Elizabeth Shack

I was reading a post about the importance of distance by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, and wondering if it’s really just fresh eyes that make getting distance from a piece so helpful.

I know when I come back to a story after a few weeks off, I can find all sorts of problems that I’m sure weren’t there before.

Is my brain really mulling things over while I’m working on other things? In theory, I’m learning new things all the time, and I’d be able to apply them to old pieces. But I don’t think the learning curve is that steep.

I’ve mentioned I’m working on a programming project. Distance helps there, too. Since it’s all done in my spare time, there have been gaps of weeks or even months where I haven’t looked or even thought about it. Several times, I’ve opened the file up after a long absence, looked at a thorny problem I’d been stuck on, and fixed it immediately. It’s not like I was doing other programming in the meantime.

Anyone out there know why this happens? (I failed a quick google search. Maybe if I try again next week, I’ll hit the right query on the first try.)

Today’s post is late because we saw Swan Lake last night.  I spent much of the ballet thinking about what led the evil sorcerer to turn Odette and friends into swans in the first place, and what parts of the story would have to change to tell it from his perspective. 
 
Which reminded me I’d meant to talk about Zero Hour! My brother discovered this movie and brought a DVD over while I was home for Christmas. Zero Hour! is a 1957 disaster movie in which food poisoning strikes the  crew of an aircraft.  Passenger and former military pilot Ted Stryker has to overcome his PTSD and land the plane safely in time to get everyone to the hospital. 

Sound familiar?
 
The guys who made Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour! Not only is the plot the same, but they kept many of the same lines of dialog (“A hospital! What is it?”). The result is that Zero Hour!, a completely serious film, is now hilarious. Sort of like a karaoke version of Airplane! where you fill in the jokes yourself. (Actor: ”I am serious.” My family: ”And don’t call me Shirley!”)
 
It was really interesting to see the changes that were made to turn it from drama to comedy. Some of it is delivery, some of it is the addition of the jokes (“I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue” was not in Zero Hour!), some of it is context (aside from clunkiness, there’s nothing funny about “our only hope us to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have the fish for dinner” in Zero Hour!, but in Airplane!, I’m already primed to find things funny).

I enjoy the exercise of figuring out how to take one story and turn it into another. And I’m now writing a story abut swans…

Recently, Jamie Todd Rubin posted about how he tracks his writing progress with Evernote and a Google spreadsheet. (If you’re interested in using his method, Margaret McGaffey Fisk has an Excel spreadsheet available for download.)

I have a similar spreadsheet that I (used to) use for novel first drafts. But for over a year now, I’ve been tracking my writing in Bento. This is the same program that I use to keep a list of projects and track my submissions, and it’s convenient to have it all in one place.

Bento is a slightly simplified database program–you can’t directly hook things together (so I have to manually tell it to associate a “submission” entry to a “project” entry, but this is very easy to do).

I’ve mostly been tracking time spent, rather than word count, so that I can include planning and revision time as well. I only added a word count column and a “wrote new words today” checkbox a couple months ago, because I’d like to be producing more new stuff.

My column setup is:
Date, Project (the name of a novel, “Short Stories”, or “None” for critting or writing classes), Task (writing, revising, critting, etc), Duration (in minutes), Notes (where I type in what story I worked on, or whatever else I feel like noting), Word count (duh), New words (checked if I created new stuff, unchecked if I didn’t).

For the most part I don’t actually look at the data much. I can do basic searches to figure out how many hours I spent on X project in December, or how many hours Y short story took. The latter is something that’s becoming useful to know for planning purposes, though it doesn’t account for fermenting time.

I’m working on a project in Mathematica that will let me do a bunch more analysis and make pretty charts, but it’s been going in fits and starts. To be honest it’s more of a learn-Mathematica project than a improve-writing-productivity project (which I want to do because, and here is the disclaimer, I work for the company that makes it). I’ve nearly duplicated the functionality I’ve been getting from Bento’s search results.

For the next novel first draft, I will probably just type word counts into Bento and use Scrivener’s session targets instead of going back to my Excel spreadsheet. One less thing to mess with.

A Twitter conversation the other day reminded me of something I read a while back about how writers should learn to type faster, because then they’ll be able to write faster.

I can’t speak for that person, but in my case, my brain is the limiting factor, not my fingers. I can type garbage quite fast but that’s not all that helpful in the end.

I switched to Dvorak in 2007. Back then, my Qwerty typing speed was in the 70-80 wpm range, with a fair amount of errors (and when I take typing tests, I can’t stop myself from hitting backspace and fixing all my mistakes). A few months after the switch, I was in the 50-55 wpm range in Dvorak.

Four years later, I’m up to the mid-60s–still not back to my Qwerty days (but my hands don’t hurt, so I don’t care).

And these days I’m bi-keyboardal. Apple still hasn’t made an iOS Dvorak keyboard, which means all the writing I do on my iPad is Qwerty. It’s not touch typing or I suspect my hands would get very confused. Having to look at the letters makes it easier to remember Qwerty. When I use a fullsize external Qwerty keyboard I get very confused.

I know I could get a hardware Dvorak keyboard, but it’d be an extra thing to haul around.

If last week’s post was a look back at 2011, this one must be a look ahead at 2012. I’ll be finishing one novel revision, outlining and drafting another that I’ve already done a bunch of planning on, writing 4+ short stories, and considering doing another novel (which currently exists as a vague idea) for nanowrimo. I’ve got a schedule laid out in a timeline program so I can check that I’m not planning on doing too many things at once.

I’m also picking a couple habits to focus on each month. (More than one because most of them are things that are almost habits already, or else are old habits that I want to rekindle. Otherwise it’s hard to establish more than one new habit at a time.) These are exciting things like reading before bed and stretching every day–some health related, some writing related, some other stuff.

After a long search, I finally found an app that will let me check things off each day: GoalTracker. It’s pretty clearly designed for parents/kids, but putting butterfly stickers on a weekly chart will make my inner eight-year-old happy too. Plus it has pretty much no analytics features, so I won’t waste time thinking too hard about this. I just want to not clutter up my to do list or calendar, and put stickers in boxes. And maybe collect trophies.

If you’re hunting for something similar but want more analysis or a web-based tool (or something more grown up), 42goals and Joe’s goals both look pretty good.