drench yourself in words unspoken

today is the last day before nanowrimo - at least, it is for this part of the world. and so, this post is dedicated solely to writing. to start, here are a couple of links that i found to be pretty cool:

>>have you heard of the "golden ratio?" supposedly everything is divided into the ratio 1:1.618. everything. nature, art, literature... this site will help you keep your novel to the ratio. type in the number of words you plan to write and how many plot points and it'll calculate where each one should be. you don't have to really follow this, but doing it after you finish is pretty interesting because you usually find out that what you wrote and what it tells you match up pretty well.

>>while writing, it can sometimes be pretty hard to avoid making your character a mary sue. you know, the completely perfect flawless ones. i know i've written a couple myself (and though i still love the character, i cant deny that she's a mary sue). here's a mary sue test that you can use to check your character. i've heard the test may be a little biased, so don't get too worked up over your results.

>>whether you make it before you start writing or after you have a finished piece of work, you'll eventually have to think up a name for it. want to know if your title would make it in the "real" literary world? using statistics and science and magic and all that other reliable stuff, this test will let you know.

some of my favorite quotes about writing:

*I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. ~Isaac Asimov

*Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. ~Isaac ASimov

*Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any. ~Orson Scott Card

*You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~Jack London

*All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. ~Oscar Wilde (from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray)

i have this problem with chapters when i write. most of the time, i just can't include them. the story will go on for over fifty pages before i realize that, in my head, i'm still on chapter one. i can never find that exact place where the story should cut. the part where i'm telling the reader, 'go ahead, take a break. we'll wait for you right here.' and then when the whole thing is finished (minus the parts that never make it to the paper because they decided they liked life in my head so much better) i never get around to breaking it up. i'm trying, in the stuff i've been writing recently, to write in chapters. this might just be me, but i feel like it changes the experience of writing. it feels different. it's not better or worse. just different. this might just be because i've been going without chapters for almost twenty years.

anyways, happy nano-ing.

*Unwritten - Natasha Bedingfield