Category Archives: Writing

The blog is taking today off, because after a long and busy workday, I have the brain to either write or to blog, not both.

Instead, have this post from last April, in which I wonder about outlining endings. Having recently finished outlining another novel, in which I did manage to outline the ending…I’m now wondering what made this most recent book different. Worked backwards from the end, maybe? It still has holes, but not nearly as many as usual.

Maybe I’m just getting better at filling in the holes.

We’ve probably all heard the conversation that starts with a writer complaining that they can’t find time to write, to which someone responds, “You don’t find time, you make it.” This makes perfect sense to me, after several years of squeezing more and more writing time into the cracks of a day job.

Then a few weeks ago, I read the column “How to Find, Rather Than Make, Writing Time“, in which a pullout quote says, in big print near the top, “Don’t feel pressured to give up things you enjoy—however mundane—to make time to write.”

Um.

Ok, she does clarify that she means you don’t *always* have to give up *everything* you enjoy, which is impossible for me to argue with, since a) it’d be hypocritical because I haven’t and won’t give up everything I enjoy, b) that would mean giving up writing since I enjoy it, and c) absolutes are always wrong.

What I really want to comment on is this suggestion: “Try to notice time in your day, even if it’s only 15 minutes, when you are not doing something you enjoy or something you have to do.” Reuse that as writing time.

Seems reasonable. Until I start thinking, what do I do that I don’t enjoy and don’t have to do? I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and have come up with:

1. Installing the rain barrel in spring and removing it in fall–We don’t need a rain barrel, and hooking it up is not a barrel of laughs. However, I like having it and reusing rainwater, and this isn’t a lot of time, so I suspect it’s not a good source of more writing time. On the other hand, I haven’t set it up yet this year, so maybe that’s why I’ve been so productive.

That’s it. I was going to add taking out the compost, but I like seeing how things are decaying and looking at the cool bugs. I’d say housecleaning, but I already only do the parts that fall under “have to do” (and my parents don’t visit without warning). I’d also say “looking at the things my husband points out on FailBlog, especially if I’ve already seen them” but that is not a whole lot of time, is often fun, and is not exactly predictable. Maybe next time he says I should come look at something, I should reply, “No, and now I have to write two sentences.”

I suppose she really means things like aimless web surfing or playing little games like Angry Birds, where it might be moderately fun and interesting, but I could be doing something even more fun instead. And that is sound advice. (And I’ve cut my blog reading waaaay back over the past months.)

What do you do that you don’t have to do but isn’t enjoyable? Should you be writing me a comment about it, or writing your next scene?

Volume 3 of the Crimson Pact is out!

I got a sneak peek at a couple stories a few weeks ago and am looking forward to reading the rest. I especially enjoyed Stephanie M. Lorée’s “A Contract Between Thieves” which is set in an “Italian Renaissance steampunk meets traditional sword & sorcery world” and features a rogue named Feni, who takes a job that goes (of course) quite wrong.

Volume 4 will be out later this year, and it will include a prequel to my story from volume 2, along with other sequels from previous volumes and all new demon-hunting tales.

If you haven’t tried any of the Crimson Pact stories, right now you can get a sampler pack of four stories from volume 1 free at Amazon through Friday, so you’ve got no excuses not to give it a try.

I’m going to Kansas this summer!

That probably only sounds exciting if you know that I applied to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Novel Writers Workshop at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, at the University of Kansas. I guess either the beginning of the novel I submitted looked promising, or like it needs a lot of work.

This is a two-week workshop for unfinished novels–they say it works best if you have less than half the book done. I have three and a third chapters… And I only have that because I had to send pages with the application. I still need to finish the outline. Workshopping an unfinished book intrigued me, because I’d like to get to a point where I do more of the work up front and cut down on my revision time/number of drafts (more on that next week). And the timing was perfect since I was planning on starting a new novel this month anyway.

So, in the next month or two, I need to finish my outline/synopsis type thing, write some more chapters, and revise the beginning (because I’ve already decided to delete a character).

And then I get to spend two whole weeks talking about writing with other writers! I couldn’t pick a more exciting summer vacation.

Recently I was looking for software to use for taking notes on books I’m reading. For various reasons Evernote wasn’t working for me. Then I randomly ran across a mention of Circus Ponies Notebook, which sounded too cutesy, but turned out to be a quite reasonable program. It is Mac and iPad only.

As you can probably guess by the name, it uses a notebook metaphor (I prefer the look of the 3-ring binder to the spiral). You can have tabbed divider pages plus outline pages plus to do lists plus some other things I haven’t looked at yet. The outlining is quite well done. The iPad version even has special keyboard buttons for indenting/unindenting.

Sticky notes can attach to pages, though this didn’t work too well for me on the iPad (I couldn’t move them around, and they covered up text).

One feature that I haven’t made much use of, but which looks like it will come on handy in the future, is the multidex. The notebook automatically indexes all your text, so you can find things easily later.

So far I’ve been using it for taking notes on topics, like content strategy or anthropology, where I want to keep notes from several books/articles/etc in one file. (I believe it was designed for students, so this is a pretty obvious thing to do with it.) I think it might also come in handy as a worldbuilding bible, especially for settings that I revisit at various times and places in their history. The multidex would make it easy to find out if I already had notes on, oh, the dining habits of the people from such and such country.

Last week, Patty Jansen blogged about something she saw in slush: boring beginnings. I only read slush for a short time, and that’s what I saw as well. The truly bad stories were rare, but most of what I read was just not that engaging.

Go read her post for examples of what makes beginnings boring. One type–stories that start with something interesting, and then have a second scene which backtracks to explain the first–is a bad habit of mine. Nearly all of my first drafts start with something interesting, and then a big infodump of backstory, and then a note where I tell myself to delete all that.

I think I have to write out the infodump to reassure my brain that I know what the situation is. The key is to delete it in revision.

Scrivener provides a lot of places to put notes. This is a feature I don’t make full use of.

You can have:

A) Synopsis – each scene/document can have one. You can show this in the outliner, it’s available in the sidebar (Inspector), and it’s what appears on the index cards in index card view.

You can make it pretty long, but you can’t make the synopsis window very big, so a long synopsis means a lot of scrolling. It would also mess up the outline view (though you can hide/show it pretty easily).

There is a synopsis finder, which will search for text in the synopses only.

B) Document notes – this takes up much of the Inspector. Each scene/chapter/folder/file/whatever gets its own document notes.

C) Project notes – this is an interesting concept. These notes apply to the whole project. You can view them in the inspector (instead of the document notes) or in a floating window. In either case you can use tabs to divide your project notes into different pieces.

I don’t use project notes at all. I’m not sure what the point is. It seems easier to create a document for each kind of note – if I want to see it while I’m in some other document, I can either split the screen or open it in a popup via quick view.

Document notes are where I put…notes…about what needs to change in that particular scene, or what I need to write. Things like “make her more suspicious” (fiction) or “more exciting, shorter” (day job). I also use it for notes to refer to later: “moon 1/4 full”. For fiction I use document notes a lot. For work stuff I hardly ever use them.

The synopsis, on the other hand, I use more at work than for fiction. Which seems weird. But it’s a convent place to stick a short list that holds the due date and status (due Mar 16, waiting for content from X). This then shows up in my outline view and helps me get a quick overview of a project.

For fiction, I just give my scenes longish titles. I would like to use the synopsis to hold an outline of the scene–at one point, I was writing very detailed outlines based on Bickham’s scene and sequel structure (which I can’t find my post on to link to). Lately I haven’t been doing that, but it’d still be nice to have a list of what is in the scene, separate from what I need to do to the scene (which is in document notes). I could make a separate document for every scene (maybe a subdocument), but that starts messing up chapter word counts and makes compiling (exporting) the text annoying.

Scrivener users, do you use project notes and the synopsis? If you use another program, does it have various kinds of note fields, and do you find them useful?

I might have gone just a wee bit evangelistic about Scrivener at my writing group last night. I’ll try to rein it in a bit here. (But Scrivener is awesome. You should try it if you haven’t yet.)

I’ve been meaning to blog about how I use Scrivener, and have decided to break it down into little pieces. Today, the Outliner.

I really only started using the Outliner recently, and I don’t use it for actually making an outline. I use it for keeping an eye on my progress and to some extent, structure.

The left-hand column lists my scenes. (These are not my real scene titles…or are they?) If I had written a synopsis, it would show below the scene title. I usually turn that off, though, because my synopses get long.

Point of view is a custom column that I added to keep track of whose scene it is. After I took the screenshot I added one for “Day”, i.e., when the scene takes place, because that is a pain to keep track of. “Location” might be another good one to add.

Label and status are sort of self-explanatory. They’re both customizable, so I use labels, which get color-coded, for things like “Questions”, “Changes needed”, “Don’t forget to follow up on this”, “Wow, you really screwed up here” etc. Statuses help me keep track of revisions and whether something’s been to my crit group or not.

I’m playing with Scrivener’s word count tracking for the first time, so I get multicolored progress bars. I told the program I want each of my scenes to be 1000 words long, and this is a nice visual reminder of what needs to be worked on (I usually write in order, but with the two different protagonists I skipped ahead to Juliet’s second chapter before going back to Romeo’s first). Or of what might be a rather weak scene–for me at least, a short scene usually means it isn’t pulling its weight.

The date columns are there by default and I haven’t got around to deleting them yet.

I’ve also been using Scrivener at work for various content projects (when I’m not sitting at the keyboard at home typing words, I’m sitting at the keyboard at work typing different words). That’s where I started using the Outliner, since for larger projects it provides an at-a-glance look at content status (to write, waiting for approval, in implementation, etc.) and location (whether the content for that page/email/whatever is in this Scrivener file, or on a mockup, or on the server). And as I type this it just occurred to me that Due Date would be a good column for me to add to some projects…

This advertises itself as “the last book on screenwriting you’ll ever need.” I can’t verify that, but it is a great look at structure. I think I have Helen to thank for alerting me to it.

Screenwriter Blake Snyder has sold quite a few spec scripts, none of which I’ve seen. But what he says here about structure–and conflict–makes a lot of sense to me.

The key chapters from this perspective are 4 and 5, which together make a nice system for plotting out a book. Which I’m doing now, so it seemed like a good time for a post.

The “Blake Snyder Beat Sheet” breaks the story down into 15 pieces like Catalyst, Debate, and All Is Lost, some of which are sections and some single events. (He gives the page numbers for where each item should appear in the script, which is not obvious how to translate to a novel.) Filling out the beat sheet for my book–even if I’m not going to follow the structure precisely, which I’m not–was useful just for making me think some more about the plot and the various ways I can add conflict and water moccasins tension.

The other thing I like about his approach–other than that it uses index cards and puts my awesome magnetic white board to good use–is that for each scene he notes down both the conflict and the emotional change the character experiences in each scene. Which is similar to what I was doing when I was looking at the Swain/Bickham scene and sequel structure.

That’s just two chapters of the book. If you’re interested in story structure or looking for a tool to help you plot out your next novel, Save the Cat is worth a look.

Several months ago I joined Pinterest. If you haven’t heard of it it’s basically an online bulletin board. You add images to groups and other people can “repin” them to their own boards. It’s hugely popular (as in, the marketers have noticed it and are trying to figure out how to use it), especially among women.

I haven’t been doing much with my account. I’ve never made physical collages, so making virtual ones doesn’t have much appeal to me.

But. I’m planning a book and decided to try to figure out what the characters look like. Usually I just have vague ideas, and scribbled notes about build and hair color. This time I decided to do what so many of my writer friends do and cast actual people in the roles. Then I’ll have photos to refer to when I need to describe someone.

Enter Pinterest. Since I can see what other people pin, I can search for photos of people. There is a “people” category that I’ve been browsing, trying to figure out who looks like various people in my books.

There is one big problem though: my characters do not look like celebrities or models, and they don’t have perfect hair and makeup and clothes. I’m going to have to broaden my image search. Any suggestions?