write this now, you can see that I’ve made my paragraphs longer than the ones in my previous posts.
Many authors have different styles of writing. Some people don’t proofread, and some have to quadruple check a page before it can be sent off to the publisher. I break my writing down into stages. Right now, I’m in my braindump stage. I’m practically writing the book, or at least writing what I want to happen. If you picked up a page or two of what I’ve written so far and tried to send it to a publisher (even as an adult), it’d be pretty plausible.
Stage two of my writing is yet to be named, so now I refer to it as my General Proofreading Stage or just Stage Two. Basically, I’m just going to turn my braindump into a book. Adding complicated adjectives with as many syllables as possible is just part of it. I try to make my vocabulary sound as rich as can be, and I’m just going to mould the book by taking out stupid parts and/or try to imagine that I’m in the shoes of a reader, using the all-so-famous yet dreaded Red Pen. Those of you who have had any work published you would know that the Red Pen holds all authority, is devastatingly cruel yet without it those very words would collapse in a state of utter anarchy.
The third and final stage of my writing will be more of an edit than a proof read. Chapter by chapter, I will pull apart the fundamentals to be 100% sure that everything matches up, and that what I’ve said makes sense and that I haven’t said something that counters or is an antonym to something I’ve said earlier in the book. After that, I’ll (with their permission) ask a few people to read the chapter and give their thoughts on it, fixing any incorrect grammar or if I’ve used a word wrongly, etc.
So, that’s it. That’s how I write, but this three and a half stage process doesn’t apply to blog posts or essays, where I just throw it all down and hope for the best. On the right-hand side of the post I have created a poll, saying whether my posts should be shorter and more often or if they should stay the way they are. If you could vote, I would love it, and your identity is secure, just in case you were paranoid (yes, I’m talking to you Jason Bourne!).
As you can tell in this post, I’ve had a lot of fun using bold text, and I promise next time I won’t go as crazy. Also, I apologise for the lengthy post – I just had so much to say that wouldn’t make sense if I broke it down into two posts!
Well then. I guess that’s all.
Thanks a load for reading,
Chaos Kitchen.
Hey!
