Scriniary

Way of the Cheetah, by Lynn Viehl, is a book about writing fast — producing more books in a year. The first time I skimmed through it I found it useless; after re-reading I like it much better. It’s a good collection of advice for people who are relatively new to writing seriously.

It takes 50 pages (of 70 total) to get to the actual *writing*. Before that, it’s scheduling and equipment and space to write — all important, but not actual writing. (The section on equipment will probably be pretty useful to many people, given the number of times I’ve seen people in panic over computer crashes that lost a day/week/lifetime of writing.) If you haven’t already read a bunch of how-to-write books or been hanging out on the internet with other writers, it’s worth a look.

Her three-pass editing process is very nice and streamlined — in theory. Maybe someday I’ll be a better writer and be able to only edit three times; I would love that. Or maybe someday I’ll be a better writer and still go over each scene a dozen times.

She advocates writing straight through the first draft, editing each day’s work later that same day, but not while writing. (Editing here means changing wording, fixing grammar – minor stuff.) That’s it til the whole book is done and she prints it and marks it up, doing the line editing as well as rewriting scenes and chapters if necessary. The third edit is polishing the prose.

I don’t have any *problem* with that process. I just don’t see how to do it. Maybe she plans things in great detail before hand; I don’t actually know. And if that’s the solution, then I’m screwed. Even my “planning” stage (in which I write an entire zeroth draft) leaves me without a complete scene by scene outline. So as I start the first draft, things change, and I end up deleting scenes, adding scenes, moving scenes, rewriting scenes — all before I’m done with chapter two.

(Here’s an old post about my revision process. I’ve changed terminology — what I called the first draft is now the zeroth draft, and I am not doing step 2a of typing it in! I thought (correctly) that it might actually be more efficient to do a blank page rewrite. And I still haven’t read the book referred to in the comments.)

One might argue that I’m doing her second pass during my first (not zeroth) draft, and that’s probably true. I could leave it for later. Having tried that in the past, the idea of having a whole novel’s worth of horrible awful revision to do at once makes me want to give up in despair. So I don’t think that’s the solution.

Anyway, I do so much rearranging of scenes that I *can’t* also do line-editing stuff on the same printout, because it very quickly becomes impossible to read. So I revise on screen, print, scribble all over the page, type in changes, revise on screen again, and often, print it out again. I am trying to cut back to one printout per chapter. But I don’t want to streamline my revision process at the expense of the book’s quality, no matter how much faster I’d like to be working.

At least the current novel (my second) is going way faster than my first one did. Not as fast as I’d like, though some of that is due to lack of time spent on it rather than multiple revision passes. But I have learned a few things.

And writing this post was a good example of how *not* to get any work done.

Filed by scriniary at 2:48 am under Books, Writing
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Finished A Feast for Crows. Loved it, though I’m not champing at the bit for the next one just yet. I need a break to read something completely different. I’m trying to read a book a month this year (those of you doing the 52-book challenge are welcome to laugh). I didn’t think this was the first book I read this month, but I don’t have any other posts tagged. And apparently I never tagged a post for Tamara Siler Jones’ Ghosts in the Snow, but I must have read it last fall. (It was good, go read it.)

I skimmed through Way of the Cheetah and found it less than useful. I’ll take another look before I delete it/give it away.

Paperback Writer lists synopsis-writing links.

Filed by scriniary at 5:19 pm under Books, Writing
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Riddle 1: How is fettucine alfredo better than buttered toast? It lands facing up.
Riddle 2: How is fettucine alfredo worse than buttered toast? It sprays fettucine around the room on the way down.

Mnemonic:
Since I cannot ever, ever spell emporer and sorceror correctly, and was too dumb to have kings and wizards instead, I have created a sentence to help me:

The emperor did
not pore
over the sorcerer's recipe for
roooooooast
geeeeeeese.

(I suppose “The sorcerer geese roasted the emperor” would work, too.)

Filed by scriniary at 4:56 am under Uncategorized
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Skating Club:
Excellent. We worked on so many things that I could be doing better, mostly mohawks and alternating forward inside 3-turns. Supposedly those are easier than alternating forward outside 3s, but since my inside 3s aren’t great, being able to take the step to the next three 3 and still have the balance to turn is … not guaranteed.

After class I played around with some other stuff, working on back outside 3s and a T-stop. My basic skating class at school was so disorganized that I only ever really learned to stop by doing a snowplow, and my snowplow is very very bad. You’re supposed to point your toes together, and my feet don’t go that way. I am the opposite of pigeon-toed. I am going to work on spread eagles and Ina Bauers, because I have the turn-out for them.

Couldn’t spin to save my life last night, so it’s a good thing I didn’t have to.

Filed by scriniary at 4:39 pm under Skating
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From Paul Graham’s essay How to Do What You Love:

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a
novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.

I appreciate his acknowledgement that it’s ok not to know what you want to do when you’re young. So many people see changing your mind, or trying something different out of curiousity, as failure.

Filed by scriniary at 5:05 pm under Life
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Skating club:
Frustrating. We worked on basic stroking and crossovers, which meant I actually had to pay attention and do them properly, which I never do because it’s boring. And I know we need to learn basics before we work on more difficult stuff, but I’ve learned them. And I hate the way the class is divided into beginners and advanced and ne’er the twain shall meet. They’ve been doing a pretty good job of teaching us footwork and dances, but still. I want my spins and jumps back, dammit.

Anyway, we didn’t do basics long enough for me to get too bored, before we moved on to the Canasta Tango, of which I can now do the first three steps before I forget what comes next. If we do it another 3-4 times I’ll figure it out.

Filed by scriniary at 4:09 pm under Skating
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When someone actually explains it well.

Back at skating club for the first time in a few weeks. We went over the Dutch Waltz, which we’d done on two previous occasions – but this time, with the other coach. She actually explained the steps in a way that made sense to me, and I can now do the dance properly. (Except for the progressives – I’m on the right beats in the music, but I don’t do the progressives right.) Not well, but properly. Now instead of stumbling around feeling lost, I can enjoy the challenge of trying to get all the steps in the right place on the ice and in time to the music and with good posture and my shoulders squared…

Filed by scriniary at 7:13 am under Skating
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Lately I’ve been reading yet another time management/productivity book, and I thought I’d take the time to review some of the useful ideas I’ve got from various sources.

The three systems I’ve tried over the past few years each have their own areas of focus, approaches to time managment, and tools for handling tasks.

I’ve found Flylady, which is more a system of housework than time management, good for handling routine chores, though many of her values as expressed on her website drive me insane. Julie Morgenstern’s Time Management from the Inside Out takes a top-down approach, encouraging people to consider their values in designing a “time map” that schedules time for personal projects as well as work. David Allen’s Getting Things Done is a bottom-up method that talks more about how to get the little stuff done, rather than about deciding what projects to undertake in the first place. (I’ve also got Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog!, but haven’t read it.)

Flylady

The core of Flylady’s system, at least the part I found useful, is creating a schedule for getting routine but necessary household tasks done, and doing it in little bits at a time. She advises doing an overall cleaning once a week, and tackling tougher problems in 15-minute chunks the rest of the week. She also has morning and evening routines for daily stuff.

The brief weekly cleaning is just enough to maintain the house’s state, but not really enough to improve things.

Each week, you switch to a different “zone” of the house and work on it for 15 minutes a day, decluttering if necessary, deep cleaning (like scrubbing baseboards) if it’s already picked up.

What I like about this system is the way it makes decluttering and cleaning (and paying bills, doing laundry, other routine chores) into a series of small tasks. I used to put “clean the apartment” on my calendar for Saturdays, and then not want to do it because it was such a huge project. So I’d put it off and the apartment would be that much dirtier the next week, so I’d put it off again…. This way it gets a quick onceover most weeks and whatever doesn’t get cleaned waits for next time.

Time Management from the Inside Out

Reading Time Management from the Inside Out is a great way to realize that there isn’t enough time to do everything you want to do, so you have to decide what you really, really want to do and let the other stuff die.

Morgenstern’s tool is the time map. A time map is a weekly schedule, not too vague, not too detailed, upon which you schedule everything you want to do in a week. I say “not too detailed” because you don’t need to write “Wed. 7 – 9 p.m. crochet afghan”. You simply mark those two hours as “self time”, rather than “work” or “family time”, and when the evening rolls around, decide whether to work on the afghan or read a book or go jogging. (Or, at the office, designate a certain time of day for paperwork or phone calls, but not specify which papers or which calls.)

For me, making the time map was more useful than following it, because it made me select a small number of things to focus on. The examples in the book are telling: the executive who’s writing his autobiography has no other hobbies; the working mother has no hobbies; the marathon runner has no hobbies. (See the trend?)

(Ok, I’m being slightly unfair. There are certain blocks of time designated as “self time” or “family time” which the example people could use to crochet their afghans. But they don’t have any big blocks of time to designate for big projects. No one in the examples is working and running marathons and writing their autobiography while volunteering in the parks and cooking gourmet meals.)

To make a time map, you not only decide what you want to do (go to work, write a novel, and exercise), but when the best time of day is for each project. If you’re more creative in the morning than at night, you schedule writing time before work and exercise time after work.

Getting Things Done

David Allen’s Getting Things Done seems like a good plan for people who really, really like to make lists. Like me. This is the system I’ve tried most recently, and it seems to be pretty close to how I naturally work.

The key to Allen’s system as I understand it is the Next Action. Everything you do that takes more than one step he calls a Project. For every project, there is a next action – the next physical thing that you have to do. For “write novel”, that might be “go over scene 2.2 for plot inconsistencies”. For “crochet afghan”, that might be “get the green yarn out of the craft bin”.

You don’t have to figure every step out in advance. You keep a list of projects (possibly subdivided into work, home, writing, and further divided into current projects (like “write post on time management”) and “someday/maybe” projects (like “write these eight books”)). Each project you’re working on has a next action. You don’t schedule it unless you have to. Whenever you finish one task, you look at all your next actions and pick one, based on what you can do, want to do, and need to do at that moment.

(Allen divides actions into context lists, so if you’re at a phone you only look at a list of calls to make, if you’re at a computer you only see computer tasks, etc. I haven’t found that useful yet, except for dividing “home” and “office”.)

Allen’s approach is designed to clear your head: you write every single thing down, in an organized system, to free your brain from the work of reminding you about it. The weekly review provides the chance to bring new projects off the “someday” list, so they aren’t forgotten forever, but they aren’t nagging at your brain.

I hope that was useful to some of you. Obviously there’s a lot more I could say about each system, but I tried to write down the main ideas that I took away from each of them.

Filed by scriniary at 12:56 am under Life
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