1. Concept summary.
   • This tends to be written in a notebook, and is a written exploration of the general flow of the novel. The concept summary for my current work is three pages of a Moleskine notebook. The focus is more on dramatic conflict and character evolution than on detailed plot points.
   • This stage also includes various notes on sources of conflict and tension, a sort of mission statement, and reference books that I’d like to keep handy.
2. Chapter Outline.
   • Each chapter is described in a few lines with emphasis on major plot points that need to occur in that chapter. In this project, I decided on a set number of chapters and worked within that constraint. In another work, the exploration of chapter creation might dictate the number of chapters.
3. Scene Outline.
   • The chapters are then broken down into a number of scenes. The level of detail is increased, but each scene is still described in only a sentence or two. The focus is still on the major elements that contribute to the overall dramatic structure.

When everything has been laid out, I can sit down each day and tackle a scene or two. I’ve found that this level of outlining gives me a basic structure to work from without dictating exactly where the story needs to go. There is breathing room between the gaps in the outline that gives me a freedom to explore characters and storyline as the work progresses. My novel writing software of choice is Scrivener, and it allows me to create virtual folders for each chapter. Contained within these chapters are the scene files. Each of these items is just an outline note that represents an actual text file. By simply clicking and dragging in the outline view, an entire chapter or scene can be moved forwards or backwards in the narrative.

I’ve found that this process helps me focus on the writing, and removes any real possibility of writer’s block. I don’t always outline an entire project, but I do find that it helps to always have the next few days worth of scenes ready to go so I can sit down and focus on the writing rather than wondering what happens next. As long as I don’t catch up to the end of my outline, I’ve never had a problem meeting my daily word count goals.

Related posts:

1. Keeping Your Rough Drafts To Yourself
2. Faking It
3. On Not Writing and then Writing Again

A year later, someone thought it would be a good idea to kick down my apartment door and steal my computer. So many of my photos and writings from the last few years were gone, and I was left with a pile of backup discs in varying conditions. Little of my writing survived, and only one of the two discs from my months in Thailand was readable by my new computer. I tried it on my computer at work, I tried it on my brother’s professional photo editing system, I even sent it home with a few friends to see if they could rescue the data, but the disc remained unreadable. While I’m sure I could have paid a data recovery expert to try to pull the photos off for me, I was so frustrated that I decided to just leave it.

These days I shoot a 12.3 megapixel digital SLR (as opposed to the 2 MP point and shoot I had in Thailand) and I’ve learned that my backup solutions needed to scale with the upgrade. If you’re creating anything of value on your computer, what steps are you taking to ensure that you don’t lose it for good if everything goes down?

The Rule of Three
Always keep your important items in 3 different locations. This is as important as your documents are to you. It’s highly recommended that at least one of the backup locations is not in the same room or building as the other two. Do you live in an apartment or condo with a sprinkler system? Ever looked around at your electronics and realized how much would disappear if the apartment down the hall was on fire and your sprinklers went off?

Backing Up Your Writing
The nice thing about backing up text documents is the relatively small amount of space they take up.

• Site 1: Your Hard Drive. Easy, this is where your work already lives.
• Site 2: An External Drive. 4 GB thumb drives are incredibly cheap these days, but to store thousands of pages of text documents, you only need 1 GB. For larger backup solutions, I love my WD My Passport Essential 500 GB drive so much that I took it to South America for 5 weeks to back up my photos. Use the built in software on your computer (I use Time Machine on my Mac), incremental back up software (I use Carbon Copy Cloner), or just drag and copy files from one drive to the next.
• Site 3: On the Interwebs. This is the second easiest method. Check out the online backup tools like Dropbox, Mozy, or something you’ve had recommended. After about ten minutes of set up and initial sync, I had all of my writing stored in the Dropbox folder on my hard drive. Everything placed in this folder is mirrored on the Dropbox website, and accessible through a login. I also have Dropbox installed on my netbook, and it automatically updates to the latest versions of my writing when it’s able to connect to the Dropbox server. With the 2 GB of storage on a free account, my writing is safe in the event of a physical calamity, easy to access if I’m not at my own computer, and synced across multiple computers as long as I have internet access. What’s not to like?

• Alternative to Online Storage. Okay, it’s 2010, but not everyone has daily internet access. What else can you do? Buy a second flash drive and leave it at the office. Bring it home once a week to do a backup, and return it to your office the next day. Don’t work in an office? Swap with a friend every week. You store their weekly backup, and they store yours. No friends? Put your drive in a plastic bag or watertight container and bury it in the woods. Dig it up every week to copy your data, and while you’re digging maybe think about, you know, getting out and meeting people.

Backing Up Your Photos While Travelling
This is what I did on my last trip. You’ll see that it still carries the risk of having all the data in the same area, but with internet connections being slow, and online storage beyond a few GB getting expensive, this was a risk I wasn’t too worried about.

• Site 1: Your Memory Cards. I don’t erase memory cards until I’m desperate for space.
• Site 2: A Computer Hard Drive. Most nights in Chile and Peru (until my netbook’s hard drive died), I used Lightroom to import the day’s images and give them a rough sort. Lightroom stores the photos in a Year/Month/Day folder tree, and the computer lives in my main backpack. It often stayed in the room while I was out all day. After the netbook went belly up, I used hotel computers to transfer to Site 3.
• Site 3: An External Drive. If you’re shooting a dSLR, you have no reason not to go buy at least a 500 GB drive. My WD drive is small enough that I regularly copied my Lightroom folders to the external drive with incremental backup software, and then carried the external drive in my camera bag while out for the day.

Backing up your work may seem like an extra expense or effort, but if you’re one of those people who only has one copy of your key works, how would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and it had disappeared?

I worked at an outdoor shop in Squamish when I first moved to British Columbia. Squamish is a popular climbing destination, and carries the not unusual stigma of being a town where you run a high risk of having your car broken into at the parking lots outside of town. Every now and then someone would be walking around the store making a list of items and their costs to report to their insurance company. Chatting about the theft and bad luck, it came out on two separate occasions that students on a summer road trip had lost the computer with the single digital copy of their entire grad thesis. Sure, they had various printouts and notes that they could piece back together, but the bulk of the writing was gone forever.

How many hours have you put into your manuscript, and how prepared would you be if your computer just didn’t turn on one day?

PS: If you would like an extra 250 MB of space on a free 2 GB Dropbox account, please use this Dropbox referral link.

Related posts:

1. On Not Writing and then Writing Again
2. Word Zero
3. Faking It

There are a lot of friends I don’t see that often now that I’ve quit my job. Invariably, when I do see them I am asked how the writing is going. Lately, all I can say is “up and down” while rocking my hand back and forth in the international hand signal for ‘meh’. During a three week visit to Victoria, I actually had to plug a cable into my computer when I wanted to get online, and this inconvenienced me so much that I managed to neglect this blog for the entire three weeks. For the first week back in Vancouver, I was still feeling the lag and let another week slip by. As the month drifted past without any blog posts, time spent working on my novel also trickled to a halt. Perhaps ‘sudden’ and ‘abrupt’ might serve better in place of trickled. The first few days in Victoria, I settled into the house we were looking after, eked out a quiet room to write in, and got used to the new location. After four days of sleeping in and lazing about, I sat down to write. I produced 12,000 words over the course of four days, and haven’t managed another since.

Three years ago I sat down to write my first novel. I have sordid history of not finishing personal projects, and I was going to prove to myself that I could write a novel length piece of fiction. It was a horrible story. Something I’d never have let anyone read or ever considered for publication, but it was easy to write and I was more concerned with finishing than I was with quality. I quit around the 40,000 word mark. I’d been accepted into a year long writers’ studio, and decided that I didn’t need this silly novel project to prove to myself that I was a writer, I’d be paying a few thousand dollars tuition to take care of that. The novel was abandoned and its carcass left to rot on my hard drive with the many other short story drafts that had accumulated over the years.

This current project has turned into a struggle. It was supposed to be a practice run for the project I really cared about. It was supposed to be written quickly and relatively effortlessly. It was supposed to have been done sometime last week. Instead, it sits and festers just a thousand or so words longer than my previous best effort. The temptation to move on to the next project has been strong, but I’ve been trying to convince myself that I need to finish something for once. It may be difficult, but this story needs to be finished before the next can begin.

The problem is that I’m just not happy with what I’ve done to my current work in progress. There was a good idea in there somewhere, but I lost that thread months ago. I’m officially dropping the draft and moving on to the next project. I don’t know that I’ll be able to look on this as anything but a failure until I finally manage to complete a full draft, but I guess that’s just something I’ll have to live with. I’ve managed to convince myself that it’s smarter to work this way. I’m switching to a story that’s been tugging at me for the last nine months, and it’s the idea that really pushed me to take this time off. It is the idea with the best likelihood of publication, and the one I’ve always planned to put the most revision work into. If I can finish a first draft of this story, I’ll be able to put it in a drawer while I go back to work on the last 30,000 words of the Hero project. This should give me enough distance to effectively tackle the rewrites.

Of course, at this point I can’t tell if this is sound logic or just a coping mechanism, but the truth of it all is that my free time is passing me by, and soon I’ll be back under the constraints of a work schedule. Now is my time to write, and this is the project I really want to be working on. Back to word zero it is.

Related posts:

1. Sit Your Ass Down
2. A New Gauntlet Taken Up
3. Novel Writing and Commitment

Last week I attended a reading where the two featured authors slipped into a sidetrack exposition on the virtues of writing longhand. They told us how applying pen to paper and writing slowly gives the work a depth that pecking away at a keyboard just can’t provide. The two technophobic old farts also explained how the new generation is in too much of a rush to write these days. I was told that we don’t like to write bridge scenes anymore, and that our work is always rushing towards action and conclusion, never taking the time to slow down and smell the flowers.

One of the authors put it like this:

“It seems that people don’t want to write long anymore, but strangely enough a lot of people still want to read long.”

I think the author is confusing what writers want to do with what the general reading public is looking for. Looking at books on my shelf published in the last five years I see short poppy contemporary literature, sitting next to long and intricately woven narratives. Shorter books are indeed popular, but is this more because a certain demographic chooses to be distracted by myriad other activities instead of reading, or is because writers are just getting lazy with their keyboards? I’ll let you chew on that one for a bit.

While I’m on the rant, I’d also like to mention that Mrs. Longhand’s book barely tipped 200 pages of wide margin and large fonts. Not having read the book, I can’t comment on the writing, but the snippets she read to us gave the impression of a fast moving book that didn’t sound nearly as interesting as the research that went into it. Maybe if she’d used a computer she might have been able to put a few more words on the page before finishing each writing day, and ultimately put a little more flesh on the bones of her story.

This whole writing long hand is The One True Way argument would be a lot more powerful if it wasn’t always pushed on my by people who look like they still own a VCR continuously blinking 12:00.

Write however you damn well want, it’s all just words when it’s rolling off the press.

Related posts:

1. Novel Writing and Commitment
2. Grand Gestures
3. Sit Your Ass Down

Making a drastic life shift like this came after a lot of thought and planning, and if I’m being honest, more than a little desperation. For two years I planned my departure from the regular working world, and it wasn’t until the last few months that I decided to make writing the focus of my time off. Somewhere in the plans to travel and generally goof off, I’d realized a few things. It’s not likely that I’ll ever again be in a situation of having so little responsibility. No kids, no mortgage, no car payments, no debt, no job, and a fair amount of fiscal freedom. For a few months at least, I could live the dream and finally get down to work.

It’s never that easy though. Last week I received an email from a young writer who is sitting on the opposite end of that spectrum. He feels that his job at a call centre is crushing his ability to be creative, and that the stresses of life are frustrating his attempts at writing. I can easily relate to this, because I felt my job was doing the same thing. I was lucky enough to be in a great working environment, but the work itself was tiresome and frustrated me to no end. I felt I couldn’t possibly write anything worth reading unless I could break free of that external pressure.

I was wrong. To be fair, I’ve known this for a very long time, but a part of me didn’t really want to admit it. You see, I suffer from something I call Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome [GIGS]. You might be afflicted by GIGS if you’ve ever uttered the phrase “things will be so much better when…” or “I could write so much more if…” Unfortunately, all I have to tell you is that the circumstances don’t matter. You will either write, or you won’t, and there is a very strong likelihood that you will write better if you’re struggling against external pressures. For many writers, there is a power in suffering that translates into the work they create. It is a writer’s job to make the reader feel something, and many writers use energy from the extremes of their emotion to write the words that will make a reader feel most keenly. Everything that happens to you is fuel for your work, but this is nothing new, and you’ve read this all before. You don’t really want to know that it’s just as difficult to work when you have all day to focus on it exclusively.

What I offer you, if you’re stuck and feeling as though life is keeping you from achieving your goals, is the idea of a grand gesture. I’m talking about doing something big and scary in the name of your art. For me, it was quitting my job, but for you it may mean hiding your TV in the closet and putting a desk in its place. Maybe you’ll rent a workspace for two hours every week so that you have a proper place to work. You might sign up for a year long writer’s studio, or even a weekend introduction to fiction writing class. Maybe it will be as small as buying your first notebook in a very long time, and deciding that you will write one creative sentence every week. Only you know what little push you need, and the thing to remember is that you must do something that scares you a little bit, and that the act itself is meaningless without the followthrough.

There is power in grand gestures. You may not think you have the ideal circumstances to be creative or productive, but the only thing that separates you from the great masters of this world in this respect is that they didn’t let such a silly thing stop them from trying. Making a grand gesture in honour of your work may not put your ass in the chair every day, or keep you working hard, but it might just give you enough confidence to convert you from someone who wishes they could do something, to someone who does it.

Related posts:

1. The Big Transition
2. The Longhand Rant
3. Word Zero

A good day sees me writing 2,000 words in about an hour and a half. This week has already seen more than one day of barely cresting 1,000 after four or five hours of waffling between the computer and whatever distractions I can find. The worry in these moments is that I’m only writing filler to get me one more day closer to my final word count; that I’m ultimately going to have to edit everything out and rewrite it during revisions.

Yesterday I had lunch plans and knew I needed to get as much work done in the morning as possible. I skimmed the pages from the last few days, and had no troubles jumping directly into a steady flow. Somewhere in the mental meandering and uncertainty, I’d actually managed to eke out a few new ideas and set myself up with a solid way to bridge the gap through major scenes. The pages will still need heavy edits, but it won’t be the wholesale slash and burn I’d anticipated.

If you’re not the type to open your word processor every day with anticipation for what surprises your brain has in mind for the story you don’t know yet, it helps to think forward at least a chapter or two. No matter what your chosen outlining theory may be, there will always be days where the words don’t flow as easily as you’d like, but the trick is in remembering that this is sometimes where your best ideas will come from. The time spent spinning in your chair or doing the dishes is time spent mulling over your story and where best to take it next, and the words that come hardest may just be the ones most worth writing.

Related posts:

1. A New Gauntlet Taken Up
2. Word Zero
3. Technology and Drafting

For illustration’s sake, here’s something from my own work in progress:

Luke knew that he was getting stuck in the image that Hollywood put out there, and that he was attempting to live in the grey area between super hero, and every day hero. He couldn’t fly, couldn’t see through walls, didn’t have superhuman strength, and didn’t have adamantium claws embedded into his hands. He also didn’t possess the Jason Bourne-like qualities of intuitive language and fighting skills that would take fifty years of training to master. He was just a man. Thinking about the fact that he was skipping school at the moment, he revised that in his head to just a boy. He was sixteen years old, and he couldn’t hold himself up to the standards of anything in his comics or movies, nor should he compare himself to the real world spies who work with millions of dollars worth of training and technology behind them. He needed to start somewhere, and no one was perfect when they first started. The real asset, as he saw it, was that he didn’t want to just be some one off hero who found themselves in an extraordinary situation and took the right course of action. No, Luke wanted to consistently seek those wrongs in society that he knew he could act on, and one day his training and experience would allow him to tackle larger and larger issues. One day, he really would be a force to be reckoned with.

This is not a fair representation of who I am as a writer. It suffers from gramatical errors, is somewhat incoherent, slightly confusing out of context, and the writing is just plain messy. After several revisions, this paragraph will hopefully take on the tight and engaging style that will make a reader want to stay on the couch until they finish the book, but right now it’s just part of the foundation on which I’ll build a readable novel. If you were to read the rest of that chapter, you might seriously doubt my ability to ever produce anything worth reading.

Consider the following before sharing your first draft writing:

1. Your first draft writing is not very good. I’m not trying to be mean here, but it’s true. First drafts are for your eyes only. Show them to a close friend if you really nead structural help, but try to resist. You should always clean up your work before sending it to anyone so that your Beta Readers are receiving the best product that you can produce on your own. They shouldn’t be doing your dirty work for you, but rather helping you take your work to a higher level of excellence.

2. Readers will judge you. Little turns me off more than writing excerpts riddled with errors and clichéd or awkward phrases. Posting your lowest quality of writing on a blog or forum might lead people to pass unfair judgment on your ability to produce a quality finished product. Do you really want to put this facet of your writing out there for everyone to see?

3. Even if your draft writing is good, it might not be interesting out of context. It takes looking at the big picture to see if the little pieces all fit together. Extraneous plot elements need to be weeded out, character traits may be inconsistent, and your rough chapter excerpts are probably lacking the momentum they need to carry the reader through. It’s challenging enough to pull an excerpt from a polished work that will stand on its own, and even more difficult to do so from a rough draft.

4. If I’m reading entire chapters on your blog, what makes me want to read them again when they’re published? We all want to get published, right? If I visit your blog and am getting blasted with an excerpt once a week, might it not feel like I’ll be reading the book twice if it actually gets published?

So when is it okay to share my writing?

This depends on what you’re hoping to get out of it. If it’s something you want feedback on, do your critique group a favour and clean it up as much as possible. Before you ask someone to work hard to help you with your writing, remember that this is a relationship based on mutual respect and that you should try hard to fix it to the best of your abilities before sending it out.

You might also find yourself in the position of wanting to promote your forthcoming novel. That’s great, congratulations! Now you can post experpts from your published work. Hook people with that same fabulous writing that you used to land an agent and publisher, and by all means put a few chapters up on your blog.

What do you think? Is there anything to gain from posting first draft writing on your blog or favourite forum?

Related posts:

1. Word Zero
2. Published
3. Technology and Drafting

A thrice-published bestselling author once told me that I should expect to spend the next two to three years with my novel if I was going to see it through to publication. From the drafting, to the revising, to the pitching, to the pre-launch promoting, the novel will consume an average writer’s life for a solid two years.

To put that in perspective, a friend of mine recently created two human beings in that amount of time. The computer you use to type the first words of your project will be on the verge of obsolescence by the time you see publication. Everyone will be driving hovercars and living on Mars. [That may be going a bit too far, but you get the point.]

It’s important to love your story. You don’t always have to be ecstatic about sitting down and typing, and there is every chance you may hate your characters and the whole idea by the time you’re giving your first reading with a hard bound first edition in hand, but there needs to be something driving you to chisel away at the work day after day. Non-writers will of course have the opinion that it’s an idyllic life of typing a few thousand words each morning before strolling to the café to converse with other artist types. It’s easy, right? Just string a few pretty sentences together, and after a few months you have a book.

Those of us who’ve looked ahead know that there is significantly more involved in the process. After the drafting comes the revisions. How many revisions? Maybe only three (we hope), more likely eight or nine on that first novel. We’re done after the revisions though, right? After we write out a dozen different versions of our query letter, send it to a few agents, deal with the rejection, revise our query letters and sample pages, send to a few more agents, land an agent (we hope), suffer through the publisher rejection process, get an acceptance (we hope), negotiate a contract, handle our own publicity by doing blog tours and interviews in the online and independent media because the publishing industry only has media budgets for it’s biggest new stars, and eventually get drunk and pass out at our book launch party. Then instead of writing we have to convince all our local bookstores to let us do a little reading and signing, where we’ll sit and try to snare the attention of the one or two book browsers who are trying their best not to wander to close to our aura of discomfort and embarrassment at standing alone in front of several empty chairs and a pile of books waiting to be signed.

Is it starting to sound fun yet? This is all part of our labour though, and to survive the frustrations, anxieties, and sense of tedium that are all likely to crop up, we need to be working on projects that we are passionate about. We need to write the stories that only we can tell, and we need to find the motivation in our work that keeps us coming back to it time and time again. When you write those first few lines of novel length project, you’re at the beginning of a new relationship. If you’re not feeling the excitement churning in your stomach in the first few days of dating, how can you expect to get through through the long term?

Do yourself a favour, and find a project that gets you going. Be ambitious, be bold, and be brave in your creativity. If you’re not a little bit afraid that you won’t pull it off, maybe it’s not worth writing about?

I’ll write more about what tactics I use to harness that excitement in a future post.

Related posts:

1. On Not Writing and then Writing Again
2. A New Gauntlet Taken Up
3. Sit Your Ass Down

I hadn’t used this particular press too often before packing it away, and never quite nailed down the bean to water ratio. If you like coffee, then you already know that the ideal is 2 tablespoons of ground beans to 6 ounces of water, but I don’t actually know the size of my press pot. I did a bit of quick measuring and learned that the pot holds 32 oz. of water. Now how much room will I have to deduct for the space 10.3 tbsp. beans will take up? If I lower the water quantity by 4 oz., how many tbsp. of coffee to I need now? How does a tablespoon of whole beans compare to a tablespoon of ground beans?

Twenty one minutes later, I’d done all the measuring and calculating to be able to eyeball the requisite amount of beans in the grinder, and the level at which to fill up the press with water, but this isn’t really about coffee. While waiting the precise four minutes of steep time before plunging, I caught myself thinking about how I tend to approach things. I’ve never been one to wing it and hope for the best. It’s in my nature to break things down, and to be as precise as possible. This may sound ridiculous to some of you, but I get an almost perverse sense of pleasure out of mastering small tasks like these. I pay attention to every small variable, and try to come up with a consistent means of producing a product that meets the standards of quality that I know myself possible of achieving.

This explains a lot about how I approach writing, and why I’ve so often felt frustrated at advice from wildly successful writers who suggest starting with a single idea and simply exploring it as you type. I generally like to have an idea of where my books is going. I like to have scheduled writing time. I don’t go in for fuzzy feelings of a piece of work yearning to be written longhand with a quill pen in a Komodo dragon skin notebook with virgin papyrus pages. I tend to be left-brained in my approach to writing because I am left-brained in my approach to life.

I’ve come to see writing as a blend of two worlds. There is art, and there is craft. For many years, I worried that writing was all art, and that I wouldn’t be able to produce anything worthwhile. Spending time with a few different published authors has shown me that we can live in either hemisphere and still tap into the other when we need to. I can approach the task from the neurotic and detail oriented craft side, the same way other authors can light incense and meditate their way to a brilliant bit of wordsmithing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pour a second cup of coffee and get back to work.

Related posts:

1. Sit Your Ass Down
2. The Longhand Rant
3. Grand Gestures

April was a temporary month for me. I was still living out of a bag and crashing with other people, suffering from mild depression due to sunshine withdrawal, and trying to generally find my place in the world now that I’d quit my job and returned from my tropical brain reset. I had the best intentions of diving right into the writing as soon as I returned to Vancouver, but by the time the sun came out again I was already too embeded into my lack of motivation to do any meaningful work. The initial writing attempts were frustrating and slow, and I wasn’t happy with what I was writing. I had external pressures weighing me down, and I wasn’t able to produce the base quality of writing that I felt worthwhile.

After several days of guilt and shame, I decided to give myself a break. I allowed myself the month of April to work on preparing for the new apartment I’d be moving into in May, and to dealing with the temporary situation I’d found myself in. I wish I could easily look back and say “these were the obvious problems,” but I can’t. Several factors just played their parts in keeping me from sitting my ass down, or doing anything productive on the few occasions I fired up the word processor.

I’m here on my fourth day of writing in the new apartment, and the words are starting to come again. It’s not easy to take up with a month old project, but I’m scratching notes with paper and pen, trying to get the plot back on track. I’m also not sitting in the bookshelf-lined office I once hoped for, but instead writing at the kitchen table on a hard wooden chair. The important thing is that I feel I’ve found my place to work for the next several months.

A writer writes. We all know this, but sometimes a writer has to give themselves permission to not write. Not for too long, but if you feel you have legitimate reasons keeping you from work, then there’s no use in moping around feeling guilty about it. If you really felt that bad, you’d probably sit down and write something, wouldn’t you?

Related posts:

1. Novel Writing and Commitment
2. Grand Gestures
3. The Longhand Rant