Category: | Writing

Writing Every Day (5 Things I’ve Learned)

by April on December 12, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

If you’ve been a writer for any length of time you’ve probably heard people argue about writing every day. Stephen King is a pretty famous proponent of the practice, insisting that he writes 1,000 words a day, no exceptions.

I don’t. So I’ve always cringed at that little bit of trivia. Then, a couple of months ago, I realized I write ALMOST writing every day in my journal without even trying. Writing in my journal isn’t work for me. It’s how I organize my thoughts and prepare for the day. So I decided to make it official and commit to doing it every day, just to see what happened.

Then I read about the Runner’s World run streak challenge. The idea is to run at least a mile every day between Thanksgiving and January 1st (#rwrunstreak). It seemed like a great way to keep in shape during the holiday season, a time that I traditionally get super lazy. So I’ve been doing it. Today is day 21. Three weeks! It feels good.

As I have worked to do these things every day, I’ve been fascinated to see how my relationship to them has changed. Here’s what I’ve learned about doing it (whatever it is) every day:

1. You’re going to have to say it out loud

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that you have to tell the people in your life what you’re doing. Because there will be a day (probably many days) when you need help carving out a little time and it’s going to be really hard to do that without a little help from the people in your life.

The scariest part about telling everyone that you’re trying to do something every day is that they might *gasp* be supportive. Even if it’s just a simple “how’d it go today?” people will ask. If you’re inclined to keep your work secret, this might be an uncomfortable situation. It was for me. But the simple act of saying I needed twenty minutes to write in my journal (even though it made my throat tighten up) turned out to be the difference between getting it done and not.

2. Your mood will no longer be a factor

When you commit to doing something every day you have to get over any excuses about how you’re feeling when it’s time to get the job done. Some days you will have a sore throat. Some days you will be tired. Some days you will feel sad, or hungover, or (fill in the blank).

But something really cool happens as you push through those excuses. They start to have less power. On my fourth day of running every day I woke up with a sore throat. I almost didn’t do my mile that day. But instead of letting a mild sore throat derail me, I sucked it up and pushed through. And I actually felt better for it.

3. You will discover that you have preferences

I like to write first thing in the morning and I like my Uni-Ball Ultra Micro pen.

It’s nice if I can get the running out of the way then too, but not as critical. I can always hit the treadmill while dinner is cooking if I have to.

As a runner, I’ve discovered I can’t stand thick socks. I like thin little ankle sock. I just do.

When you do something every day you figure out, real quick like, what little things help or hinder and because you’re committed to keeping going, you add or subtract those things from your routine without hesitation.

4. You will get better at it, whatever it is

There’s just no way around this one. If you do something every day, you will get better at it, but it’s also important to keep in mind that your gains might not be linear. That is to say, you will have good days and bad days.

For instance, on my thirteenth day of running a mile every day, I ran my fastest mile ever. The next day, I ran one of my slowest. I was tired from my stellar performance the day before. So tired that I was tempted to quit, telling myself that I’d earned a break, but I slogged it out. On the whole, I am getting faster, but I still have days when I run at a slow pace and that’s okay, because I know I have tomorrow to try again.

Also keep in mind that this little bit of truth holds true for our bad habits too. If you flop down on the couch after work every day, ignoring that little voice that tells you how you could be writing or running or whatever, eventually you will get better at ignoring that little voice. Something to keep in mind.

5. It helps to have an end date

Committing to do something every day is easier if it’s for a specific period of time. I’ve tried to run every day before, but without an end date, the task felt somehow overwhelming and I never lasted more than a few days. I mean, forever can be daunting.

It’s really helpful, psychologically, to know that come January 2, I will have met my #rwrunstreak goal and can stop if I want to. I’m not sure if I will. Maybe I’ll keep going. Or maybe I’ll take a one day break and then try to go another month. I haven’t decided yet.

As for writing, I just really like starting my day with my journal. And because I’ve been doing it almost every day for so many years, taking the leap to actually writing every day isn’t daunting at all. That one I will keep up.

Do you have something you do every day? Or is there something you might try to do every day for a little while? I would love to hear what other people have found with this sort of practice.

Please Don’t Send Your NaNoWriMo Manuscript to Agents

by April on December 5, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

Well, it’s officially December, and for a lot of writers out there that means NaNoWriMo is over. Did you do it? Did you hit your goal? If you did (and, hell, even for those who gave it their best shot) I’m so effing proud of you. You did it! You should do something to celebrate: go out for drinks, get a massage, buy yourself a tub of cookie dough ice cream and go to town. The one thing you should not do, under any circumstances, is send your NaNoWriMo manuscript to agents.

Seriously.

I’m kind of surprised this even needs saying, but apparently there is a whole contingent of writers out there who slap out 50,000 words and start querying agents. WTF?

First of all, 50,000 isn’t even long enough to be considered a proper novel. And never mind that, you’re sending a first draft to an agent? I don’t even let my husband read my first drafts. First drafts are supposed to be shitty. And they are. Count on it.

Okay, okay, I’m sure you’re the exception. I’m sure that you are so brilliant that an agent will totally overlook the typos and inconsistencies in your writing. I’m sure they will be so enamored of your pages and pages of dialogue that they won’t be able to sleep and will sit by the phone until it’s 8am and they can reasonably expect you to be awake so that they can call you and beg you to be their client.

I’m also sure you’re insane.

Please, please don’t send your NaNoWriMo manuscript to agents. It’s not only embarrassing for you, it builds a bad reputation for every serious writer who used the NaNoWriMo challenge to kick off (or make progress on) a serious writing project.

Here’s what to do instead:

Keep writing (until you get to about 80,000, depending on what you’re writing – check out this word count guide to see what the standards are in your chosen genre.).
Then stick it in a drawer for about three months and do something else.
Come back and read it through.
Edit. A lot.
Have some trusted friends read it.
Edit some more.
Stick it in a drawer for another three months.
Read it again.
Edit again.
Repeat steps 5-9 as necessary
Hire a professional editor to do a final pass.

Then, and only then, start sending out your query letter.

Or don’t do all that. There’s no law that dictates what you have to do with your 50,000 words. You could serialize them on your blog, or self publish, or make yourself a suit by stapling the pages together then use the remaining pages to make a paper mache hat to match. It’s your art.

But if you want to go the traditional route of finding an agent and a subsequent publisher, you still have a lot to do.

Writing is work. To pretend it isn’t is insulting to us all.

Tidying Up Those Double Spaces in Your Manuscript

by April on November 28, 2018 in Scrivener, The Writing Life, Writing

I was doing some freelance work a while back, working with a small marketing team, and I was lamenting the prevalence of double spaces after periods. It’s a pet peeve of mine. The woman I was working with, who was about fifteen years younger than me, voiced her theory that people tend to hit the space bar twice because that’s how texting works (for the old fogies who don’t know, if you hit the space bar twice while you’re texting, you automatically get a period – very handy).

I paused for a moment and said something that made me sound really old, something like “that’s why someone from YOUR generation might hit the space bar twice, but in MY DAY, when we learned to type on typewriters, we were taught to hit the space bar twice after a period to give a little extra space before beginning a new sentence.” Nothing says “over 40” like those double spaces.

To be fair, because I’m really not THAT old, I fall somewhere in between. I actually learned to type on a word processor. A Brother (anyone remember those?). And by then you didn’t have to hit space twice because the computer automatically put 1.5 spaces after a period.

But whatever the reason, there is a whole contingency of people who put two spaces after every period. So I’d like to state for the record: you don’t have to do that. ALL modern fonts put 1.5 spaces after a period, so that you get that elegant bit of extra space before the next sentence starts.

Cleaning Up in Word

Most word processing programs have a find-and-replace function, so if you have a manuscript full of double spaces, all you have to do is use this function to clean up your document. In Word, for instance, go to Edit -> Find -> Replace. In the “find” field enter two spaces. In the “replace” field enter one. It will look a little strange, since you don’t actually see anything in either field, but hit “Replace All” and the program will automatically tidy everything up for you.

If you’re one of those people who kind of goes crazy with the space bar every now and then, hitting it two or three or even four times, you might have to repeat the above process a few times, replacing three or four spaces with one.

Tidying Up in Scrivener

If you have Scrivener, it’s even easier to clean up your manuscript. Just go to Edit -> Text Tidying -> Replace Multiple Spaces With Single Spaces.

You’ll also see options there to remove extra lines or page breaks. These are new since the 3.0 upgrade. Pretty cool. Especially when you get to the point that you’re doing a final polish for publication. Yeah Scrivener!

And down with unnecessary spaces!

A Thanksgiving Poem

by April on November 21, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

I will admit, it was the title of this poem that initially caught my eye, but it’s just beautiful. I hope you like it. Happy Thanksgiving.

April

returns like an expatriate, a defector
from the forest. Her feet are wrapped
in old rose petals, her eyes
are the color of wet sand under moss.

She guides a wounded caravan
of spiders and dilapidated memories.
Combing her dripping hair with elegant
fingers, she announces the forsythia and pain.

She waits in the summerhouse
for summer while the moon comes in empty,
a ship bearing her transparent name.

~ Richard Shelton
from The Tattooed Desert

Setting Goals for a Writing Career

by April on November 7, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

Last week I was at a Halloween party where a tarot card reader was telling fortunes. I love fortune tellers. I love to geek out over their predictions and try to suss out how much is coming from some cosmic source and how much they’re just reading me. So of course I was the first one to sit down.

She told me to shuffle the cards while thinking of my question and the one that came to mind was: how do I build my writing career? Well, she wasn’t the greatest card reader. She asked me to tell her my question, so I did, and the rest kind of felt like a therapy session. But there was one thing she said that stuck with me. She told me that if I didn’t know what my goals were, I would never reach them.

Um, duh. This is not rocket science. This is not even fortune telling. This is just plain common sense. But I had to admit, I don’t have any goals in place right now.

The thing is, I’m usually ALL ABOUT planning. I mean, if you follow along at all you’ve seen my bullet journal posts. You know I’m a total nerd for making plans and executing. But here’s what I realized: for the longest time my goal was simply to finish my novel and get it out into the world.

Well, it’s not out in the world yet, but it has been bought by a real honest to goodness publisher and has a publishing date set for March of 2020. Done and done. And while I wait for things to progress on that front, I’ve been working on another story. I just finished a draft of that one last week. It’s a mess, but its a story. So I’ve just been writing and writing without any real sense of what my goal is.

The Money

I know I want to make a living with my writing. Good news for me is that I don’t have to make six figures to make this happen. My husband makes a good living, so I really only need to bring in half of our household expenses. That’s a goal.

But there are just so many unknowns when it comes to writing and income. A person could write a dozen books in obscurity and then have a breakout hit that makes bank. They might get a book optioned by Hollywood and make some money that way. They might hit it out of the park on their first go, getting a six-figure advance on their debut, and then not be able to sell their next book because they didn’t sell out their advance.

There are just so many unknowns around the money side of a writing career that it’s hard to hitch my goals (and my eventual joy or depression) on whether I hit some arbitrary financial goal. It’s not about the money. (That said, if you’re curious, this website does an interesting breakdown of what some writers are making.)

So I’m inclined to set other goals, centered around inputs I can control, and hope the money comes sooner rather than later.

Books Per Year

When I first met with my agent he asked if I thought I could put out a book every year. I’ll admit I flinched. He adjusted: how about a book every two years? Well, this idea is actually really appealing to me. At that rate, the odds of making money go up. Not only is a writer more likely to get to that one book that is a big hit, but with each book you gather a few more readers who like your books and might be inclined to buy them when they hit the shelves. They might go back and buy your previous books.

Some writers write four books a year to reap the benefits of accumulated work, but there’s just no way I can do that. Maybe if I had started writing before I was a mom, before I started spending five hours a day driving these little people to various practices and appointments, not to mention a husband that I actually like spending time with. Oh, and my two blogs. There’s no way.

But a book every two years? That I feel like I could plan for.

Three-Month Chunks

I started thinking about how, as I pushed to wrap up the draft of my second story, I was writing about 2,000 words a day without sacrificing too much in terms of life balance. At that rate I could put out a rough (and I do mean rough) draft in three months.

But then, I’m supposed to get notes from my editor on my first novel this week. Contractually I have four months to make the edits, but I’m hoping I can do them in three.

Then, I will switch to outlining novel 3. Yep, I already have ideas in the works, I just need some focused time to get it all worked out. I have never made outlining my main writing activity. I didn’t outline novel 1 at all (which I’m pretty sure is why it took my nine years to write it). Novel 2 I outlined while working on novel 1 and that baby was SO much easier to write. Turns out I’m a planner (big surprise, right?)

Anyway, I’ll spend three months outlining novel 3, then jump back to do another draft on novel 2, then work on a first draft of novel 3. I sketched it out on some graph paper. Here’s what it looks like:

The question is whether I can actually keep up this schedule. Because if I could, I would be sending a manuscript to my agent in January of 2020 AND January of 2021. I haven’t accounted for time editing in response to my agent’s feedback. Because I don’t know how long it will take to get feedback. There are frankly just too many unknowns. But if I could…

Writer Goals

All of this is to say that it’s hard to know how to set goals as a writer. There are so many external variables, so many things we can’t control.

How do you set goals? Do you go with dollar amounts? Do you maybe go for awards or accolades of that sort? Number of copies sold? I’m so new at this, would love to hear your thoughts.

Awesome Cover Ideas From My Family

by April on October 31, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

In honor of Halloween, I thought I’d keep things light today and share some of the awesome cover ideas my family came up with over dinner last week:

You can see in the top ones some of the elements of my story (including ostriches and a woman with a cowboy hat), but I think my favorites are the ones along the bottom. My seven-year-old boy gave me cover ideas along with his thoughts on how to improve the story: it really SHOULD have more underwater drones and ninja stars.

Even though I probably won’t forward these to my publisher, I was totally feeling the love. To see this book slowly taking shape is such a great adventure.

Now go do some trick-or-treating. I’ll catch you next week.

Nineteen Nerd Words for Dictionary Day

by April on October 17, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

Okay, so technically Dictionary Day was yesterday, but I’m celebrating all the same.
HAPPY DICTIONARY DAY!
Here are nineteen nerd words for all my word nerds out there.

Deipnosophist ~ an adept conversationalist at the dinner table. As in: He brought Rachel, the deipnosophist, in the hopes that she would distract his mother.

Struthious ~ Of or relating to ostriches. As in: I’m writing about struthious birds in the Mojave.

Celerity – swiftness of movement. As in: It moved with the distinct celerity of its kind.

Grawlix ~ A string of typographical symbols used to represent an obscenity. As in: She told him to go #@$%*! himself.

Callipygian ~ having well-shaped buttocks. The beach-bound collection of young, bronze, and callipygian individuals was enough to make one feel lightheaded.

Insensate ~ lacking physical sensation. As in: A few moments barefoot left the cuffs of her pajamas stiff and her diminutive toes insensate.

Truculent ~ eager or quick to argue or fight. As in: The truculent little beast would hide in the strangest of places, just waiting to attack.

Lutaceous ~ pertaining to or made of mud. As in: The only color in the lutaceous landscape lay in puddles of water that reflected the brilliant blue sky above.

Gnathic ~ having to do with the jaws. As in: Everything we know about that particular branch of the genus “homo” was deduced from a single gnathic fossil.

Quomodocunquize ~ To make money in any way possible. As in: His baby needed food, so he set out to quomodocunquize.

Atavistic ~ relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral. As in: They backed away from the atavistic scene, hoping they might remain unseen.

Basorexia ~ an overwhelming urge to kiss. As in: For months they lived in a constant state of basorexia.

Heterochiral ~ reversed (as a mirror image), but otherwise identical. As in: Her heterochiral self always inspired thoughts of parallel realities.

Amphoric ~ characteristic of a sound made by blowing across the mouth of a bottle. As in: She helped him up, taking note of his amphoric breathing.

Rime ~ frost formed on cold objects. As in: The rime on the window pane obscured the source of the rosy light.

Pareidolia ~ the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist. As in: Her shock stemmed from the most human of experiences, a common case of pareidolia.

Misogamy ~ the hatred of marriage. As in: The open bar helped to quell his misogamy.

Lambent ~ running or moving lightly over a surface. As in: Lambent flames were all that remained of the night’s inferno.

Pooter ~ A suction bottle for collecting insects and other small invertebrates. As in: I caught a wicked-cool beetle in my pooter.

Nine Years Blogging

by April on October 10, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

This week marks my blog’s ninth birthday!

Happy birthday little blog.

What a year it’s been. I finished my manuscript (after nine long years of work) in December of last year. I found myself a super awesome agent in January. In June he called to tell me that he sold the book. In July I got to attend the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, still high on the news that my book would be published. And with any luck, I’ll be wrapping up a second draft of my second book by the end of this month. Whew.

It seems like a good time to thank you all for being with me on this journey. I have really come to love blogging, and have made some friends I hold in high regard despite the fact that I’ve never actually met them IRL. You know who you are. Because you rock.

What’s Next?

There are a few things on the horizon.

For starters, the book. My publisher wants it to be a spring book, and they already had their 2019 books lined up, so it won’t be coming out until spring of 2020, which feels like a LONG way off, but it will come. And I will be sure to tell you all about this crazy world of publishing as things progress.

Second, I’m going to be revamping the blog. The new design won’t go live until I have a book cover design (and I really don’t know when that will be), but it’s in the works. Stay tuned.

Third, if you’ve been reading along for a while, you know I’ve been blogging less than I used to. A couple years ago I was posting three times a week, but I cut way back because I needed to focus on finishing my novel. Well, now that the writing is on track, we’re gunna party like it’s 2016. Starting in 2019, I will, once again, be posting three times a week: Mondays I’ll share some fun California trivia I’ve picked up while researching stories, Wednesdays will be my usual thoughts on writing, and Fridays will be…

All Scrivener, all the time. I was looking at my analytics recently and I noticed that my scrivener posts get FAR more traffic than anything else I blog about. Just for fun, I made a list of Scrivener tips I could blog about and it’s 60 items long! So starting in 2019, I’ll be posting one Scrivener tip a week. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter so you don’t miss any of them! (And if you’re not a Scrivener user yet, click here and you can get 10% off if you use my name – just enter APRILDAVILA as your discount code when you check out).

Thank you!

I can’t say enough how grateful I am for the readers who visit my blog, those who leave comments, and those who hang out with me on Twitter. It’s been a pretty amazing journey so far… and I’m already thinking about some sort of epic giveaway I could do next year to celebrate year 10. ARC giveaway, maybe? IndieBound gift certificate? An all expenses paid trip to New York? Not unless my money tree starts flowering – I’m beginning to think that old gypsy lady lied.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

The Lesson of the Super Suit Scene

by April on October 3, 2018 in The Writing Life, Writing

I’ve been thinking a lot about this scene from the movie The Incredibles (the first one). In case you haven’t seen it, it comes near the end of the movie, when the big bad is attacking the city. It’s the Super Suit Scene.

I Am The Greatest Good…

The movie cuts away from our main characters (Mr. Incredible and his family) and jumps to Frozone, the sidekick. As you can see, in the clip, it would have been really easy to simply show the man getting ready for a night with his wife, when – bam – a robot comes stomping down the street. Done. Six seconds. And scene.

But no. The scene goes on for another forty seconds in what is arguably one of the best moments of the movie. In that forty seconds, without EVER seeing the wife that he’s arguing with, we get to know this character and what his life is like:

He lives in stylish condo.
He is a dude who cares about his appearance.
He is married to a woman who keeps his shit together for him.
They have the kind of relationship where they can just yell at each other from the other room (also – she is probably in the kitchen cooking, which is why she doesn’t come to argue in person – which leads one to believe that he’s not much for helping out in the kitchen).
They host dinner parties, but have busy lives that make it the kind of thing you have to plan far in advance.
He is prioritizing being a super hero.
She knows his priorities and isn’t happy about it.
They have had this argument before.

It’s an awesome scene, because all of those things we learn about him are things we can relate to. Who hasn’t had an argument with their spouse from the other room? Who hasn’t had priorities that our spouse didn’t understand? Who hasn’t found themselves rushing around to find their shoes/keys/super suit?

And they could have totally just cut it after those first six seconds. Those were enough to explain his presence in the next scene, but instead they ran with it, and it’s one of the best scenes in the movie.

Giving Our Sidekicks The Time

It has me thinking about my own minor characters. What scenes have I cut after the first six seconds (so to speak)? Would those scenes be better if I let them run a little? What could I learn about the character if I did? Would those things make them more relatable? Would it serve the story as a whole?

I don’t know that I will ever write anything as brilliant as the Super Suit scene, but it’s good to have goals.

Tracking Writing Goals in Your Bullet Journal

by April on September 26, 2018 in Scrivener, The Writing Life, Writing

A while back I blogged about using my Bullet Journal (what the kids are calling BuJos) to get my writing life organized. Well I’m about ten months in, and I love it more and more. And then, a few weeks ago, I discovered another way it can help me with my writing: color coding my progress.

A Little Backstory

I got WAY off course with my writing at the end of the summer. The kids were off school, none of our usual routines were in place, and even so I was maintaining pretty well until I got an ovarian cyst that completely knocked me for a loop. Who knew that shit could hurt so much? I guess lots of women, actually, but I certainly didn’t. Anyway, I was on a bunch of pain meds and not writing AT ALL.

And just like exercise, writing is really hard to get back into if you stop for any significant period of time. Even once I was feeling better, and the kids were back in school, I was having a lot of trouble getting back on track with my draft.

Where I Want To Be

My current writing goal is to have a completed draft of 120,000 words by the end of October. I had about 84,000 words. Writing six days a week, I figured out I’d have to write about 1,100 words a day to hit my goal. That’s a lot for me, but with some focus I can do it. (BTW, if you’re using Scrivener, it will calculate that for you.)

Now, I’m going to geek out for a sec, but I’m hoping that it might help other, like-minded nerds, if they’re stuck with their writing.

The project has six chapters, so I’m roughly shooting for 20,000 words a chapter. I went through and calculated how many words I needed to write for each chapter:

Chapter 1: I have 17,000 words, so I need another 3,000
Chapter 2: need another 6,000 words
Chapter 3: need another 10,000 words
Chapter 4: need another 2,000 words
Chapter 5: need another 10,000 words
Chapter 6: need another 16,000 words

Then, I divided the words needed by 1,100 to find out how many writing days I will be spending on each chapter:

Chapter 1: about 3 days
Chapter 2: about 5.5 days
Chapter 3: about 9 days
Chapter 4: about 2 days
Chapter 5: about 9 days
Chapter 6: about 14 days (ug – the hardest chapter – I’m so dreading these 14 days)

Bringing It Back To The BuJo

Every day, when I’m done with my writing, I color in a square for every 100 words I wrote. You can see at the top of this post what September looks like so far. I give myself Sundays off (or use them to catch up). You can see some days I was totally rocking it, writing as much as 2,000 words, and then there was that one day I only got 400 words on the page.

I find it a really motivating tool. Looking ahead at October, I blocked out the work I need to do to hit my goal. Here’s what October looks like:

One day wrapping up chapter 3, two days on chapter 4, a week and a half on chapter 5 and the rest of the month on the dreaded chapter 6.

And okay, yes, when I started with the BuJo I said I would “never” be the kind of person to “carry around a case of different colored markers with which to decorate a glorified day planner,” but I find it really motivating to color in a square for each hundred words I write. It’s SO satisfying. And I don’t know why, but I love looking at it and seeing all those colorful squares. It’s a really quick snapshot of work actually getting done.

What’s more, I know if I’m suffering on a section, it won’t last forever. When I was hating chapter two, I just looked at my calendar and knew I only had to spend another three days on it and then I would have my word count and I would move on.

And if that wasn’t enough reason to love the BuJo, having this little map also helps alleviate any fears that I’m spending too much time in one chapter. I’m writing to 20,000 words on each chapter and then moving on. I will certainly come back. The chapters won’t be 20,000 words when I’m done with the final draft, but it’s a good starting point, and it prevents me from writing a 40,000-word chapter 1, and avoiding chapter 6 all together because I’ve run out of time (which I would totally do to myself because I don’t want to write chapter 6).

Do you have any tricks you use to keep yourself motivated and or organized? Do you maybe have a digital version of this that you find useful? Please share. We’re all learning here.

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