No Idea What to Write? Get Over It

It’s not new, but an idea repeatedly struck me at the recent Texas Book Festival while I manned the Yellow Bird booth with poet, novelist, and fellow avian editor, E. Kristin Anderson. This was my first time being the face of Yellow Bird to a general audience (i.e. not a bunch of writers at a conference). I talked to a lot of people who aren’t actually writers, at least not yet. Some had had some good experiences in a few creative writing classes somewhere along the way. Some had always kept journals that no one’s allowed to read. I easily recognized them from my own not too distant past when I, too, thought writing was all about having a good idea.

Well, I’m here to say you don’t need an idea to start writing. Take this post as an example. This morning I stood and stared at the coffee dripping into the pot, thinking about the book festival, and wondering if I could mine my experience for a blog post. I had nothing. It did eventually occurr to me I needed to clean my coffee pot in a pretty bad way. The coffee dripped until I took a cup. I went in and sat down in front of the screen repeating my mantra in my head:

You don’t need an idea to write. You don’t need an idea to write.

So I typed that. Over and over. It’s a technique I picked up from one of the impromptu writing exercises Kathi Appelt was generous enough to lead at the Writing Barn’s Full Novel Revision Week back in August. It’s based on the theory that your brain hates wasting time and energy and that it will come up with something for you to write about simply to stop you from typing all that nonsense.

Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me halfway down the page that I could write about not needing a good idea to get started writing and how that ties in with the people I talked to last weekend, not to mention some of the themes I’ve already been exploring in this blog, and my recent experience at the Writing Barn. Forgive the massive sentence, but I needed to convey the enormity of the connections my brain made in that flash.

All because I didn’t wait for some inspiration to descend from on high. I forced it.

Again, I know this isn’t a new idea. I certainly don’t mean to claim any ownership of it by writing about it here. I just hope maybe a couple of those people I spoke to at the book festival might read this. And maybe one of them will set their alarm a little early tomorrow, and get up and stare at the coffee pot until they can take a cup. Then they’ll go in and type nonsense until they start to write again.

College Football and Revising: Who Knew They Had So Much in Common

Before getting to the blogpost proper, I have an invitation: come visit me October 25th or 26th at the Texas Book Festival!

I’ll be hanging out with E. Kristin Anderson in the Yellow Bird booth. Okay, we’re only in half a booth because we’re sharing with The Writing Barn. But that’s even more reason to stop by. Between Yellow Bird’s editors and the always amazing programming at The Writing Barn, you can probably find a lot of the help you’re looking for to get your WIP whipped into shape. And, as always, we’ll have candy while supplies last, not to mention coupons good toward the cost of future editing.

And the Free Query Letter Raffle is back on!

But you have enter in person at the Texas Book Festival. So stop by Saturday or Sunday, the 25th or 26th(this month). Bring all your questions about freelance editing and get a little sugar fix while you explore the festival.

This concludes the announcement portion of the post.

(Please don’t stop reading.)

I am a fan of UT football. Especially this season. I can’t remember ever being more proud of my alma mater’s football team than I have been this fall.

No. Seriously.

But they suck this year, you may be saying. And with a 2-4 record, you’d arguably be right. Unless you look more closely.

When I watch the Longhorn football team I can’t help thinking of the ways talented but immature writers have to struggle with themselves. Watching Coach Strong doggedly implement his ‘don’t be a dick’ policy with his players, regardless of the short-term cost, reminds me of my own ongoing — sometimes rocky — development as a writer.

I couldn’t help empathizing with UT last Saturday when they beat OU in almost every way except the final score. Their opening drive was a perfect example of what I mean. They ended up moving the ball down the field despite repeated self-sabotage (in this case, multiple stupid penalties) and somehow still managed to put points on the board. They kept showing flashes of brilliance, only to undercut themselves each time. Then they gave up a touchdown on the ensuing kickoff. And that’s pretty much how it went the rest of the day: 1. Sprint Ahead, 2. Shoot Own Foot, 3. Repeat ad nauseum.

Like a writer clinging to a scene or image that’s brilliant but just doesn’t fit his story, this Longhorn team clings to its former — let’s just call it traditional — superstar athlete mindset. But like a good editor – come on, you knew I was headed there, it’s an editors’ blog – Coach Strong keeps pointing them in what he sees as the right direction, insisting on a level of self-discipline and commitment a lot of his players obviously struggle with.

UT’s new coach has fired a lot of talented young stars. But like an editor confronted with that brilliant but not quite right scene, he knows that sometimes you just have to make the ruthless cut. Push delete and keep focused on the big picture. Get through that first season as best you can and build your program from there. I just hope he gets a chance to finish his revisions.

Because, unlike an editor working with a writer, the whole world’s watching Charlie Strong and the Longhorns go through their rewrite process. That’s got to be rough.

Oh, and Hook ‘Em!

The Background Threat as Tension Builder

My last personal blog post played around with the idea of how I’ve grown to fear rain. This is becausewater has come into my house a couple of times in the past year during particularly heavy downpours. I only mention it because my recent drainage catastrophes have got me thinking about ways to establish and sustain tension in my WIP.

There are lots of tried and true ways of doing this. Most of which seem to be variations on the idea of putting some kind of countdown or deadline into the story: if the hero doesn’t complete his or her task within a certain window of opportunity, all is lost. The countdown is a great device, which is no doubt why it’s used so frequently across all genres. But I want to talk about another, perhaps more difficult tension building strategy, namely The Constant Low-Level, or Background, Threat.

I just finished Shana Burg’s A Thousand Never Evers which employs this latter type of tension building method. In it, the hero, a southern black pre-teen living in rural Mississippi in 1963, is forced to adapt to the growing racist reaction against the Civil Rights Movement. This threat sometimes seems to lessen, but it never goes away. And, most importantly, the white violence against her and her family escalates throughout the story, usually in a direct reaction to the choices the hero makes. Burg’s setting turns out to be her story’s greatest source of tension. It’s both elegant and compelling.

Which brings me back to my recent experiences with the flash flooding Central Texas is so famous for. If my household travails were a story, the opening scene (aka inciting event) would be me and my shovel last October ignorantly piling some dirt around the foundation at the back of my house where erosion has taken its toll. I’d probably have my “me” character look up at the threatening sky a couple of times as I unwittingly clogged the drain that allowed the rainwater to run off my patio.

From there I could go on to show that first night the water came in. Our frantic but futile reactions both inside and out. Our tearing out of the floor and the baseboards the next day. Me reinstalling them. Only to do it all over again nine months later.

After that I’d show my partner sewing the long thin sandbags we now deploy around the back of our house. And me digging and piling dirt in various configurations, mixed in with the increasingly brittle conversations we continue to have about the efficacy of my experiments in hydrodynamics. The mid-point of my tale would be a scene of the two of us watching the rain through our sliding glass door. Then, because I write fiction, I’d have the couple’s relationship begin to crumble under the stress of it all.

And that’s my point. Good low level, ever present threats in stories usually start off as just a vaguely menacing part of the setting. Like the sleeping dragon in The Hobbit, or the white racists in A Thousand Never Evers, it’s just a fact of the hero’s life. And it will probably remain a distant, passive threat so long as the hero doesn’t pick up her metaphorical stick and poke it in its eye. Of course, then it wouldn’t be much of a story.

An Introduction to Track Changes

Track Changes is the language of editors. As a writer, you need to speak it because, sooner or later, you will have to deal with it. This post is an introduction to the Track Changesfeature in Microsoft Word. I am a PC person, so I will be referring to how it works in the Windows operating system. If you’re one of those Mac people, then this post should still be helpful, although you may have to do some translating. (For context, here are links to two Youtube videos by Terence Jorgensen–one for PC, one for Mac–that I think you’ll find useful.)

In my version of Word (2010), there’s a row of tabs across the top of the document window. If you click onReview (2nd from the right), you’ll see the editing tool bar appear (replacing whichever one you were in before, probably Home). You’ll also see it’s divided up into sections from left to right (labels along the bottom): Proofing, Language, Comments, Tracking, Changes, Compare, and Protect. I’ll just be looking at the buttons in the Comments, Tracking, and Changes sections.

First off, in the Tracking section, you’ll see a button labelled Track Changes. Hover your cursor over it and you’ll see that either the top or bottom half turns yellow. That’s because it’s a split button: click on the top half (with the page and pencil icon) and you toggle the Track Changes feature on or off for the entire document. If you click on that part, both halves turn yellow signifying that Track Changes is on.

Click on just the bottom half and you get a dropdown menu allowing you to modify the Track Changessettings. The first option on this dropdown menu is merely a duplicate Track Changes toggle switch. Below it is the Change Tracking Options feature. This opens a window where you can customize whatTrack Changes looks like. Feel free to play around here a bit and get to know your options. Jorgensen does a great job explaining this part in his videos, so go there if you want to learn more about that. I mostly just use the default settings because they work fine for me.

The third and final choice on the Change Tracking Options menu deals with the user name. This is useful when you have multiple editors or authors working on a document. Or if you use a pen name or alias. To use this feature just enter the appropriate user name and initials in the boxes under Personalize Your Copy of Microsoft Word and click the Okay button at the bottom right. Keep in mind that doing this changes the author name for everything you do in Word from that moment forward. It’s not specific to the document you’re working on. So be sure it’s reset to the appropriate name after you’re done.

Next to the Track Changes button(s) you’ll see a stack of three buttons with little down-pointing arrows next to them: Final: Show Markup, Show Markup, and Reviewing Pane. Click on any of these to get their dropdown menus. Starting at the top, click on Final: Show Markup to see your four choices for viewing your document. These allow you to compare and contrast your original draft with your “final” draft (the one that has the changes in it).

The middle button, Show Markup, allows you to choose what changes, including comments, you see on the screen. Simply check or uncheck the boxes to customize what changes are highlighted. I like to keep them all in view.

And rounding out the bottom comes the Reviewing Pane button. Click on the left side where the words are and you get a list of all the changes that have been made. This can be useful when trying to decipher and navigate a heavily edited page. If you click on the little down-pointing arrow section of the Reviewing Panebutton, you can select a vertical or horizontal layout for your list of changes and comments.

Next, let’s move on to the mechanics of making changes and comments. Again, the videos give a nice visual of what editing and commenting looks like.

To make a comment in the margins of a document (as opposed to an actual change), simply click on the New Comment button in the Comments section of the tool bar (just to the left of the Tracking section). The three buttons to the right of New Comment (Delete, Previous,Next) remain grayed out and unusable until the document actually contains comments. Once you start commenting they “light up” and activate. They’re mostly self-explanatory, except Delete is a split button. Click on the down-pointing arrow and you’ll get a drop down menu that lets you choose to cut the comment you currently have highlighted, all comments shown (I have no idea what this does or even means; it’s always grayed out as far as I can tell), or all the comments in the document.

On the other side of the Tracking section, you’ll findChanges. This section contains the buttons you’ll use the most as a writer receiving feedback. Again, these are pretty self-explanatory, except to note that both Acceptand Reject are split buttons with tiny dropdown menus giving you more options.

There are two points the videos don’t touch on that I want to close with. First, if you right-click on a change or comment in the body of the document, a small window will pop-up. In there you’ll see Accept and Reject buttons. This is just another way to navigate the changes and comments. And lastly, never forget the Undo button in the very upper left corner next to the floppy disc (Save) icon. You can always hit that and make whatever horrible mistake you just made go away.

Happy revising!

What Kind of Editing Do You Need? Part the Third

In case you’re just tuning in, this post completes athree part series detailing the various freelance editing services offered by Yellow Bird. I promised to talk about copy editing in this edition. No really, I did. And you seemed okay with that. So here we go.

What is copy editing and how is it different from proofreading? To answer that, let’s start by defining the two levels of copy editing:

Standard copy editing includes corrections for grammar, punctuation, capitalization, verb tense, spelling, sentence structure, awkward phrasing, and word usage errors. Intensive copy editing covers all of the above with an additional focus on style, consistency, clarity, pacing, and dialogue.

So where does proofreading fit into the mix?

Proofreading is essentially the same thing as standard copy editing. However, the distinction is that proofreading is done on a PDF or print-ready file (for example, when getting ready to self-publish a book). In addition to correcting spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc., your editor will also check for visual disruptions in the text layout, such as widows and awkwardly-placed hyphens at the end of a line.

So if you’re just looking to give your manuscript a final once over before submission, then go with proofreading or standard copy editing. An editor will go through and fix only the mechanical things. This is probably the least subjective editing service because it’s all about the rules of writing.

But if you need a little more guidance, a little more spit with your polish, then you might be looking for an intensive copy edit which delves deeper into more subjective questions of style and usage. This slightly more expensive service is perfect for the writer who feels pretty good about the “big picture” but still needs help wrestling with clunky sentences and paragraphs before sending her baby out into the world.

And that’s that. We’ve reached the end of our journey. Now I’m off to a workshop/retreat at Austin’s own Writing Barn where I’ll start revising my own manuscript for a change of pace.

Happy writing!