Tag: Writing

Things Writers Need: Drafting Software

Pavowski9 Comments

In this inaugural post of my Things Writers Need series, I want to take a look at the big daddy.  No sense doing a thing if you’re not going to take on the biggest parts of that thing, right?  So, I want to start with something every writer needs to make friends with:  The Word Processor.

I’m sure some out there will disagree with me, but I’m sorry, if you’re not writing on a computer at this point, you’re just being silly.   Now, before you jump down my beak and strangle me from inside, rest easy, I don’t think all writing needs to be done on a computer.  There is a time and place for writing with whatever’s to hand, and even in the best of situations, your computer or laptop doesn’t fall into that category.  That said, you can’t hope to punch out the word count you can get with a word processor using pen and paper.  A typewriter might come close, but seriously… who uses typewriters any more?  Honestly?  Are you just trying to make a statement?  “Oh, I’m so retro, technologeee ain’t for meeee!”  If you have a typewriter in your house or apartment or storage shed and it’s being used as anything other than a paperweight, you’re doing it wrong.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong with typewriters.  At the time they were marvels of engineering, and many of them are positively bubbling over with delightfully adorable designs and sleek features.  They’re great to look at.  But if you’re using one to do any amount of actual Writing, you’re being pretentious.  Get with the times.

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What Does a Writer Need?

Pavowski5 Comments

I am fascinated with stuff.  I love gadgets and gizmos and accessories and tools and programs, probably to the point where it’s unhealthy.  Case in point:  my wife and I were, just a few weeks ago, talking about how we should have a garage sale before school starts back up to clear out some junk and de-crapify the house (and especially the garage) a little bit.  While we were talking, part of me was quietly filing its nails in the back of my brain, yawning and saying to itself with the most bemused of eyerolls, “yeah, that will never happen.”  True to form, school starts back up in just over a week and yeah, that garage sale ain’t happening — it’s barely even been spoken of since.

My obsession with stuff is also at odds with a philosophy I’m trying to cultivate lately, which is one of minimalism: cutting out of my life the unnecessary, the redundant, the distracting.  It’s a problem.  One side of me can give you thirteen entirely acceptable reasons why that old crappy food processor should just be thrown on the heap, but the other side manages to forget to do it or find one reason to keep it or … well, maybe it goes without saying, but the thing is still in my kitchen cabinet despite the fact that we’ve not used it in (over) two years.

But I’m wandering.  I’ve struggled this summer — struggled mightily, like a T-Rex trying to wipe its butt — with my writing in a way that I just didn’t for the first several months of the Project.  That’s my capital “W” Writing on the novel as well as my blather here on the blarg.  That hoarder part of my brain, the part that thinks any problem can be solved if I only have just the right THING to help me solve it, wonders if there isn’t some missing piece to help me write more gooder.  The minimalist part of my brain, meanwhile, is trying hard to ponder the deeper meanings of whatever and wonders if I already have too much stuff as far as my writing goes.  One way or another, there are certain things that I think you absolutely, without a doubt, must have to write, and there are other things that maybe people in general think writers need even though they really don’t.  So I want to take a look at some things that writers need (and, by extension, some things that they don’t).  Incidentally, I also want to make sure I’m maintaining focus here at the blarg, and maybe having a weekly rotation is the way to do that.

The list will by no means be exhaustive, and it will definitely be biased and opinionated.  It ain’t like companies are sending me their brand new shiny toys to beta test, but maybe if you’re an aspiring writer (like me) you’ll find something here you can use on your own journey.  I know I’ve certainly gotten help from some other writers out there, and I believe in paying it forward, so if I can help even one person out there to find a little focus, inspiration, or motivation, then it will be worth it.

Also, and maybe it goes without saying, but I’m still fairly new to the path — more chronicling the experience than trying to teach — so I won’t be able to speak yet about things like agents and publishers and all that business yet — because I’m not there yet.

So!  As I get started, I’d love to hear from anybody out there who’s reading, on one or more of these questions:

What do writers need?

What do non-writers think writers need?

What tools do you use to help yourself as a writer?

First column tomorrow, and hopefully one every week until I can’t stand this idea any more — so stay tuned!

Nothing a Little Run Can’t Fix

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Once more onto the beach, or however that saying goes.

I dutifully took my two weeks(ish?) off from SERIOUS writing to let the mind decompress and drift back into its natural jellylike state after four months of grind, but today is the day I pick it up again and continue whipping my word-vomit into something approaching Prose Worth Reading.

As with virtually every writing or otherwise creative project I have ever undertaken, the choosing was the hardest part.  For better or worse, choose I have, and now I press on with the goal of expanding one of my recent Flash Fictions into a fuller, more developed short story.  I’m aiming for about ten thousand words, just as a ballpark sort of area I’d like to land in, but if it runs long or short that won’t upset me terribly.  I’m not sure what the real goal will be as far as what I’d like to do with this one when it’s written, but I want to try out a length in between these little lightning strikes I’m spitting out every week and another full-length heartstomper like the novel has been.  Ten thousand words seems a nice happy medium, and when I’m finished with that, it will perhaps be time to start back in on editing Accidentally Inspired.

If you’re curious (why wouldn’t you be?!) I’m going to be expanding my entry from a couple of weeks ago, Powdered Chaos.  I feel like I scratched the surface of something really interesting with that one and I think it’s worth the time to delve into that particular cave and see what squishy bits of sweetmeats I can deliver back to the colony.  What’s that?  “Sweetmeats” aren’t what I think they are?

Hold on.

Okay, a sweetmeat is, of all things, a pastry.  The word I was thinking of was “sweetbread”, which for some reason is the name for pancreas.  English is a whimsical old thing, innit?

Anyway, I’ll be delving that particular cave over the next several weeks, with a much more reasonable goal of 600 words daily.  900 was a great goal for the novel, and I may use that as a benchmark in future times of novel writing dementia, but there were more than a few days when I started wanting to chop down trees with my keyboard after word 600.  Keyboards not being a particularly effective cutting implement, that’s the kind of impulse I’d like to, y’know, steer away from.  So.  600 words, five days a week, that’s about four weeks to turn Powdered Chaos into something that’s… well, something.  This is all experimental; don’t look at me if a zombie goliath of stitched-together story bits and half-formed ideas begins roaming the countryside and devouring your livestock and KILL IT WITH FIRE.

First day (night actually) of working on this one went swimmingly.  I chalk it up to my run this morning.  No, seriously.

I decided this was the project I wanted on Thursday but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about expanding it.  Start farther out front?  Deal with multiple characters and their interaction with the thing?  Maybe continue on past the one outlined in the story?  It was a problem and I was blocked.

As I’ve mentioned before, Past Me would hit a roadblock when writing and park the car, slash the tires and hitchhike back to town, abandoning the vehicle to looters and hobos.  New Me has no truck with blocks; he drives right at them with the brights on and the horn sounding its dopplerized war cry, and if the block is still there when I get around to my writing that day, well then WE’RE BOTH GOING DOWN.  Writing tonight was a given.  The how and the what and the whatever would come to me.  So I laced up.  (Actually I strapped up because my Vibrams don’t have laces, but… yeah, “strapped up” sounds a little bit like… okay let’s just move on.)

It was a rainy morning, so I left the sprout at home.  Also because of the raininess of the morning I didn’t take my headphones with me (they are a bright shiny BIRTHDAY GIFT and I am not ready to ruin them yet even though they are life-altering and awesome and give me wings).  Imagine!  Running completely unfettered by forty pounds of toddler + stroller and undistracted by mindless thumping dubstep!  I’ve not had such a run in months and I desperately miss it.

Running without distractions is something I always say I’m going to do more often and never actually get around to doing much at all, but I maintain that the experience is peerless when it comes to solving problems personal and mental.  So I’m hoofing it and enjoying the quickest pace I’ve had on a run in a while and delighting in the mist on my face and now and then pondering the question of what I’m going to do when I come up against this roadblock in actually starting the thing and then I get this idea, like a midget was following right on my heels and hopped up on my back and whispered in my ear so softly I could barely hear it, “point of view.”

And I cocked my head and pondered on that, because it’s not a complete sentence after all, but when ideas drift into my head on a run they usually do it for some sort of reason and I always at least try poking at them to see if they bite back.  “Point of view?” I pondered.  No answer.  The various Me’s bouncing around in my head only answer when they feel like it, or when I’ve had a few adult beverages.  And I run and I ponder, run, ponder.  It hits me that the point of view in that story is wrong.  Not wrong like five is not the answer to two plus two, but wrong like whitewall tires on a tractor.  The thing still runs, but it ain’t optimal.

So, change it.  But to what?

Well, I won’t spoil it yet, but needless to say, the point of view has been changed, and in a way that I hope will be both surprising and satisfying.  And I got a cool 750 words in tonight without breaking a sweat, but of course that should be tempered immediately because the honeymoon is just getting started with this thing.

At any rate, lesson learned.  There has not yet been a day when I’ve had a run and not felt better about my writing at the end of it.  It’s a lesson I keep learning and somehow keep forgetting, so THIS POST should serve as a reminder to any and all Future Me’s: Next time you get blocked, or think you might get blocked, or even think you might think about the possibility that in some future eventuality you could possibly get blocked, just lace up.  (Or strap up.  No, just lace up and adjust for your needs.)  The road and your feet and the void will go to work on the problem and before you know it, you’re home and ready for a shower and a good write.

That Time I Overheard a Jerk in a Restaurant and Learned a Lesson About Writing

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It’s odd how one little detail, left out of a situation, can completely change your read on it.  Or, to cut in the opposite direction, how you can think you have a handle on what’s going on, and then you learn something new about what’s happening, and all of a sudden you feel like a horrible sharknadoheel for thinking a certain way, or maybe you feel totally vindicated.

The wife and I went to dinner while the grandparents kept the kids for the evening.  Sidenote: when I say dinner, for us that means we hit the restaurant at about 4:30.  I know, we might as well be geriatrics, but when your kid’s bedtime is at seven, you have to rethink the way you live your life.  So it’s 4:30, and we’re at dinner at a nice little pasta place we like where there’s tacky 90’s stereotypical Italian decor and they serve you way too much food so you eat leftovers for two days afterward.  Because it’s 4:30, we have the place almost to ourselves, so we get served quick and we eat quick, which is nice, because having a two-year-old has left me unable to savor a meal; all I know how to do anymore is shovel foodstuffs into my beak while my mind wanders to the sprout and whether or not he’s likely to get into mortal danger before I can swallow a half-chewed mouthful.  But the kids aren’t there so we actually get to focus on each other and the ambiance, a really rare treat.

I don’t know if it’s my inclination as a writer that makes me such a shameless eavesdropper or if I’m just a jerk, but while we’re at dinner this other couple comes in and I immediately start with the judging.  There’s nothing special to say about her, but he is a paunch-bellied, unshaven slob, and that biases me against him before he opens his mouth.  To be fair, this restaurant isn’t the swankiest of joints, so there’s no dress code, but, come on.  Call me old-fashioned, but if you’re taking your wife / girlfriend / main squeeze to a dinner that’s gonna cost more than ten bucks a plate, maybe don’t dress like you just came from a World of Warcraft marathon session in your mom’s basement?Read More »

Routine and Breaking With It

Pavowski12 Comments

This post is part of SoCS: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1214/

The theme for the week is “getting away, or getting out.”  As usual with these stream of consciousness posts, I won’t be doing any editing or fixorating after this post is finished, so it may be a bit unpolished, which I guess is the point.

In the four (now five, yikes) months since I’ve been “seriously writing,” I’ve come to notice a few things about, well, writing.  Specifically, that while rituals are important, they can also be limiting.  What I mean by that is, there’s this box.  And you always hear that it’s important to think outside the box, or whatever, and that’s true.  The box can hold you back.  But that sells the box short, really, because the box can also be comforting, like an old sweatshirt you slip into on the first cold days of Autumn or like a glass of wine before bed.

Case in point, when school was in session, I wrote in virtually the same way every day.  I’d steal a solid thirty minutes on my lunch break to work on my novel, using that time to block out any other distractions.  Really focused work.  Looking back, now, I can identify the work that I completed in that way not just by the timestamps but also by the way it’s written.  Word choice, sentence structure, ratio of dialogue to prose… my work completed by the routine has a certain feel to it that my work outside of routine doesn’t have.  Not to say it’s better; there are certainly merits to the work I completed outside of routine.  But the routine was the box, and I came to depend on it, so much so that in the last month of the Project I found myself mentally blocked, in no small part I fear because I didn’t have my routine to mentally prepare myself.

Now I love routine, but this experience with my first draft has shown me that you can’t always count on routines, so one thing I want to work on in my next project is shaking things up a bit and breaking at least some of my dependence on routine.

It shouldn’t shock me the effect routine has on my writing; it’s the same with my running.  When I was just getting started running, I did all my runs at the mall.  Well, as I increased my ability to run faster and farther, I started to become aware of hitting a wall with my runs at the mall.  After all, it was the same loop, the same hills, over and over and over.  So I started to branch out, to run different routes all around my neighborhood and, as I pushed my distance still farther, around town, and I noticed my pace and my endurance increasing all the more.  Breaking the routine allowed me to make bigger gains faster than if I’d kept doing the same thing over and over.  With new hills and new turns I was challenging myself in different ways, and that helped make me into a better runner.

It puts me in mind of those ads for P90X and Insanity that were big over the last couple of years, the central tenet of which was “muscle confusion.”  Here was a program designed to keep you from getting into the box in the first place.  The focus of these workouts was to exercise in a different way every single day to keep the body and the muscles from recognizing a pattern and getting lazy.  I never tried the workouts myself, but the reasoning seems sound enough.

So the box helps — routine helps — but more and more I think it’s going to be important that I work to get away from routines, get away from what’s comfortable and easy, and force myself to step off the reservation, out of the box, and go tumbling down a cliffside every now and then.  That’s my writing as well as my running and my cross training.  Hell, the fact that I’m cross training at all now — something I haven’t done in two years of running — is a step in that direction.

But I’m not trashing the box.  Just like there is no good without bad, no light without dark, neither can there be invention and experimentation without the norm to return to occasionally, even regularly.

It begs the question, then: what’s “out of the box” in terms of writing?  Off the top of my head, it means straying from some of these habits and tendencies.  Overuse of fancy say-nothing words like “particularly”.  Preoccupation with sounding clever or intelligent.  Fear of the simple statement.  Gravitating toward dark subject matter in short fiction.  Trying too hard to avoid dialogue tags.

For that matter, how can I get out of the box with running?  It’s harder than ever at the moment to break with routine since the sprout joins me for most of my runs, and that means the stroller, and that means I’m very limited in where I can go.  But here are some ideas.  More speedwork and/or interval sessions.  Running without music more.  Varying the dips and twists and turns in my route as much as possible.  Making sure to drive to a more interesting location for a run every couple weeks or so.

In short, routine can be helpful, but it can also be a crutch, and if you don’t escape the routine every now and then, then like a mouse in a cage, you will become trapped by it.

Am I overthinking routine?  How else can you push the boundaries while still getting the most out of a routine?  And do I overstate or understate the value of getting away from it?