Tag: tools

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

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Thanksgiving dinner is essentially a Pie Delivery System.

This year we’re having apple streusel, cherry streusel, and pumpkin.

Things I’m thankful for, as a writer:

Word processing technology, because it hands over most of the mechanical drudgery to mechanical drudges.

The internet, and in particular the web, because it lets me do research without having to travel many miles over hedges and stiles in order to be physically present in the same room as the text, or on the same hillside as the view.

Editors, because they work to make my books not just better, but as good as possible.

Publishers, because they do all the hard work of production and distribution so I don’t have to.

And readers, because without them I’d just be talking to an empty room.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, if you’re celebrating; and have a good day anyhow, if you’re not.

Disaster Prep

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It looks like Hurricane Sandy is going to hit the East Coast like a fist.  Even here in far northern New Hampshire, with an entire mountain range between us and the shoreline, the local public works guys are pre-positioning road barriers and suchlike in case of flooding from heavy rain.  (When you have local landmarks with names like Roaring Brook, it’s not hard to guess what lots of rain coming down on the tops of the local mountains can do to the land at the bottom.)  And everybody in Vermont is hoping that this storm doesn’t decide to pull an Irene and come ramping and stamping up the Connecticut River Valley, because some places over there haven’t yet recovered from the last set of floods.  And all of our friends on the coast, from Boston down to Baltimore, are white-knuckling it while they wait to find out just where Sandy’s punch is going to strike hardest.

If you’re in any of the likely-to-be-affected areas, don’t forget to secure your writing while you’re bringing the lawn chairs inside and laying in a supply of bottled water and batteries.  Nobody wants to be left in the position of having to either rewrite an entire book from the beginning or toss it out as an impossible job.

There are a number of different ways to make certain your work-in-progress stays safe.  Offsite backup to the cloud, via services like Dropbox or Google Drive, is a good starting point.  (If you don’t like or trust cloud computing, you can always e-mail a copy of the current WIP to a trusted friend.)  A flash drive or portable hard drive that you can shove into your pocket or your laptop case on the way out the door is also a good idea — that way, if you end up crashing for a week with Great-Aunt Eunice who lives in a big house on high ground with no internet and a dozen cats, you can still keep on working as long as you’ve got power.

As for the storm itself — you’re a writer.  Observe, and take copious mental notes.  It’s what we do.

A Thankless Task and a Helpful Tool

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One of the hardest things to do, in the writing business, is proofreading your own text.  I know that every time I give a story or a novel the final run-through before printing it out or e-mailing it, I worry that I’m going to miss something — an “untied” where there should be a “united”; a sentence that should have a period at the end of it but somehow mysteriously doesn’t (cut and paste is great for revising, but sometimes not everything gets picked up when it should); a “not” that’s gone missing, to the  complete and utter detriment of the intent of an entire paragraph, if not the whole work.

One reason the final proofing is so hard is that by the time you reach that stage of the project, you’ve already read every sentence in it multiple times, and your brain is going to take advantage of that experience to helpfully supply anything that might be missing, and correct anything that might be wrong.  To fight against that, writers do all sorts of things to counteract the familiarity of the text — have a text-to-speech program read it aloud; make a printout if they’ve been working only on-screen; change the page from the standard double-spaced publisher’s-guidelines layout to double columns; and my own favorite, change the font.

For work like this, you don’t want a pretty font.  You want one that’s almost aggressively in-your-face with its distinctive letterforms, one where the errors are going to leap off the page at you and go for the throat.

One such font is Lexia Readable; it’s also good for printing out a text you’re going to be reading aloud from.  Another good proofing font is DPCustomMono2, which was originally developed for proofreading OCR-generated texts.  But any font will do in a pinch, so long as it isn’t the one you’ve been reading the text in all along.

 

 

Halfway Home

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In the beginning, writing is easy, because you don’t know yet how much you don’t know, and you don’t know yet how much work it’s going to take to get better.

And eventually, you know that you’re not yet as good at it as you can be, but you’ve been at it long enough to know that you’re at least adequate and — more importantly — you know how to work at getting better.

In between those two states, though, is a trackless waste where a lot of dreams go to die.  It’s the stage where you’ve realized how much you still don’t know, but you haven’t got any idea how to go about getting better.  This is the point where despair can take over.

What can an aspiring writing do to avoid getting mired in despair?  Different remedies work for different people, but here are some that have proven effective:

  • Write something with the pressure-for-excellence taken off.  Blog posts; a journal; letters to imaginary friends, or to real ones; fan fiction, even, if that’s where your heart lies.  You don’t have to write the Great Post-Postmodern Novel every time, or even the Next Big Novel in your genre of choice, any more than a concert pianist has to play the Warsaw Concerto every time he or she sits down at the keyboard.
  • Go for some education.  Sign up for a writers’ workshop, or take a course online, or read some books on writing.  These are all good ways to pick up tips on craft and technique, because craft and technique are things that can be taught.
  • Seek out the company of other writers.  You may not pick up any tips on craft or technique from them (then again, you might), but writing is a lonely business and too much time spent alone with it can make it seem like you’ve been hiking through the same stretch of desolate landscape since forever.
  • Read for pleasure — books in your genre, books out of it, whatever takes your fancy — and read for instruction as well.  Watch how your favorite writers handle the tricky bits you’ve been struggling with; notice when even your favorite writers sometimes don’t quite hit the mark.  (Even great writers don’t hit it every time.  Point of view in Moby-Dick wanders all over the place; Mark Twain had trouble writing endings; Dickens was fond of plot advancement through incredible coincidence.  And so on.)
  • And keep on writing.  Nobody ever got through the wasteland by stopping in the middle of it and waiting for something to happen.

Writers’ Tools

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Writers need their good tools as much as any other crafts-person.  A few of my favorites:

That slow cooker I mentioned a couple of days ago.  It’s especially useful in hot weather, and on days when I’m so busy and/or so tired that I have only minimal brain space left for stuff like food and cooking.

A good word processor.  And by “good” I mean, “suited to your own preferences and writing habits.”  Also, a good word processor for generating text and a good word processor for formatting text are not necessarily the same program.

A good printer.  It’s not as necessary as it used to be for a working writer’s printer to be a heavy-duty workhorse capable of printing out 600-pages-and-up inside of 12 hours without breaking down or running out of ink — I think it’s been at least half a dozen books now, maybe more, since we turned in anything in hardcopy — but there are still times when you’ll need a printer, and when you do you’ll want one that doesn’t give up on you in mid-crisis.

A good computer, one with enough hard drive space to store your stuff and enough memory to do the things you need to do.

And all the little things — the red pencils, the index cards, the colored highlighters, the nice fountain pens, and so on — that ease a writer’s heart and make the process of composition easier.

What are your favorite or indispensable tools?

Beadwork

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Some writers can tell the story straight through in the right order, the first time out of the starting gate.  So far as I can tell, they see the end state of the plot waiting up ahead of them like the finish line, and once they start writing they drive on toward it.

I envy these people, because I am one of the other ones — the writers who see the story bit by bit, one component scene at a time, and not always in the right order.  For us, the finished novel often resembles not the record of a straight race to THE END, but a box full of brightly-colored beads that must be strung together in a way that makes sense.

Figuring out how to do the stringing, though, can be interesting.  Both Word and WordPerfect have Master Document functions that allow a series of files to be chained together into one long document, but when it comes to figuring out the actual order of those files, the user is on his or her own.  More than once in the past, I’ve had to resort to writing one-or-two sentence summaries of the files’ content on 3×5 cards, then physically laying out the cards in different orders and arrangements until I’ve found one that works.

Recently, though, I’ve taken to using Scrivener for my initial draft work, because its functionality emulates in electronic form what I used to do with those 3×5 cards.  It lets me work on individual scenes or chapters, and allows me to move them around and re-order them at will, and then will compile them into a single file for saving in a variety of formats.

(Then I take the large, compiled file over into WordPerfect for final editing and formatting, because they will take away my Reveal Codes window when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.)

A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much

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Or, Let’s Talk about Backups. Continue reading “A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much” →

Down (48K) Memory Lane

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If I had to name the one thing that made it possible for me to be a published writer, as opposed to just another scribbler with a stack of notebooks in a desk drawer, I would have to say it was the personal computer/printer/word processing software combination.  Because in order to become published, you first have to submit stuff to publishers, and if you’re going to submit stuff to publishers you have to put it into a format that publishers will read, which back in those days meant a typed manuscript.
Continue reading “Down (48K) Memory Lane” →