I’m a fan of the blog Writer Unboxed and when I read on the site that they had a FB community page, I knew I wanted to be part of it. During these past few weeks that I’ve participated in the threads, I’ve discovered several new resources, including  The Complete Handbook Of Novel Writing: Everything You Need to Know About Creating & Selling Your Work (Writers Digest). 

The book covers the basics from crafting a story and using descriptive language to breaking through writer’s block, mastering genres and getting an agent. It also addresses a number of issues that concern fiction writers. You’ll find essays from best-selling authors, including Janet Fitch, Terry Brooks, Sue Grafton, John Updike, Richard Russon, Evan Hunter, and J. A. Jance, and a bunch interviews with others, including Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood.

I’ve only read the first three chapters, but the first essay by N. M. Kelby described me writing Julius before my “Do-Over.” Whenever someone asked me what my book was about I was unable to give them a straight answer because it included too many things that I couldn’t clearly articulate; the story was too plugged up with ideas and themes that kept clogging its flow.

The point I’m trying to make—and hence the title of this post—is that even though every idea that splashes around in your head might be great, you need to restrain yourself from including them all in your WIP. Stick to one theme, one plot and one subplot. Leave the others for your next book and the one after that.

You might think that sneaking in just another concept will make the story better, but it won’t. It will be frustrating to write, your beta readers will be questioning what story you’re trying to tell, and you’ll keep clogging the drain in that kitchen sink. However, if you insist in adding just one more element, heed these words: remember to keep a plunger and some Drano nearby.

Almost six years ago, I finished one novel—now deep in a virtual drawer— and started writing Julius for NANOWRIMO. The story was a  a respite from writing a Holocaust story, but after researching the Rosenbergs, the Blacklist, the Spanish Civil War, and anything having to do with the Left, I realized that there wasn’t anything funny about any of these subjects. However, I still wanted it to be funny so I manipulated scenes, I made characters do silly things, but I kept hitting one wall after another.

With this current rewrite, Julius is a different beast. It’s still about a magazine, but the motives and the goals of the characters have changed and there’s more conflict right up front.

Once I decided to take on this massive do-over and outlined my scenes, questioned why my characters were acting a certain way, the writing didn’t seem forced. That doesn’t mean I won’t run into some problems, but now when I see that I’m approaching a wall, I ditch the scene that’s not working instead of forcing it and the story to be something it isn’t

I’m currently working on the seventh chapter of the novel, and I ran into a roadblock. I suppose I could take a detour and write my way out of it. Although I think I can make the scene work, this time I’ve chosen a different vantage point because I’ve learned (finally!) that the reader doesn’t need the minutiae or details of Corinne’s job as fiction editor. The chapter is about a chance meeting with three veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades and that’s what it should be about. Not her job, but how these characters will play into the plot.

Like so many things in life that you can’t force—love, career and friendship—you can’t force the writing either. If a particular element isn’t working—chuck it. Don’t fall into the trap of keeping it. Spare yourself the time and pain from all the head-banging when you discover that the 20K words you wrote to make that one scene work didn’t help one bit, but made it worse.

The next time you write 300, 400, or 500 words and you see your character putzing around in scene that has no relevance to the plot, subplot or theme, stop writing. Step away from the keyboard and rethink the scene. Don’t worry about making your daily word count, instead consider the story like a game of chess and try to be ahead by five moves. Think of how that chapter will portend a major plot twist in the book. If it doesn’t then it’s just padding to make your characters look busy and we all know the senselessness of that  and not accomplishing anything.

I’m a bit off since I took Wednesday off, so this post is a Belated Scrivener Saturday.

Apart from planning, outlining and writing Julius in Scrivener, I also use it for this blog and for organizing the online content for HAND/EYE Magazine.

This is how my binder looks for the HAND/EYE Scrivener project:

I recently started to play around with the freeform corkboard. With this feature, I can place my index cards wherever I like and I can also customize the background.

To use the freeform corkboard, you can access it by clicking the icon that looks like stacked cards at the bottom of the page.

You can arrange them in any order that you like. You’ll notice that however the order is changed, the order of the folders remain the same. If you want to change the size of the cards, click on the icon to the right of the stacked card icon and from there window will open and you can fiddle with the size.

Once you’ve determined how you want to order the cards, click on the Commit Order and a window will open that provides options for how the program interprets your layout. Under Start click whichever option is appropriate (I chose “Top” and the same with under Order From (I chose “Right to Left”) You’ll see that your cards have been reordered in the binder.

If you don’t like the default cork board background or the font, you can change that to suit your sense of aesthetics. To make the change go to the file menu click on “Scrivener” scroll down to “Preferences” and select the corkboard icon.

You can customize the background by going to the “Freeform Background” select “Custom Color” or “Custom Background.” If you select Custom Color, the box of crayons will pop up or you can play with the color wheel option. For Custom Background, you can select any photo that you have on file on your Mac. Here’s how mine looks using a custom color.

Next week, we’ll  learn all about stacked corkboards.

Mira Schor. Semi Colon in Flesh, 1993.

My intention was to cover the comma in a series of posts (no pun intended) but this morning I had an adventure when Mr. Bessie, my Jack Russell terrier, decided to run off and visit one of the many B&Bs here at the beach. I had a two hour scare, but all’s well that ends well. A kind stranger found him and brought the Mr. B. to the police station. Now he’s back at home, snoozing under the bed covers.

So now that the dog is safe and sound, I figured I would discuss an equally safe form of punctuation that for some reason many people fear: the semi-colon (okay, the photo is a little scary).

According to Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage:

Semi-colons (;) are sometimes used instead of full stops, in cases where sentences are grammatically independent but the meaning is closely connected. Semi-colons are nearly as common as full stops or commas.

Some people work best in the mornings; others do better in the evenings.

It is a fine idea; let us hope that it is going to work. 

Commas in these examples wouldn’t work (and we know why, right?)

We can also use semi-colons to separate items in list, particularly when they’re complex:

You may use the sports facilities on condition that your subscription is regularly; that you arrange for all necessary cleaning to be carried out; that you undertake to make good any damage; …

But when do you avoid the semi-colon? In Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference, she provides these guidelines:

Do not use a semi-colon in the following situations.

• Between a subordinate clause and the rest of the sentence
• Unless you brush your teeth within ten of fifteen minutes after eating,brushing does almost no good
• Between an appositive and the word it refers to
• The scientists were fascinated by the species Argyroneta acquatica, a spider that lives underwater.
• To introduce a list
• Some of my favorite film stars have home pages on the Web: Uma Thurman, Billy Bob Thornton, and Halle Berry.
• Between independent clauses joined by and, but, or, nor, for, so, or yet.
• Five of the applicants had worked with spreadsheets, but only one was familiar with database management.

Hacker writes there are exceptions. The first one is if at least one of the independent clauses contains internal punctuation, you may use a semi-colon even though a clauses are joined with a coordinating conjunction. For example:

As a vehicle [the model T] was hard-working, commonplace, and heroic; it often seemed to transmit those qualities to the person who rode it. —E.B. White.

Another example of when to use a semi-colon is to emphasize a sharp contrast or a firm distinction between clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction:

We hate some persons because we do not them well; and we will not know them because we hate them, —Charles Caleb Colton.

See, nothing scary about it at all. It’s the comma that’s frightening.

Flip Dictionary
By Barbara Ann Kipfer, Ph.D.
Writer’s Digest Books, 2000
693 pages

I skipped yesterday’s post in protest of SOPA, not that I think this site would ever get censored but you never know. Writing a novel that’s critical of our policies, and whose characters admire an alleged spy and a former blacklisted screenwriter has probably put me on someone’s blacklist.

However, I am back today with an inoffensive review. Today’s offering is Flip Dictionary, by Barbara Ann Kipfer Ph.D. Printed on the cover it says, “For when you know what you want to say but can’t think of the word.”

So it’s a thesaurus and dictionary, right? Well, yes and no. Flip Dictionary offers a reversed method for finding the correct word or phrases that describe people, places and things. And it’s also a thesaurus.

Let’s say I want to name a specific piece of furniture, but I don’t know what it’s formally called. If I go and look under furniture, I’ll find that Kipfer has compiled a list of furniture terms that range from curved and tapered leg (cabriole) to wickerwork furniture (rattan). But I still can’t find the specific word for a desk with a small book case on top. So I leaf through the book until I find desk and voila! There are several entries and I find that my specific desk is called a “Secretary.” Don’t know the name of the rolling part of a rolltop desk? That’s a tambour. What about a small desk? A davenport.

I never know what any of the furniture in the dining room is called besides the chairs and table, so I went ahead and looked under “table” and found: table, sideboard or buffet: credenza. Bingo! Now I have the specific word I need to describe the scene that takes place in a dining room.

Flip Dictionary offers a lot more than just furniture terms. I opened it to a random page and found the related terms to hammers and mallets. Do you know what a hammer head is called? That’s a peen.

Or maybe you need something more colorful to describe legal jargon other than legalese, how about grimgribber? [Note: I did some more research on this and the meaning of grimgribber was originally legal jargon, but it also referred to lawyers until it fell out of common usage].

You can spend hours with Flip Dictionary looking up words and phrases. It’s loads of fun, but most importantly it will help punch up and add oomph (élan, pizazz, vigor, vim, vitality) to your writing.

It’s been several months after I got my kick in the gut critique and after some time of mulling the story over, I went ahead and opened a new Scrivener project, saved it as Julius 2012 and started to outline.

I kept the prologue, but changed the voice to the second person. I was inspired by Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers. It’s a little off-putting at first when you write it, but once you get the hang of this voice, it’s fun. At least, I think so.

Other changes to the story include ditching a good chunk of the first 70 pages, but I also salvaged a few scenes here and there. I cut a lot of the slapstick and now it’s more serious in tone. The big change is that Chapter 10 is now the first chapter and it’s written in the third person.

I hesitated writing in the third person because of my past experience of switching voices too often, but now that I know how to handle the mechanics of the various viewpoints, I like getting in the head of these characters to see what motivates them and how they think.

I’ve changed  a lot personality traits. Jake’s character is no longer impulsive or happy-go-lucky as he was before. He’s serious about his work and he has his goals for both the magazine and with Corinne.

As for Corinne, I’ve made her less sarcastic and more ingenuous. The standout feature with Corinne is that she’s at a crossroads and needs to find what will make her happy, especially with a person like Jake who wants to be in control and the center of attention.

The two other male characters seem to share the similar traits as Jake so that leads to think that Corinne attracts a certain type of man into her life.

I’m still stumbling about as I create the outline, but I’m seeing the power of Scrivener with all it’s handy features that help the process of outlining and writing that first draft. And I think it’s fair to say that with the exception of a handful of scenes that I pulled out from previous version, this is a first draft.

Thanks to the outlining, and I outline in chunks, about 12 chapters at a time, I suspect  because of the speed the writing that I might be done with this first draft by the end of next month. I was planning to rejoin the Novels-list at IWW, but I’ll wait until the manuscript is complete. Then it’s back to critiquing, and hopefully, I won’t be eviscerated with this version. In the meantime, I’ve offered it to two trusty readers so that they can get a feel for this new version.

So that’s where things stand with Julius and my not-so-merry Marxists.

As I’ve noted in a number of posts, I am a fanatic about research.  Before I had Scrivener, I had many files scattered like land mines in my Julius file.

This post deals less with the techy side of the program, but how I organize my research so that it is at my fingertips all the time. This way I don’t have to be flipping back and forth through my files, Evernote, or my bookmarked pages on my browser.

As you can see–click on the image, it will open to another window and it will be larger–I like to play around with my icons. I tint the folders and I change the look of the icons. In a previous post, I showed how to change the icons, but I’ll save you the trouble to find that post and show you again:

To change the icon, point your curser on a folder and right-click; go to Change Icon. From the list choose whichever icon suits your need.

I’ve chosen numerous icons to distinguish each folder to avoid confusion. The conversation bubble folder has my elevator pitch; the clapper board holds my unused scenes. The picture icon folder has all the details of my characters; and the map folder has all the locales where Julius takes place.

I’ve added three more folders and that’s from the research I’ve culled from the internet and other places. I selected the book icons for Marx and Russell Kirk. For any news articles about the financial crisis I selected the bar graph.

I also have a number of To Do tasks in the research folder and you can see I’ve selected the check mark icon. This file includes the templates for the synopsis in various formats, i.e., four page summary, two page, one paragraph, and so on, as well character synopsis.

The remaining two folders are from Scrivener’s template, which provides template sheets for a character and setting sketch; the sample output includes samples of how a manuscript is formatted for a novel, paperback, and e-book.

Scrivener allows you to import web pages, text files, photos and even videos within the binder. I’ve imported photographs of how my characters look like and numerous photos of where certain scenes take place. An important thing to note is that Scrivener makes a copy of the file. Your original file is still in its folder that you saved within your files and the copy or photo remains untouched.

To import from the Internet, select Research. From the File Menu, select Web Page.  In the address box, type in the URL. In the Title box, type the subject of your research. Click okay.

The imported page appears in the research folder with a Web icon. Click on it to view it in the editor pane. If the page is updated, you won’t see any changes, but the hyperlinks work.

Let’s say I want to import a photo from my Macbook Pro’s Finder files. Once again, go to File Menu, select Import, but this time choose Files. A window will drop down showing your finder’s files, select any file you want and then hit Import.

In this case, I selected a photo and as you can see in the editor pane that I’ve typed notes about this specific photograph and its part in the story.

On the corkboard it looks like this along with the index cards that summarize the setting sketch:

For articles that come from the web, I prefer to turn them into PDFs instead of having the web pages. It’s easier to manipulate, especially if articles from newspapers run over to more than one page. When I’m referring to these articles, I use Scrivener’s nifty split screen feature, but I’ll leave that for next week’s lesson.

So that’s how I organize my research using Scrivener. Feel free to share how you organize your own research.

Have you ever had someone comment that you have a comma splice and then not point it out? And because you don’t know what it is, you can’t fix it. It’s simple to remember:  a comma splice is the use of a comma to join two independent clauses. For example, Stevenson’s romances are entertaining, they are full of exciting adventures. That is a comma splice.

According Strunk and White in The Elements of Style:

Do not join independent clauses by a comma.

If a two or more clauses, grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semi-colon.

Therefore, the previous sentence should be: Stevenson’s romances are entertaining; they are full of exciting adventures. Or simply add a period and turn the sentence into two separate ones, but if you omit any punctuation you have a run-on sentence.

When do you insert a comma? Add a conjunction. Stevenson’s romances are entertaining, for they are full of exciting adventures.

To correct a comma splice, you can do the following (example from Wikipedia):

Simply removing the comma does not correct the error, but results in a run-on sentence. There are several ways to correct a comma splice:

• Change the comma to a semicolon, colon, or dash:
• It is nearly half past five; we cannot reach town before dark.
• We cannot reach town before dark: it is nearly half past five.
• It is nearly half past five—we cannot reach town before dark.
• Write the two clauses as two separate sentences:
• It is nearly half past five. We cannot reach town before dark.
• Insert a coordinating conjunction following the comma:
• It is nearly half past five, and we cannot reach town before dark.
• It is nearly half past five, so we cannot reach town before dark.
• Make one clause dependent on the other:
• Because it is nearly half past five, we cannot reach town before dark.
• It is nearly half past five, which means we cannot reach town before dark.
• Use a semicolon plus a conjunctive adverb:
• It is nearly half past five; hence, we cannot reach town before dark.

In the colon (:) example above, the two clauses must be transposed. A colon often introduces a reason or explanation: the colon becomes a substitute for “because.” The clause giving the reason (“it is nearly half past five”) must follow the clause that needs explaining (“We cannot reach town before dark”).

When in doubt about using a semicolon, dash, or colon, your best bet is to make the incorrect sentence into two complete sentences.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print
By Renni Browne and Dave King
Harper Paperbacks
288 pages
List Price: $13.99; Amazon Price: $9.00

On numerous occasions at the Internet Writing Workshop’s writing list there have been threads about the best books for editing. One writer always writes about his three go to reference books: The Chicago Manual of Style, The Synonym Finder, and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.

It should not come as a surprise when I admit that I own all three. I acquired The Synonym Finder and its been incredible. Concerning Self-Editing, it’s a marvelous book and it will help shape your fiction.

Self-Editing is divided into 12 chapters ranging from “Show and Tell” to “Voice” Each chapter has exercises and the writers have included an appendix with answers to these exercises as well as a reading list of other books on writing craft.

I’ve used this book, but not as often as I should. Now that I am reworking my novel, I have the perfect opportunity revisit these chapters. Although I’m pretty good with dialogue, I still need some points to make it crisper, to convey emotion through the characters words, and not describe how they are feeling. In other words, if you’ve properly set the scene that a character is astonished and says “You can’t be serious,” you can easily drop the “she said in astonishment.” For Browne and King adding this tag is lazy writing and point out:

When your dialogue is well written, describing your characters’ emotions to your readers is just as patronizing as a playwright running onto the stage and yelling at the audience. And when you explain dialogue that needs no explanation, you are writing down to your readers, a sure-fire way to turning them off. The theatergoer might or might not walk out of a theater when the playwright runs on stage; the reader who feels patronized will almost certainly close the book.

Chapter 11 focuses on how to make your writing more sophisticated by using some stylistic tricks. Browne and King give the “as and ing” construction example:

Pulling off her gloves, she turned to face him.

or

As she pulled off her gloves, she turned to face him.

Although both phrases are grammatically correct and express the action clearly and ambiguously.  They write:

Both of these constructions take a bit of action and tuck it away into a dependent clause. This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant. And so if you use these constructions often, you weaken your writing.

Oh dear…

It’s advice like this that makes Self-Editing one of the better books on the market and a valuable one to revisit often (note to self: practice what you preach).

A recent discussion on the Internet Writing Workshop surfaced about writing routines and an IWW member passed along the following link, “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day“  by Rachel Aaron.

Aaron is a science-fiction and fantasy writer. She admits to a geeky side and wanted to figure how she could increase her daily word count. She came up with a three-pronged method that involved time, enthusiasm and knowledge. For time, she kept track of the time she wrote without distractions and evaluated how she could use her time more effectively to write. Enthusiasm consisted of the material she was excited to write about. Scenes that were boring to her (and ultimately to readers) had a tendency to slow her down. But the one that intrigued me the most was knowledge and that essentially was to know her material so well that she could write a good chunk of it in a long writing session. To prepare for this, she gave herself five minutes and started writing notes to herself of what she wanted to accomplish in a particular chapter. In essence, it’s a long outlining method instead of a couple of bullet points or sentences. After those five minutes, she had  three or four pages that gave her a broad view of her chapter. During her writing sessions, she filled in the sections that needed more description and transitions, but the core of the scene was already worked out when she sat down to write it all out. Using this process enabled her to meet her deadlines early and to be ahead of her writing schedule.

Since taking on this new rewrite for Julius, I’ve been trying to write when I know I won’t get interrupted and that appears to be either very early in the morning–about 5:00 am or  in the evenings around 7:00 pm when dogs have had their last walk and have settled down. I’ve been writing a consistent 1500 words per day since the start of the new year. I’ve been relying more and more on outlining scenes/chapters and although I was pretty much converted that outlining was the best approach, now I’m 100 percent certain that I will always outline any story I want to tell. Now I also see the value of having a more detailed one instead of generalizations or a few bullet points. I don’t need to write 10,000 words a day, but it would be nice to be able to sit down for four hours and get in a good 2500 or 3000 words daily and to see the story move along. I’ll try Aron’s method and see how it works.

What’s your writing routine and how many words per day do you try to write?