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What I Learned about Writing this Week…from Julia Cameron

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, May 26, 2010

When I sat down to write this week’s WILAWriTWe, I planned to tell you what I’ve learned this week through not writing. The thesis of my article was going to be that sometimes, we actually need to cease creative production and, instead, go down to the pool and drink. Said thesis was going to tie in neatly with last week’s article, and it was going to make me happy, and it was going to make you happy, and there would be sparklies and rainbows and sunshine and unicorns with the magical power of a three-wolf T-shirt, yay!

In my quest for this overabundant literary joy, I took to hand a certain book, knowing that it contained a few quotes to support my ideas. I plucked this book from my shelf, plopped down on the couch, started flipping pages…

…and rewrote my entire article in my head in the space of about twenty seconds.

The book in question, my dear inklings, is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which I read two years ago. If you never buy but one thing from Amazon by way of a link I give you, that one thing and that one link should be this one.

The Old Way

Gentle Readers, I could write a twelve-tome series on how The Artist’s Way has affected me — spiritually, emotionally, physically. Granted, had I never read the book, I wouldn’t be the same person now that I was two years ago; constant change, however minute, is human nature. However, because of this book, the changes wrought in my nature over the last two years have run deeper and will last longer than those which simple day-to-day living would otherwise have catalyzed within me.

Before I read and worked through The Artist’s Way (and yes, there was WORK involved — you knew that was coming, didn’t you? *grin*), I held the following beliefs:

  • Writing and painting are a nice hobby.
  • I don’t have the right to focus my energies on such things.
  • When I spend time and energy on writing and painting, I am letting other people down.
  • When I spend time and energy on writing and painting, I am being selfish.
  • My creative accomplishments have no value in the real world.
  • My creative passions are traps that hinder me from taking hold of real life.
  • My creative passions are a spiritual danger to myself and to others.
  • I should feel guilty for following my creative passions.
  • God wants me to give up my creativity in order to free my time and energy for work.

As I type out this list of horrors, my heart cringes. Tears come to my eyes. I feel such overwhelming compassion for the girl who believed those things and acted upon them. She put on a great face, but she was not a happy person. If contentment is something that fills up the heart, her heart was empty.

She felt like a cornered animal, snarling and ready to issue death threats to relationships. She harbored an inner fury, and resentment so massive she couldn’t even see it. Her creative self did not trust her, because she sold it out over and over again.

She leeched blood from her very soul, and so her soul went to ground. The result was apathy, resignation, and monstrous self-deception about who she really was.

I’m not making this stuff up. What I’m sharing with you, I am taking straight from the notes I wrote to myself two years ago as The Artist’s Way helped me peel back the layers of misery in which I had clothed myself almost my entire life.

The New Way

I won’t try to sugar-coat it: The Artist’s Way is hard work, and it hurts. Ms. Cameron’s book is full of eye-opening thoughts, well-crafted comforts, and affirming revelations. But each revelation comes with its own practical, hands-on exercise for putting the new to the test and incorporating it not only into your thought pattern but your daily life pattern as well.

My friends, we are talking about exorcising demons and excising malignancies — neither of which can happen without getting our hands dirty and straining — yea, even tearing — our muscles. We must look the gritty, naked truth in the eye and say, “I see you, and though I am afraid, I will not look away.”

I am a work-in-progress. My creative self is a work-in-progress. I have not yet reached a goal, an apex, a fulfillment. My path is still rocky.

I cannot tell you that the study and implementation of Ms. Cameron’s work has solved all of my creative problems, because it hasn’t. I still find myself slipping back into old thought patterns — which is why, when I picked up the book to page casually through it, I realized that it’s time for me to revisit my struggle by means of what I am writing at this very moment.

You’re reading my catharsis. You’re reading my reminder to myself of all the beauty and the truth I have discovered and the new beliefs I am still learning to hold. Here I give you some of them, and I hope they are as great an encouragement to you as they are to me:

  • I am by nature a creative being.
  • I have both the right and the sacred duty to follow my creative passions.
  • I can be responsible and practical and an artist all at the same time.
  • I can forgive myself for selling out my creative self to the will of others.
  • My creative self is a precious child who deserves encouragement, freedom, and pampering.
  • When my body is unhealthy, it can be a sign that I’m not taking care of my creative self.
  • My God (and Ms. Cameron says this can be anything from an all-powerful entity to an acronym for “good orderly direction”) thinks that artists are his gifted children.
  • God wants me to exercise my creativity in order to show the world how amazing he is. He would never ask me to cease being creative, because that is not who he is.
  • By using my creativity to brighten the corner where I am, I am being and doing exactly what I was created to be and do.

Choose You This Day…

When I speak of creative passions, I’m not limiting “creative” to writings, works of art, or musical compositions. To create means to bring into existence something that wasn’t there before. This encompasses anything from The Arts to the conception of a child to the founding of a business. It’s anything we humans think to make out of the tools, skills, and gifts at our disposal.

In your mind, you hold the germ of an idea to make something. There. Did you see that? Feel that? You thought of it, just now.

You’ve been putting it off, refusing to give yourself permission to pursue the dream. You’ve let other people tell you that you can’t. You’ve come to believe that going after that dream isn’t right. You beat yourself up again and again for being selfish enough to want this. You believe the lie that says, “Creativity? That’s nice and all, dear…but it’s not terribly practical now, is it? Why don’t you find something productive to do with your time?”

The lie is insidious, and it numbs you to who you truly are. You don’t have to listen to it. You don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to let it continue spreading through your heart like a cancer. You are allowed to banish that demon from your soul forever. You have the right — and that right is sacred.

Choose to wield that sacredness.

“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.” — Robert Louis Stephenson

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

(If you buy The Artist’s Way through clicking one of my links, I’ll get a tiny percentage of what you spend…but what I get will be nothing compared to what this book will give you in return.)

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

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How to Use Google Docs Templates to Make Writing Amazing Documents Easy

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I’m talking this week about that special breed of boredom that drives kids crazy and keeps grown-ups sane. Yesterday  I told you all the reasons you should use document templates in your writing (focusing specifically on Google Docs, of course). Jerk that I am, though, I didn’t tell you how.

Well that’s what today is for. And the fact of the matter is, you’ve probably been using document templates for years, even if you don’t know it.

See…there’s a little workaround we all use when we don’t want to bother building (or finding) a template — or when we don’t know how templates work. You can achieve almost the same effect by finding a document you’ve already written, choosing Save As from the File menu (or just making a copy of the file), and giving it a new name.

Once you’ve done that, you’ve got a new file from template. You can keep the text that’s useful, and delete everything that’s not — but not before looking it over closely for a good example of how to do your formatting.

That’s how a lot of Tech Writing is done. It’s how a lot of writing is done, and it’s very effective. It’s so effective, in fact, that some time back some clever fellow thought about the process and said, “Hey, why don’t we automate that a bit?” And that’s where document templates came from.

Google Docs supports the Save As sort of template just fine. Open any document, and from the File menu choose Make a copy…. Bam! You’ve got your template.

Creating a New Template

As I said, though, that’s a workaround. Still, going through the real process starts the same way: first things first, you open a document that already looks the way you want it to. Maybe it’s a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet that you uploaded, fully formatted, and now you want to recreate that format in future Google Docs. Or maybe it’s something simpler than that.

For years now I’ve been writing my novels in Google Docs. I like the way Google Docs works, but any time I want to submit a novel to an agent or editor, I’ve got to do some post-processing — change the body text to a serif font, delete all the extra blank lines between paragraphs, and insert tabs at the beginning of every paragraph.

So I got in the habit of formatting my novels one way, and all my other documents another. Last week, I finally took the time to make that format official, with a template. It was a ton of work.

First, I opened one of my full-block formatted novels in Google Docs:

I selected Edit CSS from the Edit menu, and changed it to make sure the paragraphs were Times New Roman and started with a text indent, and that the book, volume, and chapter headings (h1, h2, and h3) were all Arial and centered:

Then I went to the Google Docs Templates gallery (to get there from within Google Docs, just click Create new | From template), where I spotted the Submit a template link in the top right corner:

I clicked the button, provided some quick descriptive text, and then clicked Submit template.

And then I was done.

Formatting a Google Docs Template

The only step in that process that was remotely complicated was the second one — styling the document — and that’s where a lot of the power in a beautiful template comes from. You style Google Docs the same way you do a web page, using CSS (cascading style sheets).

There are tons of great CSS tutorials out there, whether you’re completely new to such things or just need a refresher. I fall somewhere in the middle — I’ve done a bit of CSS design in the past, but never frequently enough for me to remember any of it offhand. Still, I can get by with little more than quick Google searches like “CSS indented paragraphs” or “CSS align right.”

If you don’t want to learn CSS, you don’t have to. You can still make templates from any of your existing Google Docs (with all the formatting you’re already able to do), and you can browse thousands of user-created templates already out there.

Using a Google Docs Template (Technical Writing Exercise)

All you have to do to use a Google Docs template is find it in the template list (or click a link provided by a kindly template-maker you happen to know online).

From the template list or from the template’s preview page,  you can click the Use this template button to create a new document in your Google Docs folder that’s an exact copy of the original template.

I welcome you to try out my novel template (or use the full-block novel template if you don’t like indented paragraphs — that’s still how I prefer to do my writing). And of course there’s also the blog posting schedule template I’ve been barking at you about for months now.

Even if neither of those appeals, look around in the template list and find something you like. Google Docs keeps track of templates you’ve used before for you, so it’s easy to find them again next time.

Let us know what you find! And if you do try out one of my templates, please let me know what you think. I can keep making improvements, if you’ll let me know what’s needed.

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Why You Need to Use Google Docs Templates

By Aaron Pogue on Monday, May 24, 2010

As I said yesterday, this week I intend to finish up my three-week series on Google Docs.

I first really recommended Google Docs back in my series “How to Choose Your Writing Software.” In those articles, I talked about the benefits of writing in a program like Microsoft Word, because it allows you to design a beautifully styled and formatted document. And then I’ve talked about the benefits of writing in Google Docs because Docs makes it cheap and easy for you to create notepad-like documents you can access anywhere.

That’s really selling Google Docs short, though. Even though Google Docs isn’t meant to provide rich page formatting, if you know what you’re doing you can handle some pretty amazing document formatting. The most powerful way to do that is with templates.

Filling in the Blanks

Last week I gave you a link to a custom spreadsheet that I designed for blogging, with some really basic color-coded formatting and pre-labeled rows and columns. That was a template, meaning that if you used that link to create a new spreadsheet on your account, you would get a clean copy of it — same formatting, same labels, but none of my information.

From there, all you have to do is fill in the blanks. That’s where yesterday’s story comes into play. A good template is boring — just punch out the pre-cut, interlocking pieces, and stick them together.

In this case, you don’t have to figure out the format or organization for your own blog posting schedule. I decided the calendar format worked great, I came up with development milestones and color codes for each. Just start a new document, type some titles, and record your progress.

That’s incredibly useful any time you need to work with information that’s going to need a pretty standard organization or layout. Here’s just a handful of the most popular examples:

All of these document types benefit from strong templates. You can borrow someone else’s effort, and free yourself up to spend more time writing.

Formatting with Style

Just using templates to provide a framework for your data is far better than starting from a blank slate, but Google Docs templates can get much cooler than that. If you didn’t already, click the links in some of the examples above.

I’ve described templates as “fill-in-the-blanks,” but a good template is more than that — it’s a designed document. It’s already got style. Maybe that’s pretty colors and fancy illustrations, or maybe it’s just tabs. Either way, the formatting you see in those documents helps make them work.

The key to really professional document design isn’t really aesthetics, but simple consistency. If there’s an existing standard (like you’d expect for something like a resume or business letter), you need to be consistent with your reader’s expectations. If you’re designing your own document type (like a project report or novel), you need to choose your own set of formatting rules and apply them consistently throughout.

Either way, you benefit from templates. Templates shine when you use them in conjunction with paragraph styles. Use the Heading 1 style for your book title, Heading 2 for volumes, and Heading 3 for Chapters. Use a custom Caption style for photo captions, and a custom Demonic Dialogue style for those heavily-formatted sections of your novel that involve demons speaking to each other across the page.

Once your document has those styles associated, you can adjust the styles (not the actual bits of text), and update the look and feel of your whole book at once. Better yet, design and adjust those styles in a template, and you can maintain that same professional quality across all the documents of that type that you ever make.

How to Use Google Docs Templates to Make Writing Amazing Documents Easy

Did some of those examples sound a little specific? They should — I’ve been going through this very process for the last week or so.

Making a helpful template in Google Docs is really easy. Making a beautifully-styled and powerfully-designed template can take some advanced work, but it pays dividends when all your future projects benefit from that one-time effort.

Whether you want to save a little bit of time or make your documents fabulous, come back tomorrow. Either way, I’m going to tell you how to make and use your own custom Google Docs templates.

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Pre-Cut, Interlocking Pieces

By Aaron Pogue on Sunday, May 23, 2010

I’m going to finish my series on technical writing in Google Docs this week with what will probably be the most valuable lesson of all. And dinosaurs.

A couple weeks ago I told a story about one of my week-long visits to Granddad’s, and my great ambition involving killer robot dinosaurs. That story involved notebooks full of hand-drawn schematics.

Of course, what does a kid know about drawing schematics, right? I thought making them more complicated made them more powerful — these days, I understand that in almost every discipline true genius comes in making things as simple as possible.

Back then I disdained the simple (as the inexperienced so often do). I wanted to make things so brilliant they baffled. I dedicated myself to it.

I know this about myself, because I vividly remember one traumatic encounter with the elegantly simple during those same days.

Whenever I went to visit my grandparents, sometime about halfway through the week, Granddad would take me to a bookstore or a hobby shop somewhere in town to pick out one something to keep me busy. I remember the agony of seeing all the tantalizing items on display, and having to choose just one.

I made these trips every summer for several years, and while I don’t remember a lot from those times, I remember each and every one of these shopping trips in vivid detail. Twice — twice! — I bought video games that just looked so cool…and then had to wait five days to get home before I could play them.

Three times I bought books — two Hardy Boys and Ivanhoe, on Granddad’s recommendation (which I’m reading again right now). I never regretted those purchases.

The very first time, though — the same time he found me drawing schematics — he took me to a hobby shop and as soon as I walked in the door I knew what I was getting. On a prominent display, just inside the door, they had a model dinosaur kit.

A model dinosaur kit! The cover had a painted illustration of a T. Rex mauling a Brontosaurus (yes, this was back in the days when they had Brontosauri). I grabbed it, looked up at Granddad, and said, “I’m getting this.”

He nodded, showing some appreciation for the choice, but still showed me around some of the other stuff in the store. There were a lot of cool things, but I never once set down that box. Five minutes later, I finally led him to the counter and he paid the good man for my new model dinosaur.

Back at the house I headed straight to my room, tore open the box, and poured out the pieces. I reached for the instructions, but even as I did my heart sank. This wasn’t what I wanted.

It was four sheets of balsa wood, with pre-cut, interlocking pieces shaped crudely like dinosaur bones. The whole “assembly” consisted of punching out the pieces, and sticking them one-by-one onto the long curved spine.

It wasn’t anything like the painting on the cover! It wasn’t even the T. Rex from the cover art — I got a Brontosaurus model. With an entire store full of toys to choose from, I’d picked a freaking herbivore, made from a “model kit” that was about as much fun as a connect-the-dots.

I put the thing together, and left it sitting on the dresser for the rest of the week just so I could give it a good resentful stare every time I entered the room.

Why You Need to Use Google Docs Templates

You knew this story was headed toward a writing lesson, right? I said that right from the first.

This week we’re going to talk about document templates — the boring sheets of pre-cut, interlocking pieces of the Tech Writing world. And everything they lack in that exciting potential to do murder to helpless, non-existent herbivores, they make up for in convenience and utility.

I understand why a six-year-old would resent that trade-off, but as a grown-up who has to do business writing whether I want to or not, I absolutely love it. I’m sure you will, too. Come back tomorrow to learn how Google Docs templates can improve your writing process.

Photo credit Amazon.com and Think Geek.

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How to Find a Good Writing Group

By Aaron Pogue on Saturday, May 22, 2010

Yesterday I covered the benefits of joining a writing group. It’s not like you’re getting spammed with junk mail inviting you to try out each of the different writing groups in your area, though. We don’t tend to go door-to-door evangelizing — we’re much more likely to huddle together in a quiet corner of the nearest Starbucks.

So how do you go about getting a writing group? And how do you make sure you end up in a good one?

Make Your Own

The easiest way to guarantee the quality and direction of your writing group is to build it yourself. Sometimes that means making new friends (and finding those friends could be a nontrivial task).

In our case, it was a matter of rumor and reputation — four of us who went to the same church, all interested in creative writing, and only tenuously connected to each other apart from that. Someone decided we should get together, though, and we did. And, as I said before, it was magical.

(It’s worth mentioning here that every one of us is an introvert, at least half of us are seriously shy, and I was wrestling at the time with something perilously close to crippling social anxiety. Any one of those can be a pretty standard personality trait for your average writer. Don’t let it stop you.)

Julie joined my Facebook group to get ready for last year’s NaNoWriMo, and got jealous enough of the meetings we were holding here in Oklahoma City that she recruited a couple of writing friends into her own group in Topeka.

Chances are good you, too, know someone who likes to write. You don’t have to be close friends. You don’t have to be at the same place in your craft (in fact, it helps a lot if you’re not). All you need to have is a shared interest in becoming better writers. The rest will take care of itself.

Browse by Genre

You don’t have to make your own, though. There are local writing groups in your area — I’m confident of it. And there are local writing groups that would be out knocking on your door to recruit you, if they could afford the marketing budget.

The most common public writing groups are the ones that focus on a particular genre. I know we’ve got a Children’s Book Writer’s Group here in Oklahoma City, and I’ve attended a meeting of the Oklahoma Romance Writer’s group. That was an experience.

I’m sure we’ve got Western Writers, and probably some general groups, too. These public writing groups might not offer the same sort of close, connected relationships I’ve been talking about, but they could be just the right the place to find the handful of friends you’re going to make those relationships with.

Want some help finding groups like these? There are a few general indexes, like this one at squidoo, but it’s hard to know how up-t0-date sites like that are.

It can be as easy as searching Google for “writing group” and your city name, though. If you’re writing in a genre, throw that in, too, and see what you get.

Ask an Expert

If you’d like a more personal experience than you can find in public groups on Google, turn to the experts. If you know any writers you admire in your area — published or not — ask them if they can recommend a group. If not, ask them if they’re interested in joining yours, or if they know of any other writers looking for one.

Another expert source of information could be a local creative writing teacher — high school or college, depending how old you want your group members to be. Set up an appointment in the English department at the nearest university, or just drop by the local community college.

In my experience, Creative Writing professors tend to be pretty approachable, especially if you’re going to express an interest in writing. They’ll likely have a finger on the pulse of your local writing community, and they can also put you in contact with students (or former students) who’d likely be interested in joining a group like yours.

Creative Writing Exercise

The lovely Kelley, writing at a coffee shopYou’d better go ahead and make that appointment now! I want you in a writing group by this time next month. I’ll check up on you, too.

Mark it on your calendar, review the options I’ve given above, and do the work you’ve got to do to get from here to there. If you don’t have any ideas at all…ask in the comments. Who knows? Maybe another of my readers happens to live down the street.

At the very least, just like I said yesterday, you can join our writing group on Facebook. It gets pretty quiet as we get more than a couple months away from NaNoWriMo, but maybe if we get our numbers up it’ll start jumping. If you’re interested, let me know.

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Why You Need a Writing Group

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, May 21, 2010

You’ve heard of writing groups, whether it’s the famous Inklings or my own group on Facebook, Mightier than the Sword, or just the sort of impromptu, frantic writing groups that coalesce over the course of National Novel Writing Month, you know that there exist, in the wild, bunches of writers who sit around talking to each other.

Have you ever participated in one? Have you ever been invited to one? If not, I’m inviting you now to Mightier than the Sword. Let me know in the comments, or just look me up on Facebook and drop me a message, and I’ll be happy to bring you into the fold.

It’s hard to beat the power of meeting face-to-face, though, so I’d encourage you to find a local writing group (or found your own, if it comes to that).

It’s a lot of work — and it’s a lot of work that isn’t putting words on the page — but it will make you a better writer in three different ways (that just happen to be synonyms).

Socializing

Yesterday I told the story of my first writer’s group meeting, and the big lesson it taught us all — that we’re all strange in precisely the same way — came entirely by surprise. We’d gotten together, each of us for our own reasons, but none of us could have realized beforehand how valuable that one message would be.

In a writing group, you can stop feeling so strange.

More than that, you can participate fully in your craft. As a writer you should be talking about those strange experiences, about the magical moments of inspiration and dreadful doldrums between 20k and 40k.

No matter what patient listeners your friends and family are, nothing beats the sympathy and encouragement you can get from hearing another writer say, “Oh, me too.”

Interacting

And that conversation is more than just emotional support. When you talk to other writers about writing problems, you’ll find answers.

Maybe you’re having problems with characterization, or designing a working plot. Maybe you’re having trouble figuring out how to balance research time against getting a first draft written. Maybe you just can’t get your damsel into distress, no matter how hard you try.

The thing is…whatever it is that’s slowing you down, it’s not new. Every artist’s experience is a little different, but the other writers in your group have run into something like it. Exploring the processes and writing exercises that have worked for them could very likely help you find your own solution.

It can also get you moving again. Every single time our group meets, no matter what we discuss, we all break up commenting how much we want to write. Hanging out with writers is inspiring.

Networking

It’s also a savvy business decision.

Writing is a lonely process, but getting published is an incredibly social one.

That’s true whether you’re looking for a multi-book deal with a New York house, or hoping to self-publish and self-promote. Either way, you’re going to need help getting your pages in front of the eyes of serious readers.

You’ll need test readers to provide feedback. You’ll need fans to help promote your work. If you’ve given up on the gatekeepers, you’ll need editors (and they don’t come cheap).

A good writing group should provide you all of those, though. Sure, you’ll have to reciprocate, but you’ll be learning in the process. You’ll be improving yourself as a writer, in myriad directions, at every step of the way.

So get yourself a writing group. Need help finding out how? Come back tomorrow, and I’ll give you some tips on finding or building your own writing group (and a good solid deadline to keep you motivated).

And, seriously, if you want in Mightier than the Sword, let me know. If nothing else, it’s a start.

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“This is Going to Sound Strange….”

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, May 20, 2010

This is going to sound strange, but writing always leaves me lonely. It pulls me away (mentally and physically) from the people in my life.

That’s because, when I’m writing, I lose myself in that world of conjured lives, surrounded by my imaginary friends. I watch over their shoulders, capture everything they have to say (or everything relevant anyway), and do what I can to hold their hands through the myriad trials of a well-structured plot arc.

They never speak to me, though. They never even look at me. I crash all their parties — and make them spectacularly interesting — but I’ve never yet been invited. And then when I’m done, when I hit my word count or have to surface for some supper, I have to leave all those precious lives behind, too. It’s an awful lot of goodbyes.

And, of course, the real loneliness doesn’t come from the time I spend cut off from people, in one world or the other, but from saying such outlandish things as I’ve just written down. To people who’ve never lost themselves in that process, the very idea of hanging out with the characters in a book I’m writing does often seem quite strange.

Last summer, I found a bit of an answer — not a cure, really, but a support group. As I’ve mentioned before, Courtney and I joined a couple friends to start a writing group.

None of us had ever participated in one before, so we each came to that first meeting a little nervous. We weren’t all terribly close to begin with, either, so we started off by going around and introducing ourselves, tossing in brief descriptions of where we were as writers.

It felt a little forced…for all of twenty second. Without a meeting agenda, without any real plans, we burned through three hours in no time at all. Despite our different ages, different interests, different backgrounds, we immediately found a close kinship — bound together by that one common experience.

There’s a process every writer goes through, over the life of any significant project. Sometimes it’s glorious, and sometimes it’s torture. Whatever it is, it’s always overwhelming.

And without any of us recognizing that process out loud, it became the centerpiece of our conversation. We shared those experiences — deep and powerful and emotional responses — that arose as the direct result of our efforts to Tell Cool Stories.

At some point deep in that conversation, Shawn sat forward, bouncing nervously on the edge of his seat, and said, “Okay, this is going to sound strange–”

And I held up a hand to cut him off. I met the eyes of the others in the group, and said, “By now, we’ve all said that more than once. I think we’ve thoroughly established that we’re all strange here.”

That got nods all around the room, and Shawn grinned back at me. “Fair enough,” he said, and shared a story that every one of us could identify with.

Why You Need a Writing Group

Writing is lonely. It has to be, in some ways, but you can offset that some by sharing your experience with other writers.

And it’s more than just a cure for loneliness. A good writing group can make your writing easier, better, and more marketable. Every writer should be in one.

Need more convincing? Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you exactly what you can get from a writing group.

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What I Learned about Writing this Week…from Dreams

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Courtney Cantrell's weekly writing advice

When I was fifteen years old, I had a nightmare.

For two reasons, I won’t describe it to you in detail. First of all, it was a particularly vivid dream full of all the typical nightmare clichés: running in slow motion, inability to scream, absolute certainty of impending doom. I don’t need to describe these things to you, my dear inklings; I’m quite sure you’ve experienced them yourselves. For most of us, there’s a certain strange familiarity in nightmares — sort of like an old, unpleasant acquaintance who keeps popping into your life uninvited, and you don’t really know how to get rid of him. Doubtless, you know quite well what I’m talking about when I use the phrase “nightmarish helplessness.”

My second reason for not recounting the dream for you is that if I did, I would be copying directly from the climactic scene of my very first fantasy novel. You see, when my fifteen-year-old self sat down to record the fascinating whos and whats of this nightmare (and it was so horrid and so real and so invigorating, I couldn’t resist), my act of journaling sparked a story. At first, I didn’t realize what was happening…but as I wrote out the scene, I started seeing this guy in my head — and events were playing out from his perspective, not mine. And the funny thing was, this guy was a real jerk, not at all the kind of person I would want as the main character of anything! He was obnoxious, sarcastic, and callous. He knew he had to fight the monsters in order to help someone, but he really didn’t want to be there. He was arrogant and selfish, had low self-esteem, and was wholly in love with this girl and unable to tell her so.

Wait. What girl? Where did she come from?

Dreaming It Up

And thus was born my first fantasy novel, Legend’s Heir Trilogy — Book One: Legend’s Heir. That led to a second book, Legend’s Heir Trilogy — Book Two: The Bearer of the Stone (not terribly original, I know; which might be part of the reason this story faltered and died after about 12,000 words). The third and, so far, best of the trilogy carries the simple (and more wieldy) title Triad (most recently mentioned here). A single nightmare spawned two-and-a-half novels. Not bad for a Swiss cheese brain.

For the last eighteen years, all but three* of my novels or wanna-be novels have started life as dreams. Indulge me, my dears, as I stick my hand into one of those mental Swiss cheese holes and pull out some reminiscings…

Selfish Loverboy and the phone booth monsters led to:

  • Legend’s Heir
  • Bearers
  • Triad
  • And Deren’s Story (a fourth novel set in the Legend’s Heir universe, but not part of the trilogy)

Dark-haired, darkness-spewing demon on the iron bridge became:

  • Colors of Deception
  • And Shadows After Midnight

Last year, a vivid nightmare involving a cat turned into

  • A short story about a scary sociopath and his even scarier baby sister

I know it’s not a novel, and it doesn’t belong in a paragraph about dreams that led to novels, but it’s my favorite of the few short stories I’ve ever written, and this is my article, so I get to say pretty much whatever I please, within reason and the boundaries of Aaron’s goals for this blog.

*ahem*

And just this week, Magician’s Apprentice Helping Damsel-In-Distress has graduated from convoluted dream sequence to plotted, outlined, chapter-headinged novel entitled Tapped Out. Chapters 1-3 are complete, Chapter 4 is in the works, and I am having all sorts of outrageous fun. (And yes, you can take that as a work-in-progress update, cleverly disguised as its big sister WILAWriTWe.)

Of IMAX and Warehouses

My husband, the poor dear whom I once attacked in my sleep because I was hungry and thought he was a ham, says that while his mind is an empty warehouse when he sleeps, I have been blessed with a mental IMAX theater. If I weren’t a writer, I would call that blessing a curse, because if I couldn’t exorcise these creative demons through content content-creation, I would run mad, yea verily. (Some might claim that this has happened anyway, writerhood notwithstanding, but that is another story and shall be told another time.) These dreams-turned-stories whirl around my brain like caged things, looking for a way out and hammering at the inside of my mind if I don’t let them have their way (with me). Why is this? Do I not give my brain enough things to do during the day, that it must needs torment me at night? Is it overstimulated? Do I have an unresolved Internal Sequin Issue?

The answer, my darlingest of darling inklings, is that I. Don’t. Know.

I don’t know why I dream weird, I don’t know why I dream vivid, and I don’t know why I seem to start dreaming weird and vivid right when I wrap up one project and want to start a new one but don’t know what it should be. The dreams come when I need them, and they’re always exactly what I need. I don’t know why this is; I just know that it is.

Drink, and Drink Deep

Of one thing I am certain: When I sleep, my brain goes to the place where creativity flows. When I sleep, my conscious self gets out of the way, and my mind goes down to the pool and drinks deep. I am a writer, and I thirst. Constantly. I’m willing to bet that you do, too. I don’t know if your creative self goes down to drink when you’re asleep, or if that happens for you at other times. However it happens for you — try to let it happen. Try to get your Self out of the way so it can happen. Let your mind go on autopilot so that your feet — whether in a dream or in the waking world — can take you to that place you need to be. Drink deep, writer…and then write.

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

* The novels that did not begin as dreams are: ‘S’ is for Survival (young adult post-apocalyptic), Mindsnatcher (young adult sci-fi), and Tomato Electric Destroy Force 9 First Draft: Writer Dearest and the Interlopers (romantic sci-fi literary metafiction [yes, I really said that]).

(Click that link up there. Go on. You know you want to. You don’t have to buy Benny & Joon when you get there…but if you buy something, I get something, and we’ll all be happy! Yay!)

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

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Your Blog Posting Schedule in Google Docs (Redux All Over Again)

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, May 18, 2010

While we started the week with a story of my incontestable authorial prowess vis a vis Facebook’s Mob Wars (and, to a much lesser extent, Farmville), yesterday’s article about creating and editing a document in Google Docs said essentially nothing relevant to that story.

That’s because Google Docs is far more than just the cloud-based Word Processor we talked about yesterday. For all the writing I do, I still find myself using their spreadsheets at least as often as I end up working in documents.

Working in Spreadsheets

To create a new spreadsheet in Google Docs, from your document list choose Create New in the top left corner, and then click Spreadsheet. When your new, unnamed spreadsheet opens, you should find a relatively familiar appearance – some editing controls at the top, and then a scrolling table filled with a gridwork of grayed-out lines.

If you’d like to see an example, check out the Blog Posting Schedule template I designed after writing a post all about how I used a spreadsheet to take control of my blogging deadlines.

In this case, the title row and column have already been labeled for you, and the relevant columns have been sized for the information they’re meant to contain. You’ll also find color-coded cells (using the Highlight dropdown), and an auto-calculated date field (in column B).

Like any spreadsheet program, Google Docs allows you to track information across rows and down columns, and perform calculations based on the contents of all those cells. That’s how I managed my property list in the Mob Wars spreadsheet.

Putting Google Docs to Work

I’ve also used these spreadsheets

  • to manage a shared To Do list with my wife (dividing up projects by category and labeling them with a priority ranking)
  • to compile a list of medieval-sounding first and last names that can be randomly combined to populate a video game with named NPCs
  • and to track the word count progress of the folks in my little writing group throughout the last NaNoWriMo.

I love how quick and easy it is to create a blank notepad in Google Docs — whether you need a Document or a Spreadsheet — and then how accessible that document is wherever you go. As long as you’ve got access to the internet, you can review, update, and even share any of your Google Docs.

Technical Writing Exercise

If you want to see that in action, there’s no better place to start than with the Blog Posting Schedule template. Add one to your document list (if you haven’t already), update the Start Date in cell A2 to a recent Sunday, and then start filling in blog post titles or summaries.

Share it with a friend or two, whether you’re making them accountability partners or just showing off your handiwork. And if you can think of anything I could do to make the template more useful, let me know. I can update it anytime, and make those updates freely available to anyone who could use them.

How do you use Google Docs? And if you’re just now looking into it for the first time, what ways do you imagine it could be useful to you? Let us know in the comments!

Oh, and don’t forget to come back next week for the end of our series, when we discuss one of the most powerful tools in the whole Google Docs suite: document templates.

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Working with Google Docs and Spreadsheets

By Aaron Pogue on Monday, May 17, 2010

If yesterday’s story didn’t convince you that you need to have ready access to Google Docs, I don’t know what will.

By now you should, though. We went through the process of getting started with Google Docs last week, so you should already have an account. It’s time to see what all the moving parts look like, though.

(Note: If you’re already a veteran Google Docs user, today’s and tomorrow’s articles won’t have a lot to offer you, but come back next week for an introduction to the awesome power of Google Docs templates.)

Creating a Google Docs Document

Visit your Google Docs account, sign in using the email address and password you picked last week, and then from the Create new dropdown in the top left, choose Document. You’ll get a new tab (or window) with a simple, familiar text-editing toolbar at the top, and below it a large expanse of white for you to fill with text.

You can make the document look more like a printed page by choosing View | Fixed-width page, or you can turn that option off and allow the text to flow all the way to both edges of your screen. I’ve been working with Word for so long that I find myself a lot more comfortable working with the Fixed-width page, but your choice is mostly an aesthetic one.

Type a sentence — “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” or something to that effect — and format it a bit. Make it bold. Make it centered. Make it 36-point Garamond.

Oh! Then save it. In the top left corner, where you see “Untitled,” click there and provide a name. Call it “Practice” or “A la recherche du renard sautant” — whatever you want. Click OK, and your new document is named and saved in your Google Docs list.

Collaborating on a Document

As I’ve said before, the real strength of this service is the ability to share it among multiple users, and collaboratively author (and edit) a document. My favorite way is to invite Collaborators, so they can highlight, leave comments, and even make suggested changes right in the document.

To do that, click on the Share dropdown in the top right corner and choose Invite people…. That opens a dialogue where you can type as many email address as you want.

Use the buttons below the address field to choose whether you want your invitees to just view the document, or if you want to let them make changes, too.

Of course, one of the biggest risks of working in a collaborative writing environment is that a single careless user can destroy information provided by other users. Google Docs (like most modern authoring systems) allows you to correct for that using the Revision History.

With your foxy document still open, click File | See revision history. This presents you with a list of all the major changes made to the document, and lets you see who made the change, and when.

You can click the checkboxes next to two different versions and Compare Checked to get a highlighted list of everything that’s different between them, or you can just click the Revision Number link on any of the lines and see what the document looked like after that change.

Notice the blue bar at the top of the page clearly tells you you’re looking at an older version of the document, and allows you to move through the change history using the Older and Newer buttons.

There’s also a button labeled Revert to this one which lets you abandon all changes made since that revision and get back to work on the document from that point. While that may not sound like a very pleasant option, it could be a lifesaver if someone chose to replace all the Rs in a document with Ps. As soon as you catch the problem, you can revert and undo their change. You can also look at the Revision History to find out exactly who did it.

The word processor is a nice tool, but it’s also pretty self-explanatory. I’ll be back tomorrow to teach you the real magic with the Google Docs spreadsheet tool (yes you, too, could be a world-famous strawberry farmer).

For now, though, you’ve got an account set up, and you’ve peeked into the Document editor. If you want to get some practice, do something a little more intensive than typing practice. Maybe start a grocery list and share it with your roommates, or paste in the text of a work-in-progress to share with some test readers.

Whether or not you trust Google with your great American novel, I’m sure you can find some real use in these tools.

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