pajaro

I write whenever I have time, sitting at a simple desk and working at a laptop in a spare room I use as an office. While writing, I distance myself from external distractions and get myself into the appropriate mood by listening to non-vocal music over noise-cancelling headphones. For this I usually choose soundtracks from movies or games that reflect the mood of the scene that I’m writing.

Apart from always having a mug of tea or decaf next to me, I avoid bringing snacks or having an easy source of drinks near my desk. This forces me to get up every so often to take a break. I find this particularly helpful when I am writing tense scenes, because I get so wrapped up in what I'm writing that I tend to be just as tense as my main character.

If I could, I would work overnight, which is when my imagination really comes alive. However my wife is very much a daytime person, so I make do with writing during the day.

All very good advice. At present my blog just contains occasional posts about the progress I’m making on my book, usually with a photograph of somewhere I’ve visited recently, along with something interesting about it. However, it's now been more than a year since I published my first book, so this may be getting a little stale.

I do agree that it is essential for authors to post something every so often, just to let their readers know that they're still around, even if they've had to give up writing for a while. The pandemic has been an eye-opener in this regard, as some of the independent authors I used to read, disappeared without a trace.

I'm not sure why I failed to see the importance of characterization in scifi stories for so long. Perhaps it was because, for years, my experience of reading sci-fi was dominated by library books of short stories, which tended to focus more on ideas than character development. And yes, that included a lot of Azimov's stories with their paper-thin characters. On the other hand, once I could afford to buy novels from bookshops, I did become a big fan of Heinlein and other excellent authors, so I'm not sure why I didn't notice the importance of characterization. Maybe they did it so well, that it looked easier to write characters than find fascinating new ideas.

Speaking of Heinlein, one thing that always amazed me about his books, was that the very first paragraph of every book somehow managed to drag me right into the thick of the story, complete with the feel of its environment and the tone of the rest of the book. I think he did that better than any other author I have ever read.

Regarding my question about switching to free indirect speech in the final book of my trilogy, I think you are right. I experimented with this a bit in the final few chapters of my second book, only to abandon it and rewrite those parts, because it jarred with what came before.

I first began to think about writing while reading science fiction as a teenager back in the 1980s. In the subsequent decades, whenever I dabbled with writing science fiction, I focussed my efforts on coming up with novel ideas, fanciful creatures and exotic alien landscapes. However the results were always dry and boring, even to me. The big breakthrough came when I realized that these otherworldly environments were irrelevant. What mattered were the human stories within them, driven by colorful characters and their interactions. It's obvious now, and much more fun, but it took me a long time to see this.

A second revelation came after I sent my first scifi novel to an assessment editor. He shocked me by telling me I shouldn't have sprinkled almost every sentence with adverbs. After railing against this for a while, I did some research online and discovered how right he was. I then began to notice that the most compelling public talks and the most immersive stories were the ones with the fewest adverbs. With that evidence in hand, I spent over a year re-writing my novel from start to finish, using almost no -ly adverbs, except between speech marks, where they give emotional color to my characters' speech. The result was very much worth the effort.

Right now, as I near the end of my second novel, my latest revelations have been reading about the problems with filter words, and about using free indirect speech to decrease the emotional distance between readers and characters. I am now wondering whether or not to switch to free indirect speech in the final book of my trilogy. In particular, I worry whether such a change in style would change people's perceptions of the characters they've become familiar with.