Reading About Writing: My Favorite Writing Books

One of the most common tips writers give to want-to-be-writers is to read a lot. This isn't something I've ever had a problem with, but there are certain books about writing that I've found incredibly helpful to me over the years, so I thought I'd share them with you.

• Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg. The chapters are short essays that motivate and inspire writing; there's a list of prompts toward the front of the book if you're stuck on the what am I supposed to write? horse. I found her writing very accessible and almost like she was sitting across the table from me at a coffeeshop. Goldberg is a gifted writer and her writing always inspires me to take another crack at my current project.

• Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True, by Elizabeth Berg. This is my favorite book about writing. Berg gives a ton of unusual prompts and activities to really inspire creativity, and she writes about her own writing process and inspirations. I've got this book post-it marked, underlined, and bookmarked in many different ways.

• Make it Happen, by Lara Casey. This isn't a writing book, per se, but it's a book about setting and achieving your goals. I love it!

• The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. The classic book on freeing your inner artist, this has helped a lot of writers I know, especially in the institution of Morning Pages. I'm working my way through this--very slowly. :)

These are my favorites. How about you? Do you have favorite books that inspire you to be creative?

Writing Updates--June 8, 2015

• The first installment of the Jane Re-Read is up on the blog. A new post will go up every other week throughout the summer. First was Sense and Sensibility, and next is Northanger Abbey. Come join us!
• The Dominican Part of the Memoir is being written. The timeline is important here, and after this part is down I'll need to finesse how it works in the manuscript as a whole, but this is an important part that's been missing.
• Remember the NaNo novel I abandoned last year? I think I might have a new way into it, which excited me, but I need to play around with it. Right now it involves moving from a third person to first person narration, and possibly adding more points of view, instead of the limited third person I was going with before. But we'll see if that helps.
• Coming up on the blog this week: travel tips and Sketchbook Skool!

Goal Setting for Dummies: Using Power Sheets

"Goal setting."

Does that phrase give you shivers? I know it used to for me. It seems so grandiose, right? It takes me back to when I was in high school and everyone asked "what I was going to do" after school. Most of us sort of mumbled our major or shrugged. I knew what was my major was going to be, but until I figured it out, it was nerve wracking, right?

So many articles have been written about goal setting that I don't think what I'm going to write here is new. But if you're new to this, here's an article from lululemon's website that talks about it.

Anyway, I'd always liked the idea of goal setting, but I was never very good at it. That is, until I found Lara Casey's power sheets (And no, this isn't an add for her. It's a great tool I use in writing that I thought I'd share with you. :) )

Basically, the Power Sheets break goal setting down into manageable chunks: short-term and long term goals, and most importantly, why you want to achieve these goals. The set contains six months' worth of sheets, and a lot of detailed prep work. But they are magnificent, guys. Each goal gets broken down into daily, weekly, and monthly goals, which is so helpful for someone like me, who needs that step-by-step accountability. For example, for the past few months "write three blog posts a week" was a goal. Then there was "daily writing 30 minutes", and in the monthly section, it was manuscript goals. I also have prayer and fitness goals.

No matter what your goals are--climbing Everest, finishing your dissertation, learning to draw, whatever!--these sheets will be an enormous help. If you're like me and need accountability, then checking off the boxes every day will be a big help.

Do you have goals you're working towards? How do you push yourself to accomplish them?

Using an Editorial Calendar (or: making sure readers have something to read!)

Before I used an editorial calendar, my blogging habits were pretty hit or miss. Some weeks you'd have content coming out of my ears, and some weeks, total radio silence. That's not helpful on a couple fronts--for you, the reader, I hope that you want regular content because you like to read what I write. (If you don't, don't tell me. ;-)) Second, writing, like anything else, requires regular practice and time devoted to it. If I only write when I feel like it, then I'm probably not really dedicated to the craft of writing. (You could say this about anything, really--prayer, gardening, sports, yoga, etc. If you only do it when you feel like it, it's probably going to be a sporadic practice.)

When I was doing my social media overhaul, Cristina had the brilliant suggestion of an editorial calendar, and I think it's changed my writing for the better. It's helpful in several ways:

• I can track outside writing projects (like my Real Housekeeping work) and make sure I don't miss deadlines.
• I can see, at a glance, what's coming up for the next few weeks, and schedule posts appropriately--if I'm going on vacation, I can still have content ready to go, if I want.
• I have to dedicate time to writing at least a few times a week, so I can have these posts ready to go.
• It helps me prevent feast or famine blogging--I can spread ideas out over a number of days, so there's not a glut of pieces on day and then nothing for days after.

I use trello, and I really like the format, because it's easy to use, clean, and very user-friendly.

So here's my current editorial calendar:

The left-most column is where I keep a running tally of ideas. These are either scheduled--as in, I think I have a place for them on the calendar--or not (just yet). Next is researching: this is for posts that might take longer (such as posts where I'm talking about theology) and need to look up necessary documents--hence, research.

Middle column is writing, and this is where things go into the hopper, if you will. I try to have two weeks' worth of material going at any one time. You can see, in fact, that this piece is at the bottom of the writing list, meaning it's in the on-deck circle, to steal from baseball. (I took the photo the day I wrote this.)

The colors mean different things: the blue means it's a post for this site, whereas the purple means it's going to the blog (which you follow, right?) Any other colors are indicative of the category of writing, which is really just for me.

After writing is editing and graphics. That means I make the pretty pictures that top these articles, and give all the pieces a read-through to scan for errors.

When all that is done, the card moves into the "completed" column--yay! I generally keep things here for a week, so I can get an overview of what went up where over the past week. Then the cards are archived.

Another great trello feature is the calendar page:

This is actually one of my favorite features, because I can see what's going up when in a big spread, and I can re-arrange cards at will. This is great for my future planning, especially for when I'm going on vacation, or I want to see things at a glance. The only problem I have here is that when a card is archived, it's also removed from this page, and that irritates me, but, such is life!

I also have a trello board for my big writing projects, but that's set up differently. Maybe I'll show you that one some other time.

So not only does my board provide organizational nirvana, but it also provides accountability. The content isn't going to write itself! Usually early in the week I do the calendar sorting and resorting, to figure out what's going up when, and then I work on blog posts throughout the week, along with my other writing.

Things that don't get scheduled are things like Yarn Alongs and Seven Quick Takes on the blog, because those are running features that don't need quite as much planning as from-scratch blogging does. I do keep certain features as cards, though, so I don't forget, like the biweekly writing updates--I'm also going to do those for the Jane Austen Re-Read. 

I know that the idea of editorial calendars is used in a lot of different industries--I know that IT guys use a version of this (not trello), but something like this to track their software development. Have you used an editorial calendar in your work? Would you like to?

After the First Draft, Now what?: Revising vs. Editing

So you've got the first draft. Yay! Now comes time to let out your inner editor. This can be hard, because the inner editor can be a beast, and think that everything you wrote is crap. So I recommend--and so do other writers, like Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones--that you take time away from your piece for a little while. Sometimes it's a week, sometimes it's a year, but that time away allows you to refocus your vision and recalibrate your inner editor. When you come back to the piece, you'll have fresh eyes, and this enables you to see both the good and the bad in what you wrote. When I was recently going through The Undesirables, there were places that were great--and places that were just crap. I deleted the crap and attempted to write new and better things.

This brings us to an important distinction between editing and revising. Revise means (among other things) "to alter something already written or printed, in order to make corrections, improve, or update." Edit means "to revise or correct, as a manuscript."

Essentially, revising comes before editing. When I used to "edit" papers in college for other people, what I did was revise and edit. The first reading was usually for revisions. I made sure that the paper flowed, the argument presented was made, and that everything moved in a sequential, logical fashion. If an argument was weak, I noted that, or if there was too much repetition, I noted that. Sometimes I would circle entire sections in red pen and note that they should be moved around--either forward or farther on--in the text.

When I revise novels, I delete sections I don't like, I add things that need further exposition, and I can re-imagine the timeline, if I have to. Revising is more about the grand shape of things. Editing is about the nit-picky details--spelling, punctuation, grammar, things like that. So if I've revised a paper, the second pass is usually for editing purposes, unless the person wanted me to read it again to make sure the revised copy worked.

I really like revising and editing. To me it's the process that turns the coal into a diamond, if you will. Now, there does have to be the one good sentence in there to begin with. But if it is there, then you simply have to build on it in revision. I find the first draft the hardest part in my own writing, because I haven't gotten everything down yet. The ending is still ambiguous, and I might just have one scene in my head--how can I create an entire novel out of one scene? The writing gremlins are usually pretty present in my first drafting experiences. It's probably the effect of the blank page, or the blank canvas. But when I'm revising, I have fresh eyes and I'm ready to tackle the manuscript head on again.

Writing Updates May 25, 2015

Notes from the writing room:

• This week I'm finally adding the new (and hopefully last) section to the memoir. I've nicknamed this part the "Dominican section", since it deals with me joining a Dominican parish, discerning a vocation to be a cloistered nun, and things that happened after that. (No spoilers here, guys.)
• I'm writing up my D.C. trip on the blog tomorrow, which, coincidentally, involves more Dominicans. (Subscribe to the blog if you don't already, please?) It was a picture-perfect weekend, weather wise, which was so nice, since the last trip I made to D.C. involved snow and cold.
• I'm also writing my next Real Housekeeping column this week, which involves how to stock your pantry and create easy meals from your food stash.
• On Wednesday in this space will be a piece on revising vs. editing: no, they are not the same thing!

The First Draft--the Messy Scribbles

So you've finally decided you're ready to start the first draft.

And you put pen to paper and....nothing.

I know some people think they need to know everything that's going to happen in the novel before they start writing, and you really don't need to. It helps, sure. But it's not necessary. I've started pieces with just one scene in my mind and then gone from there. (Gift of Snow started this way.)

For a first draft, I find things like NaNoWriMo to be really helpful. You're stuck with a word goal and the objective is to get everything on paper. You can't stop because you've got the time crunch to meet the goal of 50,000 words, so you write through writer's block and hopefully come out the other side with a story that has a beginning, middle, and an end. Personally, I need that sort of external accountability to get my first drafts done, and I only stop if I am really stuck--totally, creatively dry and at a dead end, which is what happened to my piece for NaNo last year. I just had no idea how to move the story beyond its embryonic stages.

If you don't like the word goal idea, you can also tell yourself you'll write for 30 minutes a day, or an hour a day--whatever. The point of a first draft is to get the basic sketch--the messy scribbles--of the story down. This also applies to writing nonfiction. Things like essays or speeches can be done this way, and I've done that before. You start with what you know is going in the piece. Then you can write things like "MORE HERE" (which I do all the time), or "WORDS" (if you're being cheeky) as placeholders.

No one turns out a perfect piece of written work in a first draft. No one. Not Jane, not Dickens, not Ernest Hemingway. No one. So shut up your inner editor and just write. No one cares if it's trash, because no one but you is ever going to see it. This is where you can think up whatever you want. When you go back and edit, that's when you can critique and slash out entire chapters if you want. That's the purpose of editing. But the rough draft is like a Pollock painting. It's paint splashes on the canvas of the page. Reduce your expectations, sit down, and write.

It's Alive! Creating a Vibrant Novel Part II: The Characters

Last week, we talked about how important research is to a novel. Today, we're going to talk about the people that populate your stories--the characters.

There are a plethora of approaches involving characters. Virginia Woolf talked about digging a cave behind hers:

“I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.”

 Diana Gabaldon writes about characterization at length on her website. Some authors prefer to know everything about their characters, from the time they were born to their favorite childhood breakfast, while some wing it as they go along. Some characters have things borrowed from people I know, and some are created out of whole cloth (like Ariel, a minor character in The Undesirables--I just worked on a scene with her yesterday, so she's fresh in my mind. And yes, her name is Ariel for a reason.)

Generally, I know my main characters well. I write down details about them--eye color, hair color, height, general body shape and composition. I know how they like to dress and what they do for fun, and I can picture them as I'm writing. Secondary characters tend to spring up because the main characters need them to populate their world. For example, in Undesirables, Kate (the main character) has a best friend, Paige. David (Kate's husband, and the other protagonist), has a best friend, Eric. While I might not know as much about these guys as I do about Kate and David, I still need to know how Eric and Paige will react in situations with Kate and David. How do they talk? What is their relationship with my main characters? What is their physicality--how they enter a room, how they sit, their mannerisms.

In Pilate's Wife, for example, I knew there were things that Pontius and Claudia wouldn't do. They wouldn't slouch or be slovenly people. They wouldn't talk with their mouths full. They have a certain sense of breeding and carriage. I also had to be careful of their dialogue. I couldn't put twenty-first century idioms into first century mouths.

But the main characters have "caves" behind them: I know when they were born, who their parents are, their siblings. I often sketch out family trees for these guys, and have birthdays for their siblings and parents. I know where their parents live and where the characters grew up. I know their best and worst school subjects. To me, that's all very important,  even if I will never use this information. I still have to know it.

The last piece of creating a vibrant novel is dialogue, and for this, I'll have to devote another post.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? If you write fiction, how do you create your characters?

Writing Updates--May 11, 2015

The latest updates from the office:

• First, I'd like to state that, as much as I love the new baby princess's name, I named my royal character Charlotte years before she was born (The Gift of Snow). So when the novel comes out, don't be thinking I stole her name, guys. ;-)
• Blog: The blog has its own tab here (look up--it's the furthest right), but if you want blogging posts when they're published, please go over there and subscribe. Here's what I wrote about last week: How to handle life's curveballs; knitting and reading. Two weeks ago, I had a post about books you need to read before you die, so if you're looking for some summer reading, I've taken care of it for you!
• Some of you have been asking about excerpts of the novels. I'm in the process of working on finding good sections and I will post those under the "excerpt" pages, above (they're currently empty). I'll update you when there is something there!
• I'm doing major revisions to The Undesirables. When I first wrote it, my objective was basically to get a beginning, a middle, and an end in 50,000 words for NaNo. To do that, I wrote quickly and skimmed over some pretty large plot developments. Now I'm going back and filling all of those empty spaces in, and I'm having a ball.
• As a gift for subscribing to the page, I've sent y'all a copy of Pilate's Wife. If you did not get it--or are a Wordpress Subscriber, in which case you didn't get an email because I don't have your email--please let me know so I can send you a copy. I want to make sure everyone who wants to read it can!