Category Archives: Writing

I’m excited about the upcoming Scrivener iPad app. The primary reason I got my iPad was so I could write at lunch, and I actually prefer it to my netbook, virtual keyboard and all.

But syncing with Scrivener has been a problem. When I first started using it, I’d copy my notes for a chapter or two into Word and write the draft in that, using Docs to Go on the iPad. When it was done I’d copy it back into Scrivener. It worked all right, except when I wanted to refer to something that was still on the computer, and it ran the risk of forgetting which version of a chapter was currently the canonical one.

Now I’ve got a better workflow. Scrivener syncs my draft as plain text files to a folder in my Dropbox folder. Then the PlainText app grabs them from Dropbox. Everything happens automatically, so as long as I remember to open PlainText before I leave the house or when I come home, I always have the freshest version of the file.

But that only syncs the text of the files. One of the things I love about Scrivener is that every scene (or whatever unit of book) has its own associated collection of notes and metadata. So if I’m, say, revising a novel, I keep a list of changes for each scene in there. If I want to revise at lunch, I have to copy the notes into the actual text of the scene. If I forget, I have to find something else to work on during that lunch break. I’m looking forward to having my notes magically appear. Also the color-coding for labels (green = some changes needed, red = need to figure some stuff out, black = my crit group will kill me if I make them read this).

And my dream feature? That they’d include their own keyboard with a Dvorak setting. But I’m not holding my breath on that.

I was reading a post about the importance of distance by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, and wondering if it’s really just fresh eyes that make getting distance from a piece so helpful.

I know when I come back to a story after a few weeks off, I can find all sorts of problems that I’m sure weren’t there before.

Is my brain really mulling things over while I’m working on other things? In theory, I’m learning new things all the time, and I’d be able to apply them to old pieces. But I don’t think the learning curve is that steep.

I’ve mentioned I’m working on a programming project. Distance helps there, too. Since it’s all done in my spare time, there have been gaps of weeks or even months where I haven’t looked or even thought about it. Several times, I’ve opened the file up after a long absence, looked at a thorny problem I’d been stuck on, and fixed it immediately. It’s not like I was doing other programming in the meantime.

Anyone out there know why this happens? (I failed a quick google search. Maybe if I try again next week, I’ll hit the right query on the first try.)

Today’s post is late because we saw Swan Lake last night.  I spent much of the ballet thinking about what led the evil sorcerer to turn Odette and friends into swans in the first place, and what parts of the story would have to change to tell it from his perspective. 
 
Which reminded me I’d meant to talk about Zero Hour! My brother discovered this movie and brought a DVD over while I was home for Christmas. Zero Hour! is a 1957 disaster movie in which food poisoning strikes the  crew of an aircraft.  Passenger and former military pilot Ted Stryker has to overcome his PTSD and land the plane safely in time to get everyone to the hospital. 

Sound familiar?
 
The guys who made Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour! Not only is the plot the same, but they kept many of the same lines of dialog (“A hospital! What is it?”). The result is that Zero Hour!, a completely serious film, is now hilarious. Sort of like a karaoke version of Airplane! where you fill in the jokes yourself. (Actor: “I am serious.” My family: “And don’t call me Shirley!”)
 
It was really interesting to see the changes that were made to turn it from drama to comedy. Some of it is delivery, some of it is the addition of the jokes (“I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue” was not in Zero Hour!), some of it is context (aside from clunkiness, there’s nothing funny about “our only hope us to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have the fish for dinner” in Zero Hour!, but in Airplane!, I’m already primed to find things funny).

I enjoy the exercise of figuring out how to take one story and turn it into another. And I’m now writing a story abut swans…

Recently, Jamie Todd Rubin posted about how he tracks his writing progress with Evernote and a Google spreadsheet. (If you’re interested in using his method, Margaret McGaffey Fisk has an Excel spreadsheet available for download.)

I have a similar spreadsheet that I (used to) use for novel first drafts. But for over a year now, I’ve been tracking my writing in Bento. This is the same program that I use to keep a list of projects and track my submissions, and it’s convenient to have it all in one place.

Bento is a slightly simplified database program–you can’t directly hook things together (so I have to manually tell it to associate a “submission” entry to a “project” entry, but this is very easy to do).

I’ve mostly been tracking time spent, rather than word count, so that I can include planning and revision time as well. I only added a word count column and a “wrote new words today” checkbox a couple months ago, because I’d like to be producing more new stuff.

My column setup is:
Date, Project (the name of a novel, “Short Stories”, or “None” for critting or writing classes), Task (writing, revising, critting, etc), Duration (in minutes), Notes (where I type in what story I worked on, or whatever else I feel like noting), Word count (duh), New words (checked if I created new stuff, unchecked if I didn’t).

For the most part I don’t actually look at the data much. I can do basic searches to figure out how many hours I spent on X project in December, or how many hours Y short story took. The latter is something that’s becoming useful to know for planning purposes, though it doesn’t account for fermenting time.

I’m working on a project in Mathematica that will let me do a bunch more analysis and make pretty charts, but it’s been going in fits and starts. To be honest it’s more of a learn-Mathematica project than a improve-writing-productivity project (which I want to do because, and here is the disclaimer, I work for the company that makes it). I’ve nearly duplicated the functionality I’ve been getting from Bento’s search results.

For the next novel first draft, I will probably just type word counts into Bento and use Scrivener’s session targets instead of going back to my Excel spreadsheet. One less thing to mess with.

A Twitter conversation the other day reminded me of something I read a while back about how writers should learn to type faster, because then they’ll be able to write faster.

I can’t speak for that person, but in my case, my brain is the limiting factor, not my fingers. I can type garbage quite fast but that’s not all that helpful in the end.

I switched to Dvorak in 2007. Back then, my Qwerty typing speed was in the 70-80 wpm range, with a fair amount of errors (and when I take typing tests, I can’t stop myself from hitting backspace and fixing all my mistakes). A few months after the switch, I was in the 50-55 wpm range in Dvorak.

Four years later, I’m up to the mid-60s–still not back to my Qwerty days (but my hands don’t hurt, so I don’t care).

And these days I’m bi-keyboardal. Apple still hasn’t made an iOS Dvorak keyboard, which means all the writing I do on my iPad is Qwerty. It’s not touch typing or I suspect my hands would get very confused. Having to look at the letters makes it easier to remember Qwerty. When I use a fullsize external Qwerty keyboard I get very confused.

I know I could get a hardware Dvorak keyboard, but it’d be an extra thing to haul around.

If last week’s post was a look back at 2011, this one must be a look ahead at 2012. I’ll be finishing one novel revision, outlining and drafting another that I’ve already done a bunch of planning on, writing 4+ short stories, and considering doing another novel (which currently exists as a vague idea) for nanowrimo. I’ve got a schedule laid out in a timeline program so I can check that I’m not planning on doing too many things at once.

I’m also picking a couple habits to focus on each month. (More than one because most of them are things that are almost habits already, or else are old habits that I want to rekindle. Otherwise it’s hard to establish more than one new habit at a time.) These are exciting things like reading before bed and stretching every day–some health related, some writing related, some other stuff.

After a long search, I finally found an app that will let me check things off each day: GoalTracker. It’s pretty clearly designed for parents/kids, but putting butterfly stickers on a weekly chart will make my inner eight-year-old happy too. Plus it has pretty much no analytics features, so I won’t waste time thinking too hard about this. I just want to not clutter up my to do list or calendar, and put stickers in boxes. And maybe collect trophies.

If you’re hunting for something similar but want more analysis or a web-based tool (or something more grown up), 42goals and Joe’s goals both look pretty good.

In the usual fashion, I’m starting off my planning for 2012 by looking back at 2011. It was a good year, writing-wise.

The most notable point is that I made my first two fiction sales: “The Demon’s Tomb” came out in volume 2 of The Crimson Pact in August, and “A Talent for Death” is in the current issue of Shelter of Daylight.

I finished several short stories this year. My goal was four, plus any interesting anthologies that turned up, so I ended up writing seven. Which surprises me, now that I add them all up, because it seems like a lot. In fact, it’s half of the short stories I’ve written ever. Which makes it completely unsurprising that I blew my previous annual number of submissions out of the water.

Novel-wise, I finished the first draft of one book, and I’m just about done with a revision of another book. I’m also finishing up the planning stages of my next book and itching to start writing.

Last week I talked about goals–something you want to achieve and can control. If you want something, set goals that will help you achieve it, and then make a plan that will make you meet those goals.

So how do you plan? Sounds like a rhetorical question, but I’m curious. For the past five or so years I’ve been making schedules for myself, which originally started back when I read Time Management from the Inside Out and thought her “time maps” were intriguing. Mainly, putting everything onto my calendar ensures that I actually make the time to do it. I still tend to slide into the realm of “I can do 15 things after work tonight and still get to bed by 10” if I don’t look at how long things actually take. (There is some part of my brain which thinks the rules of time don’t apply to me.)

That covers the “how much writing time can I wedge into this week” and “can I really jog, swim, and play tennis?” elements of my plan. Now it’s time for the bigger picture.

More recently I’ve been playing with a timeline program, because I couldn’t find any free project management tools that were nice to use. I wanted to lay out a year’s worth of writing. Like my daily schedule, this is another area where my brain tries to overreach. Hey, there’s a story a week challenge. Wouldn’t that be fun. Ooh, Nanowrimo. Haven’t done that in a while. Oh, and I should write that cool book about the nifty thing. Sure, I’ll just finish up this revision and then draft the next book and then I can do that new book and these fifteen short stories and maybe I should try poetry and….

Conveniently I know about how much time in a week and (roughly) how long it takes me to write something. Which means I can sit down with a map of the year and say, ok, this short story will take me this many weekends. This outline can take up these weeks. This first draft will be done by x, so after that I can start something new. And so on.

Also conveniently, no one but me actually cares about the deadlines I set for myself, so I have the flexibility to change my plan whenever I want if something unexpected (like an open anthology or a workshop I decide to attend) comes along. I don’t think I’ve ever ended a year with the same plan I started with. My life is not nearly as draconian as this post makes it sound.

So back to the non-rhetorical question. How do you lay out what you’re going to work on for the year (or five years, or month, or whatever)?

Because it’s getting to be resolution time, and time for me to set my writing goals for the next year, I wanted to talk about dreams versus goals.

I see a lot of people (probably not you) who declare that their goal for the next year/five years/decade is “Sell a novel,” “Win the big contest,” or similar things.

Those aren’t goals, they’re dreams.

A dream is something you want to achieve but can’t control. A goal is something you want to achieve and can control. And you set goals to help you reach your dreams.

So you want to sell a novel? That’s not in your control (or in mine, alas). That’s a dream. Make your goals “I will finish my first draft by x date,” “I will revise the novel by x date,” “I will start submitting on x date,” etc. Those, you can control.

Want to win the tennis league? You can’t control how well everyone else plays. Goals could be “I will practice my serves,” “I will practice anticipating where the ball will go,” and so on.

And then make a plan that will make you meet those goals. You might not achieve your dream, but you’ll be making progress.

Last week, Pat Wrede posted about college majors and degrees for writers. This is a topic I always find interesting to read about, despite my not having any experience with being in school as a fiction writer–or maybe because it’s fun to play the “if I’d wanted to be a writer back then, what would I have studied” game. (Or the “if I went back to school, what would I study” game, which is not. going. to. happen.)

In early adulthood, I wanted to be a physicist, so I commented:

I didn’t want to write until I was in grad school, and I didn’t want to have a fiction career until quite a while after that.

Which means my undergrad degree is in physics, and my electives were in more physics, math, chemistry, and biology, and I got a master’s in physics…and then I started writing fiction and went to journalism school.

I wish that when I was in college I’d taken more history, anthropology, sociology, etc. courses (I took four history and one economics, everything else was math and science). On the other hand if I just made myself read more nonfiction I could build up a solid foundation anyway.

Perhaps I should explain that I didn’t go to journalism school to be a novelist; writing novels helped me realize that I liked writing, and I went to journalism school after quitting physics to jumpstart a career in nonfiction.

Reading isn’t going to give me anywhere near the background that a degree would, but see above about not going to happen. I’ve been–very slowly–going through Anthropology for Dummies [1], which was the only general intro on the shelf at B&N the other month.

What have you guys studied, or what would you major in if you went back to school now?

[1] I love the url they’re using for it. It’s really for dummies.