W is for Write

So in April, I participated in the A-Z Blog Challenge. It was an absolute flurry of blog crazy. I was worried at the outset that I wouldn't make it; given that it's only been in 2013 that I've managed to get the discipline of blogging every Tuesday, and also that April for me means end-of-term grading plus hunting for summer internships and jobs.  Well, actually that last stuff turned out to be the first week of May, which is why this post is going up on the Tuesday after I intended it to! But I'm pleased to say I turned in my grades Monday morning at 2:30 AM, ahead of the 8AM deadline, and that I also got an email offering me a great summer internship. So, yay! One week blog break...worth it. 

But despite all my busy, I did the A-Z, and I'm glad.

I was going to make a reflection about all the great lessons I learned from doing it—and there were many!—but really, there was only one main one I found myself coming back to, again and again and again and that was this:

It's not hard.

Sometimes I despair when I see people who are blogging day in and day out, at the fresh, breezy tone of their posts, and the way it seems to be effortless. In the past, I've felt like I needed to have Something To Say™ before I blogged. And I needed to think about how it sounded. And compare it. And worry about whether it was too long. Or too short. Or too unprofessional. Or too crazy-seeming.

A-Z forced me out of that. I had some things I was excited to talk about (cool things you can do to "hack" your writing experience), and a goal of talking about them every day, and the next thing I knew, I was blogging. Every day. In a breezy tone. Effortlessly. It wasn't hard. When I showed up, the words did, too.

So for that reason, A-Z was amazing. It reminded me of a very important thing, which has lately been getting lost in the world of twitter, and blogging, and social media, and revisions. The lesson that,  that to write, you simply...

...write.

And that's a reminder that we could all use from time to time.

Voiceless..but Friendly

So a year ago, I tried really hard to get into a contest called The Writer's Voice, hosted by Brenda Drake, Krista Van Dolzer, Moni BW, and Cupid's Literary connection.

The widget hated my guts, and both times I failed to make it into the hopper.

But that was also post- me knowing that ISAAC IN THE MIDDLE needed some major work.

So this year, I found out with about two weeks' notice that TWV was going to happen again.

When I'm sitting here with a novel that is barely underway on its rewrite.

Now, the rewrite is pretty stellar, if I do say so myself. And I'm excited for it, and excited for how it speeds up all the necessary stuff, and excited for what the results may be when it's finished. (And I'll be excited when it's finished to send it off again!)

I'm no saint. It definitely occurred to me that given the structure of TWV, I could enter, put up my query and first 250, and frantically finish the rewrite over the next 23 days. The bones of the book are there, and it could be done.

But in the end, I decided it'd be foolish.

So instead, I'm sitting on the sideline, cheering. I've commented on what feels like  bazillion queries this morning (but what is probably only a dozen or so). The great thing about contests is that it's how you make friends, and I think (hope?) I can do that even if my manuscript isn't ready. 

I'm still going to try to have my rewrite done by May 24, though. The deadline is a good thing, and May is a great month for an academic...school's out, and summer research hasn't really gotten underway.

Good luck to all the TWV participants. You'll see me bouncing around the hashtag and commenting on your blogs. Let's be friends!

Get to Know You

There's a lot of great software out there.
There are lots of ways to better take advantage of resources you already have available.
Many ways to create good, sustaining, writing rituals.
And to protect your time and writing space.

In almost every single post, I've found myself writing something along the lines of, "This may not be for everyone."

And the reason for that?

Because the best writing hack is You.

What do you want? What kinds of books do you want to write? Which things will most help you achieve those goals? Are you a morning writer, or an evening writer? Do you feel stifled by a daily wordcount, or does it energize you? Do you prefer a longhand notes notebook, or does storyboarding software make your fingers tingle with joy?

The best way to make the most out of your writing time is to pay attention...to yourself. Because what makes your writing time tick isn't what makes mine tick. What works for one person won't necessarily work for everyone.

The key is to know yourself as a writer. This might come through journaling about your writing process, or through trying different things and throwing them out, or simply by experiencing yourself as you write.

But most importantly, it involves writing.

Know yourself. When you do, whatever system you have will be the most "hacked" and the best one there is...

...for you.

Thanks for coming along on my first A-Z! It's been super fun, and I've loved getting to surf around to so many different blogs. I hope to write an A-Z recap next week, with some important new lessons that the A-Z experience taught me about writing, of course!

In the meantime, happy writing.

This month I'm participating in the A-Z blog challenge. My theme is "writer hacks," or 26 shortcuts you can do as a writer to get the most out of writing and the journey toward and through publication. Find out more about it at a-to-zchallenge.com, and hop around to read the other cool blogs that are part of the challenge!

Wrangle Story Research With Zotero

Merp? But it's the penultimate day, you say. Why am I posting "Z"? Well, as I was looking at my topics, I realized that the best and most important writing hack is "Y," and that "Y" would be a great one to end this little journey. So I'm going to post "Z" today, and "Y" to end everything tomorrow.

As a broke grad student (wait, that's redundant), one is always on the lookout for inexpensive solutions to problems. And one problem I have as a grad student is citation management. A friend tipped me toward an open-source citation manager called Zotero.

Right. So Zotero does all those cool things like throw in an in-line citation (Schley 2013) and create a bibliography. Neither of which are things a fiction writer often has to do, though if you need something more robust, it can handle that.

But what really makes Zotero nice for my fiction writing is its ability to wrangle multiple types of sources at once. For instance, I can have a PDF of an article attached to its citation so that the citation automatically launches the PDF when I need it. Or, the reference might be for a URL for a website with great info. Or perhaps I check a book out of the library, and make notes about the important stuff that's relevant to my novel right into the citation, and then, if I need the book again, all the info about which book it was is right at my fingertips so that I can check it back out.

Then, I can group all my citations for any given book into a folder, so that all the resources I've used for one book appear in one place. 

Best of all? I can tag all those sources with their topics or any other tag that is relevant to me. The sources still stay in the main bin, but they can be pulled up by tag. For instance, I try to keep heavy research to two books, so that at any given time, I'm doing two spins on the same set of research. So for Book A I might need resources on topic Q, but I'll need topic Q resources for Book B, also. When I begin outlining Book B, instead of just browsing everything I set aside for Book A, I can just click on the tag for topic Q, and add those citations to a new folder.

We're all trying to craft a story that our readers can get lost in with full suspension of disbelief. But to do that well means potentially keeping track of a lot of little niggling details. Zotero lets me outsource some of that work, so that I can focus on the important part: the writing.

What do you use, if anything, to keep track of where your noveling research has taken you? Bookmarking sites? Goodreads or Library Thing? Your Amazon Wish List?

Zotero

This month I'm participating in the A-Z blog challenge. My theme is "writer hacks," or 26 shortcuts you can do as a writer to get the most out of writing and the journey toward and through publication. Find out more about it at a-to-zchallenge.com, and hop around to read the other cool blogs that are part of the challenge!

Use X-Ray to Improve Your Structure

So, I'm not a giant fan of the 'Zon, for a lot of reasons (and actually, none of which have to do with my being employed by their main competitor, as it's a part time job and my world wouldn't crash if suddenly my employer disappeared). But I definitely have to give them props for the things they do well, for instance, their fabulous book-finding algorithms.

One thing the 'Zon does really well is the X-Ray feature on Kindle. And it works on the Kindle apps, too, so you can discover it even if you don't have a Kindle. X-ray was designed to allow people to surf easily through a book for all the mentions of a particular character, to define terms, and basically to allow people to more easily navigate a book.

But I've found it is helping me think about novel structure in a way I haven't before.

For instance, here is a screenshot from my iPad of an X-ray from a Kindle book I enjoyed recently, SOMETHING LIKE NORMAL, by Trish Doller.

Looking at this page, I can see a few things. How often is the MC's old love interest mentioned? (Paige Manning) How about one of his close friends? (Ken Chestnut) How much time does the author spend explaining and talking about the Marines? (not a lot)

I can also see how dense these mentions are. The first part of the book is about Travis coming home to North Carolina; the second half is more about him reconnecting with his Marine buddies and coming to grips with what happened to all of them in Afghanistan. As I think about that in parallel with looking at how often and where these characters get mentioned, I can see that in the beginning, there's a lot of to-do about the ex-girlfriend, and while she's still present as the book goes on, her mentions get shorter and more infrequent. By contrast, the love interest, Harper, has exactly the opposite trajectory.

X-Ray lets you see a book's structure at a glance, and lets you peer into the clockwork of books you think work well (and perhaps books you thought did not). Where should it be unbalanced, and where should it be balanced? Which characters get a lot of screentime, and which do not? And importantly, how does that compare to how I've handled the same issues in my own work? It helps me see not only what works in another novel, but also what I can do to improve my own.

Do you have a helpful method for thinking about how you've structured your novels? 

This month I'm participating in the A-Z blog challenge. My theme is "writer hacks," or 26 shortcuts you can do as a writer to get the most out of writing and the journey toward and through publication. Find out more about it at a-to-zchallenge.com, and hop around to read the other cool blogs that are part of the challenge!