Keep On Writing Blog

I use an older version of MS Word on an older version of the MS Surface laptop.

I have tried it all over the last thirty-some years from Apple 2 to Mac to Linux, and AppleWorks to Lotus Ami Pro to Scrivener. My current configuration is not the best, it is the best for my current writing process.

Hardware

Lightweight, long battery life, exceptionally good keyboard. I bought my first-generation MS Surface Laptop at Best Buy on clearance for ~ $500 after the next generation had been introduced. My previous dell laptops all failed within a year or two, usually starting with the keyboard. Don’t get me started on warranty repairs… I have been pounding on this one trouble-free for almost five years.

I bought a “Home” license for MS Word since my Word XP license did not want to install on the new laptop. Minor nuisance. Since the install had to be downloaded from the internet, it chose to install O365 instead of a local static version. Major nuisance. I write offline, never connected to the internet, ever. Maybe once a year I’ll connect and get the latest updates, but I don’t worry about viruses because I am always offline on the writing laptop. O365 wanted to verify who was using their precious license every f-ing month! It would not let me open a document until I went online and verified with the overseer.

First time this happened, I was at home and I thought it was a one time thing. I was back up and running in ten minutes after finding my password on another computer. The second time I was in a camper in middle-of-nowhere Utah with no internet or password. I had to write with pen and paper for three days! Great thing about a laptop with a lighted keyboard? I can write in the dark. Can’t do that with pen and paper. Plus, I had to type everything in later. Losing time writing is a pet peeve of mine, so I was DONE with Microsoft.

I paid for Scrivener, endured the learning curve on the not-so-great Windows version, and I started to love it. I have used the Mac version and it is just plain better, but I don’t have a portable Mac so that is not what I write on.

I’m going to jump back to hardware for a moment. When you write on a never connected computer, how do you backup your files? I used to have a thumb drive that all internal hard drive files were automatically backed up to. I would daily take that thumb drive and copy newer files to a Carbonite directory on my main desktop computer. Then an internal drive (Dell) failed on me. Losing time is a pet peeve, losing work is unacceptable. Dell replaced the drive… a month later, but I was not allowed to keep the drive to attempt recovery of my precious work. Luckily it was fresh enough that I was able to remember a lot of it, but something had to change.

I began working directly on the USB thumb drive, using a second one as my backup. I use Samsung drives and they have never failed me… until Scrivener.

I never dug into the internals of the Scrivener application, but my best guess is that the save feature does not make a new file and then delete the old. It simply changes the specific blocks within the file on the drive. This is extremely time efficient. It is a requirement when working with large database files, which is why Microsoft has that feature in the Windows operating system. MS Word on the other hand takes seconds to save a large document that you only changed a few words on. Why does this matter?

It didn’t when the storage media was a spinning magnetic disk that could handle millions of changes to the state of any memory location without a failure. Solid State media, on the other hand, has about one hundred writes per location before it fails. No problem with MS Word since your document ‘saves’ march across the drive, not getting back to the original location for months if not years.

What I believe Scrivener was doing is autosaving to the same location every minute. This meant if I didn’t start a new Chapter file within two hours of writing, the save failed. This began about two months after I started using Scrivener as my primary writing software. I would be mid-sentence and look up and there would be a message from Scrivener that something went terribly wrong. Oh no, what could it be? Failure to save a file. I’d seen that in most other applications, especially when working on a network connected drive. You dismiss the box, then save to a different location. Easy. Nooooooo. The genius programmers at Scrivener do not trap and handle that error. The application crashes and work is lost. Only a minute’s worth, and you can screen shot to capture all the words not hidden by the fatal error, but you are definitely kicked out of your flow state.

At first I blamed the thumb drives and started experimenting with better quality ones. After the third lost work failure I was done with Scrivener. I sent them the bug report and never heard back from them. I still use it for short articles like my writing blog, because the organizational interface is exceptional. I never had this problem with the Mac version of Scrivener, but I don’t write nearly as much on the Mac.

I am back to MS Word, after eliminating O365 in favor of a local static version. Zero lost time or work since the change ~four years ago. I do change my thumb drives every six months just for piece of mind.

I do use O365 rarely for the Read Aloud feature, but I don’t pay for it. My partner uses it for their business, so I just piggyback on that license.

What makes you a professional writer? There are many possible answers. Among them are:

• A publisher has paid you to write words
• You have committed yourself to daily writing with the intent to publish
• You love writing.

It doesn’t really matter what your definition is. The professional writer writes to be paid to write. Could be ten years before you get paid for what you wrote yesterday. When it sells, you were retroactively a professional writer when you wrote it. Believe that you will eventually be paid, and you instantly become a professional writer.

What I want to tackle in this post is what a professional writer does. This is about the time management of all the things a writer needs to do. The best increment of time for work management is the week. This gives you flexibility to adjust your schedule day to day, without allowing you to push things off until the end of the month. A ‘work week’is therefore seven days. In that work week you allocate a certain number of hours to ‘writing’. A full-time writer should put in at least forty hours, a new writer may dedicate only four. How do we spend that time?

First and foremost, we write. Obviously. How much? When? Where? My rule of thumb is that at least 25% of our work week is adding words to a story. This means two hours a day for a full time writer. Seems easy. You had no problem sitting in a cubicle for eight hours, two hours is a piece of cake. It is not. Two hours of creativity is extremely difficult, especially if you have doubts. Start at ten minutes a day and work up to two hours over a decade or two.

Second is reflection. Thinking about what you wrote, what you are going to write, what you want to change, what you are doing with your life. This is the non-creative part of writing. It is accounting. Log your time. Summarize what you did. Make a note of what worked, what didn’t, what you want to try. Sitting in Starbucks was too distracting. Sitting on the couch wasn’t stimulating. Find your most productive you and cater to it. This is five to fifteen minutes per day. Do it at the end of the day, or throughout the day. Don’t do it the day after. Don’t spend hours doing it. Absolutely do not confuse this with editing what you wrote.

Third is business. Correspondence. Fifteen minutes is usually more than enough time. If you are spending more than that, analyze the content of the correspondence and justify it. Marketing. Spend five minutes per day selling the story. Pitch it to the wall. By the time the story is ready, your pitch will be too. Calendar. You have things to do outside of writing. Make sure those things are scheduled in a way that do not passively hurt your writing.

Fourth is joyfinding. If you cannot find any joy in the life you are living, it is time to change that. If you don’t find joy in writing, it is time to change that. Read your story as if your favorite author wrote it. What would you do differently? What would make the characters more interesting? If no one was ever going to read your words, what would you write? Eventually you will become your favorite author. Eventually you will find joy in most of what you do, because you have begun the process of self-authoring. This is not a percentage of your work week. This is to be done in every waking minute of your life.

Finally, there is editing. Self-editing is what kills most creativity. You go back and read the sentence you just wrote. You begin second guessing every word, character motivation, punctuation mark. This should not be part of your work week. You need to sub-contract this job to someone you trust. Someone who wants you to succeed more than you do. More on this in a future post.

So in summary, define your work week, break it down into tasks, and then document what you actually do.

On day seven, take a break, enjoy your life, and compare what you planned to do with what you actually did. This is the act of the reflective practitioner. Don’t limit this practice just to your writing.

Comments. They are right there, at the bottom of the screen, calling to you. Your finger hesitates on the mouse wheel…

DON’T DO IT!!!

Don’t read the comments. It has been scientifically proven that it takes one hundred seventeen positive comments to undo the damage of a less than flattering one. One hundred seventeen, give or take a hundred… sixteen.

Don’t read the comments. Ever. Let the trolls have their say. Let them rant, belittle, backhanded compliment, etc. Let them think you are completely unphased by their brutality by never replying.

Let your assistant read them and only bring the best of them to you. You don’t have an assistant? Wait until you have been writing long enough that you need an assistant to help before reading comments. Trust me, there is nothing but despair and heartbreak waiting for you there.

Even within the positive ones you will find negative comments between the lines. You know how I know? Because if you didn’t believe your writing was crap, you wouldn’t go seeking adulation in the first place. Just keep writing less and less crappy stuff.

Get constructive comments from your trusted friends, not the anonymous rants of a East Europe troll farm.

PS I have read all the below comments and agree completely. 😉

You’ve created a work of art. You have revised it a dozen times. No matter how many times you read it, you find a flaw. Shakespeare is somewhere up there rereading Hamlet and saying to himself ‘Dammit, that second act drags…’

When is it good enough?

If you have a great professional editor, they can tell you. If you have a great professional editor, why are you reading this stupid blog post? Go enjoy your wealth and success.

When is it good enough?

It is always good enough and never good enough. The question should be: when will you be okay with letting your precious little daughter ride her bike to the park all by herself? Are you imagining the scary guy in the white van (critics) just waiting to grab her and do unspeakable things (bad reviews) to her? Then you should never let her go. Keep revising until you are too old to care. Sit in the retirement home and babble about the life you could have lived. The daughter you kept locked in the tower will never visit you.

What you need to understand is that this story, the one you are working on right now, is not your only chance at success. If you created one, you can create another. Do you really think JD Salinger only wrote Catcher in the Rye? There were stories before it and after it. Really bad ones that he refused to let see the light of day, maybe some mediocre ones that were published without anyone really noticing. You have more than one chance. You have as many chances as you choose to take.

When your tenth novel finally gets recognized and you find wealth and fame, you can go back an publish the current one and the sycophants will love it.

When is it good enough?

When you find the next thing to write. That will pull your attention away and your unhealthy attachment to perfection will fade. Keep on writing new stuff, because you are a writer, not an editor.

What is creativity? How do we get it? How do we keep it? How do we get it back when it disappears?

The FIRST thing to know is that creativity is in everyone, always has been, always will be. You can’t get it or lose it. The only thing you can do with creativity is use it, or don’t use it.

The SECOND thing to know is not all creativity is good. In fact, my guess is 99.997% of all creativity is bad, embarrassingly so. It is so embarrassing that most people learn to avoid it. We are social animals, and until very recently in human history, survival was dependent on continued acceptance in the group. The group knows this and likes to use that power to make you be and think just like them. This reinforces their decisions, their creativity, at your expense. You used to do the same to them, admit it.

The THIRD thing you need to know is that even if you are able to dispose of all your horrible creative ideas, and then get some good ones written down in a coherent manner, they aren’t going to be seen as good by other people. You will fail miserably for a long time. If this seems like something you don’t want in your life, give up now. Really, stop reading. Go look at cat videos. They are so cute, aren’t they?

Still here? Congratulations! Welcome to the world of perpetual failure. Sure, mom loves your stories. That’s because she wants you to take care of her in her old age. Truth is, failure is always a good thing. Learning how not to do something is the best way to learn how to do something better. Learn to love your mistakes. Go read some of those year one stories, talk about cringing. This is year one for you? Set a reminder in your calendar ten years from now to go back and read that story you just started. Imagine how bad the ones we didn’t write down were.

The FOURTH thing you need to know about creativity is that it has two sides. It has an ethereal side, mystical and elusive. It also as a logical side, concrete and straight forward. They compliment each other. The logical side determines what creativity is needed and then asks the necessary questions. The ethereal side gives a lot of answers, good and bad, often not the ones you want or need. The logical side calls all of them stupid and asks for more. Eventually the ethereal side gives up, knowing the logical side will never be satisfied. Writer’s Block. Finding the balance between the two sides is how your creativity becomes part of you. Write down most of your ideas regardless how bad they are. Yes, they all suck, but some will suck less than others. Keep narrowing it down, adding more, narrowing down again, and then choose the least sucky option. That is how Rembrandt and Chaucer and Beethoven did it. It is also how the millions of unknown, unpublished artists did it. You might be one of those, face it. Even if you work your mind to the bone for decades, your least sucky creativity may never entertain anyone but mom. If that thought bothers you, cat video time.

The FIFTH and final thing about creativity you need to know is that only one reader, one critic, one person needs to like your work for you to be creatively successful. Can you guess who that is? No, not your mom. It’s you, and you hardly even know you. Seeking outside recognition for your art is the quickest route to disappointment, discouragement, and failure. If you’re next story will only get written if someone likes your last one, you are creating for the wrong person. No matter what, keep on writing.

You have a story, a good one. It is in a world that can expand endlessly and support many more stories. That is true of almost every story. Yes, Hamlet and everyone important is dead, but what if we continue telling the story of the aftermath? Some stories are good because they tell of an extraordinary event in an ordinary world. When you keep throwing extraordinary events in, it becomes diluted and unrealistic. Game of Thrones can go on forever because it starts with dragons and zombies. Real world stories don’t have that… hopefully.
(Insert link to zombie apocalypse prepper sponsor here. 🙂

There is nothing sadder than a bad sequel to a good story. Bridges of Madison County and The Notebook had sequels. Count yourself lucky if you didn’t know that. Why do they do it? Money. Or maybe they had a contractual obligation and couldn’t think of anything else. Who knows… The Gone With The Wind sequel at least had the decency to be written after the original author’s death.

The best reason to do it is to follow a side character that everyone wonders about. I wrote 200,000 words of fan fiction about Ayla’s three year old son. The important part of that sentence is “fan fiction”. That is where a story like that belongs. Do you want to write fan fiction about your own story? Mrs. Auel wrote five more fan fiction books after Clan Of The Cave Bear. They had the benefit of being completely different in tone, switching to romance fiction, something that could not be done in the original Ugly Duckling story re-imagining. No one wants to watch a swan getting it on with a duck.

If you want an ongoing series of books, plan for it. Create a larger world in which the later stories make sense. Sherlock Holmes and his fictional detective brethren are perhaps the best form of serialization. Another genre that seems to do this well is the Tech War popularized by Tom Clancy. You start with a reluctant warrior and the world keeps throwing bad guys at them while the technology to wage war becomes ever more lethal. This is just a novelization of the comic book superheroes and their endless adventures against impossible odds.

Serialization doesn’t work well in the Romance world because if they live, do you want to break them up just so they can be HEA with someone else? It is almost antithetical to the genre, which is why the previously mentioned sequels were so bad.

Serialize or not? Make sure your genre supports it. Make sure your characters are interesting and complex enough to support it. Make sure to have character arcs planned out over the series so that you don’t have to RetCon new things for the next story to be interesting. Most importantly, make sure you love these characters enough to spend decades with them. Or… have so many characters that killing them off is the Game that you play. Done properly, it is a great way to just keep writing.

A brilliantly reductive book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck by Mark Manson, summarizes happiness as coming from solving problems. Seems too simple for it to be true. I thought long and hard attempting to disprove it. While it requires a lot of context (why he wrote a book, not just a sentence) it does seem to fit into the world that I observe.

The most popular stories are by far mysteries. What is a mystery other than a problem (crime) being solved? Romance? How do I find love (solution) with so many things (problems) working against me? You can go through every genre, story type, writing style, and you will find little more than problem solving. That is because readers, often incapable of solving the problems in their own life, seek the fictional world where problems do get solved. This lets them know it is possible, and gives them hope. Hope itself is not happiness. In fact some believe that hope is the root of unhappiness because it so often leads to disappointment.

What Mark Manson so eloquently explains is how to choose what solvable problems to keep in your life, and to not give a f*ck about the rest of them. We do this in our stories. We give our characters seemingly unsolvable problems, then we walk them through the fires toward solving them. That’s because we, and our readers, want them to find happiness. They don’t always get there, but it is the direction that matters. True in the fictional world, true in the real world.
Writing is one of the best jobs in human history because it is a never ending string of solvable problems being solved. We can solve anything because we can invent the solution without any regard to the laws of physics or the constraints of time and money. Creativity is free. Happiness is a choice.

Human life is story. We live our lives by telling each other our stories. It is the essence of education, community, even survival. This is why our brain craves it and rewards us chemically for engaging in it.
You go through your day gathering events. Most fall to the wayside because they have no lasting value. At the end of the day, you condense them down into the memorable things. The funny thing Bill told you. The crazy assignment the boss gave you. The bastard that cut you off in traffic. The delicious new restaurant you tried. This becomes the story of your day. Most of those moments are excised from the story of your week. How many remain for the story of your year?
“And, by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories, here’s a good idea, have a point. It makes it so much more interesting to the listener.” – Neal (Steve Martin) from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Written by John Hughes.
What is the point of the story? What is the point of life? A story needs to be interesting. What makes it interesting? Many would say ‘conflict’ is the key to an interesting story. It certainly features heavily in the best stories. Adversity is a form of conflict and an important ingredient of any story. Comedy can be full of conflict, but sometimes a joke is absent conflict and still gets a laugh. What the conflict does for us is to bring emotion to the surface. A story strives to make us feel… something, anything. This makes the story more real and in the process more likely to be remembered and have lasting value.
Which emotions do you want to evoke? There are only four of them, though you can find articles that will argue for many more than that. They are simple variations on a theme. Disgust is just a form of Anger. Surprise is just a form of Fear. The final two, and the ones most often evoked in story, are Happiness and Sadness.
I have said many times that a great movie is one that can make me laugh and cry. This is a low bar since I cry at most movies, even Terminator 2 gets me in the feels every time. Mostly I cry at the happy endings, like the town’s people bringing George Bailey money. I often laugh at the horrific scenes Quentin Tarantino puts together.
As for novels, no one has made me cry more than the death merchant, Nicholas Sparks. A Walk to Remember can keep the waterworks going for hours even on my seventh re-read. John Scalzi gets me laughing like no other. The best ones can do both, and throw in some anger and fear to go with it. I bet Harry Potter gets a lot of people there, though I am too old and cynical a muggle to fall for it.
Story is empathetic emotion, driven by conflict and adversity, for the purpose of making us aware of the potential dangers that could befall us. The reason we want to avoid danger? Aside from surviving, that is how we make our way toward happiness, the true purpose of life.