Writing on my iPad
I know writers who prefer to sit at an ornate old desk with a topographical landscape of nicks, cuts, stains, and worn-away lacquer. They sit at these desks filled with character and they use a pencil, to write. Sometimes they might use pen but their labor is 100% analog and they love it.
I am not this kind of writer.
My handwriting is terrible and within minutes of any form of steady writing my hands ache. Minutes after that the carpal tunnel from the years spent writing computer software makes my wrists ache. The idea of using a pen or pencil to produce a 100,000 word novel is to me as herculean a task as building the pyramids without the aid of diesel-powered construction equipment and laser-accurate measuring devices.
Ever since the iPad first came out I have wanted so badly to be able to use it as a writing device. Not as my main editing platform but more as the device that is virtually always with me whenever a great line of dialogue or an intriguing scene strikes me and begs to be given form. Up until recently, this has been impossible because writing using the on-screen keyboard is nearly as much of a pain in the butt due to typos as using a pencil.
Now I have an iPad2. In addition, I have a “Book book” iPad case. I love this thing on so many levels, but my favorite part is that my iPad case looks like an old book, an icon for which I hold a tremendous amount of reverence. The other thing I have is a fairly small wireless keyboard.
For the past few days I have noticed that when I feel the urge the write, the typical counter-urge to stay on my ass and do nothing is not as strong because it takes so little effort to just pull out the iPad, turn on the wireless keyboard, and start typing.
The software I use on the iPad for writing is iA Writer. I use this software specifically for something that it calls focus mode, where everything but the current paragraph is grayed out and there is nothing on the screen but my words. Nothing. No distractions, no blips from IMs or e-mails and most importantly for me, no temptation to fire up a code editor and start doing something technical.
This software also has iCloud support so that when I’m done spewing stream-of-consciousness raw prose into the iPad, I can take it over to my Mac, put it in my desktop writing application, and refine it later when I am in that mode. One thing that I’ve noticed is that I have very different needs and desires in terms of the way software looks and behaves when I’m creating something new versus when I’m editing and revising.
If you’ve been resisting the idea of writing on your iPad, then you might want to try again with this combination of software and hardware as I’ve found it very comfortable and easy to use. If you have your own favorite software/hardware for using the iPad as a writing tool, I’d love to hear about it.
Backspace Agent-Author Seminar – November 2011
Last week I attended the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar in New York City. For those of you unfamiliar with this seminar, writers are given a chance to present their query letter and opening pages in front of fellow writers of the same genre and agents looking for work in that genre. By present, you might be thinking that you simply get to hand your papers to an agent and be done with it.
In this format, we actually had to read our query letters and our opening pages out loud to the agents and fellow writers. I don’t know about many other writers, but the idea that other people are reading my story is nerve-wracking enough, but reading it aloud in front of other people, many of whom are far more talented than I, is worthy of a stomach-wrenching nervous breakdown.
First, let me just say that the agents were amazing. I learned so much from the short period of time I got to spend listening to their feedback. At times the feedback may have seemed harsh but writers need to know how to take constructive criticism and I learned a bunch of things that I hadn’t thought about before and had some of my techniques validated. I also met a bunch of great authors and we all have plans to use each other as critique buddies in the future.
Second, I want to say that reading your work out loud is quite possibly one of the best things you can do during the editing process. The human brain is an incredibly forgiving organ and its number one specialty is pattern recognition and compensation. In other words, while you are reading your own work in your head, your mind tends to fill in gaps, smooth over awkward speed-bump phrasing, and forgives much. When you read your work out loud, you’ll find that you come to a dead stop on awkward sentences, places where words don’t belong, and even on things like misplaced or dangling modifiers. Since I got home from the conference, I’ve been reading aloud each new chapter or scene that I write before I start the usual editing process and I am finding a ton of stuff that might have otherwise slipped through the cracks and only been caught by an editing partner.
I am an autodidact – always have been and always will be. Throughout my life and my career as a writer and computer programmer, there have been these key moments where I am suddenly aware of how much more I don’t know than I used to. At some point, I become fairly confident in knowing what I don’t know and the limits of my own advancement become finite. Then, something happens. I read an amazing book, meet a certified genius, or attend a conference, and everything changes. My horizons recede and I return to this amazing place where I have no idea how much I don’t know. The possibilities become endless again and I get filled with this childlike giddiness as I am confronted with nearly infinite learning possibilities.
This is what happened to me at Backspace. My horizons receded, the possibilities again became endless, and I have an amazing new perspective on writing. The conference re-invigorated me, inspired me, and more importantly, showed me how much more I have yet to learn. I highly recommend this conference for any writer who has finished a book and thinks they’re ready to take the next step toward publication.
A terrible, sleepless, epiphanous, wonderful night
I tossed, I turned, I rolled and scrunched and tucked and squirmed, utterly unable to attain that restful state where you know that sleep, though elusive, is inevitable. I clawed at the frayed, gnawed filmstrips of my dreams, hoping that something would catch and I would be able to grab hold, dive into the dream, and drift into blissful sleep. Alas, nothing happened. I turned more. I tossed more. Ever fitful and with growing frustration, I repeated the futile, choreographed dance of non-sleep.
I knew why it was happening. On the lowest and easiest to comprehend level, I knew that I’d had a coffee after dinner. This was my right and fit punishment for such a decision. But, just underneath the surface, a refracted, rippling and less obvious source of my insomnia was visible. Yesterday morning, at 11:30am, my uncle died. Cancer raised the battle cry against him, cancer fought the war, and cancer and its innumerable side effects defeated him.
Rather than sit in a corner, blubbering and jiggling as would a shaken bowl of still-cooling Jell-O, oozing a bevy of sobs and tears, my mind retreated. Rather than confront the truth and reality of my uncle’s death, the mortality of his departure and, let’s be honest, my own inevitable mortality, my mind turned and ran, its tail between its legs. It threw at me every possible shiny object, red herring, and interesting thought it could muster, anything it could put in my path to keep me from staring death in the face.
This was no ordinary collection of obstacles. My subconscious knows my conscious better than I do (I also realize the recursively flawed nature of that statement), and it knows what I like to chew on. I got up out of bed and in 10 minutes flat wrote the entire suite of sample code for “Hour 13″ of my upcoming Mac OS X Lion programming book. That failed to sate my desire for … whatever it was that I desired.
So then I started writing. Not prose, but something closer to stream-of-consciousness brainstorming, a free, unfettered and unfiltered flow of raw inspiration through my fingers and into outbound e-mails to my sounding board, friend, and editor of brutal ferocity. I’ve been working on storyboarding my novel and something just hasn’t been clicking into place lately. I’ve haven’t been able to nail down the rules of the world in which my book takes place. In addition, I haven’t found good behavioral and archetypal models for my characters. Further, I haven’t found a title for this book or its sequels.
Tonight, between fretful tosses and disgruntled turns, I picked up my smartphone and double-thumbed out e-mails containing my novel’s rules concerning the level, degree, and nature of magic in its world. I detailed the behavioral and archetypal models for the protagonist and many of the supporting characters and, though I didn’t send out the e-mail, I also jotted down pages of information on my antagonist and his cronies. This was all after 1am, mind you, when any sane person (who worked during the day) would be sleeping.
I put the phone down and again sought unconscious respite from the day’s news, events, and my ever-reddening bloodshot eyes. After another 30 minutes of sleeplessness, I was hit by the names for all 3 novels I had planned, including the name of the series to which they belong. These names might not stick, but they’re at the very least a straw man with which to elicit better, more powerful and evocative book titles.
And now, at 3:45 in the morning, in the patch dark with nothing but the glow of my monitor and even dimmer glow of the backlit keyboard lighting the room around me, here I sit writing this blog entry. I don’t do so because I think anyone’s reading my blog (in fact I have compelling evidence to the contrary) nor do I do so out of desire to increase my readership. No, I do this out of pure compulsion, not the kind of compulsion that makes a sleepwalker fix themselves a pastrami on rye before heading back to bed, but the kind of compulsion where you know you will find no peace until you satisfy that compulsion.
And so, finally, to the point of the title of my post: a terrible, sleepless, epiphanous, wonderful night. It started with the terrible news of my uncle’s death and continued with the maddening sleeplessness brought on by my mind’s defense mechanism, its poor attempt to shield me from the harsh reality only making the situation worse by depriving me of much-needed sleep and ability to focus. The night was epiphanous (I actually had to check to make sure that word was in the dictionary – it is). In the span of just a few hours I felt the pain and sadness of the lowest of the lows and the unbridled joy when your mind is filled with an open fire hose of ideas.
For the first time in my life, I know that I am a writer. I’m not just pretending to be one, nor am I an aspiring writer. Being a writer has nothing to do with being published. Being a writer has everything to do with being physically unable to sleep until you have given form to thought, given venue and escape to the ideas and concepts burned into your mind’s eye. I’ve experienced being literally tortured by the onslaught of ideas, information, and words that begged to be put to pen and would not rest until I had done so, including this blog post that puts form to my own struggle to both confront and avoid the death of my uncle.
Now that I’ve managed to empty my mind of the things my subconscious thought could keep me from my confrontation with death, I can now feel the pain and sadness approaching. Thankfully, I can also feel exhaustion and sleep approaching just as rapidly.
Submission Day and the Editing Process
Today I submitted a short story to an anthology for publication. I have submitted to this publisher before and been rejected several times before, some of these rejections resulting in posts on this blog. After each of these rejections I was able to take a few steps back and look at the work I submitted and try and see the piece from their point of view.
Sometimes, the writing was bad. By writing, I mean the craft itself was bad. I had poor sentences or awkward paragraphs and in many places I had beats in the wrong places and the story just flowed wrong.
Other times, as mentioned in a few other blog posts, I submitted a scene or even a loosely collected series of narrative events. In these instances what I submitted was not what most people would consider a short story.
The piece I submitted this morning, a 5,100 word urban fantasy short story, is by far the single best short story I’ve ever written. After finishing the first draft nearly two months ago, I have been re-writing it, editing it, and subjecting myself to brutal criticism from an amazing editor (if she had a blog or a mugshot, I would provide a link here).
Several dozen revisions later, I feel like it is a great short story. It isn’t a scene that is being squished into the short story format, it is an actual short story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It has a hook. I think the writing is some of the best I’ve ever done, the beats are in the right place, the story flows fast when it should be fast, slow when it should be slow. All of the myriad of tiny little details that readers take for granted, I obsessed over for months trying to get this story right.
Now that I’ve submitted this story and I can see what it looked like when I started versus what it looked like when I finished and it really is night and day. I didn’t add a mountain of words and in many cases removed some, but the painstaking attention to every detail in every paragraph as well as to the story as a whole really paid off.
This led me to re-evaluate my concept of the editing process. I used to think of writing as a process that consisted of two big steps: you write, then you edit. To me, editing was something that was done after you produced whatever it is you wanted to label your initial draft. This placed far too much emphasis on the initial output and not enough on editing.
What I’ve learned is that writing isn’t what you do before editing. Writing is editing. The initial output is just that, it’s the starting point on a (often very long) journey. What you do to your initial output isn’t a grammar check or a check for punctuation, it’s a check for the thousands of subtle things that writers do at the micro and macro level: hunt down adverbs and replace them with stronger verbs, find passive voice and passive phrases and strengthen them where appropriate, make sure that as you build compound sentences you lead the reader’s mind’s eye from the right start to the right finish every time and at the right pace.
There’s still a million other things to do that I’ve been habitually bad at doing like consistency checking (making sure that if a character is on the ground in one paragraph, they’re still there in the next), object tracking (making sure that the reader’s mental image of a scene is stable and not disrupted by inconsistencies), dialogue consistency (making sure that people talk the way they should be talking given their backgrounds and current situation), beats and pacing check, exposition versus dialog (“say it don’t tell it” etc) checking, and when that’s done there’s a million more things.
I’m not saying these things to scare potential writers. I’m saying these things because I used to look at a draft and say, “this is good enough” and stop 20-40 revisions too soon. Good enough isn’t good enough. It’s very hard for writers to put themselves in the minds of a reader who has never read the story before – it’s been bouncing around in the writer’s head for weeks, months, maybe even years. It takes disciplined attention to detail and the aid of unbiased, objective, and hopefully brutal reviewers and editors to pull out the core nugget of greatness from the surrounding pile of mediocre writing and turn a good story into one worth publishing.
I am hoping that with this new-found respect for the editing process, my future pieces will be better for it. Even if I never get any of my future stories published, I now know how to make them far better than they ever would have been before.
Fear Conquering
This weekend I did quite a bit of fear conquering and that got me to thinking that an awful lot of the things I do to avoid writing are fear-based. I have a nearly-paralyzing fear of heights that starts as soon as I stand on a footstool and this weekend I got up on a zipline 50 feet above the water (25′ above the cliff) and swallowed the fear and rode the zipline from start to finish. Fear 0, Kevin 1.
Certainly I fear rejection. I think you are given this fear as an initiation present, a “welcome to the author’s club” trophy that you carry with you as a combination point of pride and burden for the rest of your life. I don’t think fear of rejection ever goes away, we just get better at suppressing it.
What I think I realized this weekend, however, is that underneath the fear of rejection is an even more deep-seated fear, a fear that is often so traumatizing that we can’t even bear to confront it or even admit that we have it. Some writers reading this now probably know what I’m talking about already. The real fear, the paralyzing fear that simmers underneath the frying pan of the fear of rejection and the other things that contribute to writer’s block is this: the fear that we aren’t actually good at writing.
When I was a kid I took an aptitude test. This test told me that I should consider a career in the sanitation field or perhaps janitorial. At the time I had very few lofty goals outside of augmenting my collection of He-Man and G.I. Joe figures, so this didn’t hurt me much.
What if, as an adult, someone reviewed my writing and said, “you know what, you should stick to your day job.” Nobody (with the exception of a few strange people) wants to be that guy on American Idol who thinks he can sing but ends up in the “embarrassingly bad” clip montage. No writer wants to be that guy that devotes a year or two or twenty of his life to writing, to pouring his soul out onto disk, only to be shown the door and told that his stuff sucks and is beyond help.
I think this is the real cause for so much of a writer’s anxiety. They aren’t necessarily afraid of rejection, though it certainly stings. Everybody knows that even great writers have been rejected – if the story isn’t what they want to publish at the time, or if the editor was in a crabby mood that morning, the story is thrown in the round file. What none of us want is to get all the way to the end of the road and we wind up on the “embarrassingly bad” writer’s list. We can tolerate being called “unpublished writers”, but, can we tolerate someone telling us we shouldn’t be writing?
As I was standing on the launching platform for the zipline I looked down about 25 feet and saw metal fences, hard rock, and people, none of which I was particularly interested in landing on. 25 feet below them I saw water. I’d always had trouble with heights so it came as no surprise to me that I had trouble breathing and every fiber of my being told me to turn the hell around, go back on solid ground, and give up. Let someone else take the risk.
That’s when I reminded myself about this one pervasive fact: the only difference between me and the other people on the zipline was what was going on inside my head. If my brain wasn’t telling me that I was going to die, then I could easily get up on the zipline and jump off the platform.
This same conversation goes on in a writer’s head when they sit down to write. Somewhere deep inside, there might be a voice telling this writer that they aren’t good enough, that they aren’t really a writer, and that they shouldn’t bother, that they should let someone else take the risk.
I decided at that moment that I was going to take the risk, that the journey was worth it even if the ending wasn’t the one I’d dreamed of. And so the point of this blog post is that, if anybody is reading this and thinking about spending a year or more writing a novel, they should do it. Don’t let someone else take that risk, because they’ll end up with a novel and you’ll end up with regret. The only difference between the writers writing and the writers pacing is what’s going on inside their head, and thankfully, we have complete control over that. So write. Fear can’t stop you unless you let it.
I will close out this blog post with some inspiring words from Frank Herbert’s Dune about fear:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Writer, go and write. Everything else is secondary.