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Outlining

Since I’m drawing near the end of the outlining phase of my new WIP, I should probably explain my fairly simple three part process.

  1. Concept summary.
    • This tends to be written in a notebook, and is a written exploration of the general flow of the novel. The concept summary for my current work is three pages of a Moleskine notebook. The focus is more on dramatic conflict and character evolution than on detailed plot points.
    • This stage also includes various notes on sources of conflict and tension, a sort of mission statement, and reference books that I’d like to keep handy.
  2. Chapter Outline.
    • Each chapter is described in a few lines with emphasis on major plot points that need to occur in that chapter. In this project, I decided on a set number of chapters and worked within that constraint. In another work, the exploration of chapter creation might dictate the number of chapters.
  3. Scene Outline.
    • The chapters are then broken down into a number of scenes. The level of detail is increased, but each scene is still described in only a sentence or two. The focus is still on the major elements that contribute to the overall dramatic structure.

When everything has been laid out, I can sit down each day and tackle a scene or two. I’ve found that this level of outlining gives me a basic structure to work from without dictating exactly where the story needs to go. There is breathing room between the gaps in the outline that gives me a freedom to explore characters and storyline as the work progresses. My novel writing software of choice is Scrivener, and it allows me to create virtual folders for each chapter. Contained within these chapters are the scene files. Each of these items is just an outline note that represents an actual text file. By simply clicking and dragging in the outline view, an entire chapter or scene can be moved forwards or backwards in the narrative.

I’ve found that this process helps me focus on the writing, and removes any real possibility of writer’s block. I don’t always outline an entire project, but I do find that it helps to always have the next few days worth of scenes ready to go so I can sit down and focus on the writing rather than wondering what happens next. As long as I don’t catch up to the end of my outline, I’ve never had a problem meeting my daily word count goals.

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By Mark Feenstra – July 22, 2010

How Redundant Are You?

In 2006 I burned two months worth of photos to disc in a photo lab in Bangkok. It was a modern shop with technology that probably outstrips what I would have found at most places in North America. When I returned home, I put the discs in a safe place and downloaded all the images from memory cards to computer. I resized the better images to share online or print out, and largely forgot about them.

A year later, someone thought it would be a good idea to kick down my apartment door and steal my computer. So many of my photos and writings from the last few years were gone, and I was left with a pile of backup discs in varying conditions. Little of my writing survived, and only one of the two discs from my months in Thailand was readable by my new computer. I tried it on my computer at work, I tried it on my brother’s professional photo editing system, I even sent it home with a few friends to see if they could rescue the data, but the disc remained unreadable. While I’m sure I could have paid a data recovery expert to try to pull the photos off for me, I was so frustrated that I decided to just leave it.

These days I shoot a 12.3 megapixel digital SLR (as opposed to the 2 MP point and shoot I had in Thailand) and I’ve learned that my backup solutions needed to scale with the upgrade. If you’re creating anything of value on your computer, what steps are you taking to ensure that you don’t lose it for good if everything goes down?

The Rule of Three
Always keep your important items in 3 different locations. This is as important as your documents are to you. It’s highly recommended that at least one of the backup locations is not in the same room or building as the other two. Do you live in an apartment or condo with a sprinkler system? Ever looked around at your electronics and realized how much would disappear if the apartment down the hall was on fire and your sprinklers went off?

Backing Up Your Writing
The nice thing about backing up text documents is the relatively small amount of space they take up.

  • Site 1: Your Hard Drive. Easy, this is where your work already lives.
  • Site 2: An External Drive. 4 GB thumb drives are incredibly cheap these days, but to store thousands of pages of text documents, you only need 1 GB. For larger backup solutions, I love my WD My Passport Essential 500 GB drive so much that I took it to South America for 5 weeks to back up my photos. Use the built in software on your computer (I use Time Machine on my Mac), incremental back up software (I use Carbon Copy Cloner), or just drag and copy files from one drive to the next.
  • Site 3: On the Interwebs. This is the second easiest method. Check out the online backup tools like Dropbox, Mozy, or something you’ve had recommended. After about ten minutes of set up and initial sync, I had all of my writing stored in the Dropbox folder on my hard drive. Everything placed in this folder is mirrored on the Dropbox website, and accessible through a login. I also have Dropbox installed on my netbook, and it automatically updates to the latest versions of my writing when it’s able to connect to the Dropbox server. With the 2 GB of storage on a free account, my writing is safe in the event of a physical calamity, easy to access if I’m not at my own computer, and synced across multiple computers as long as I have internet access. What’s not to like?
  • Alternative to Online Storage. Okay, it’s 2010, but not everyone has daily internet access. What else can you do? Buy a second flash drive and leave it at the office. Bring it home once a week to do a backup, and return it to your office the next day. Don’t work in an office? Swap with a friend every week. You store their weekly backup, and they store yours. No friends? Put your drive in a plastic bag or watertight container and bury it in the woods. Dig it up every week to copy your data, and while you’re digging maybe think about, you know, getting out and meeting people.

Backing Up Your Photos While Travelling
This is what I did on my last trip. You’ll see that it still carries the risk of having all the data in the same area, but with internet connections being slow, and online storage beyond a few GB getting expensive, this was a risk I wasn’t too worried about.

  • Site 1: Your Memory Cards. I don’t erase memory cards until I’m desperate for space.
  • Site 2: A Computer Hard Drive. Most nights in Chile and Peru (until my netbook’s hard drive died), I used Lightroom to import the day’s images and give them a rough sort. Lightroom stores the photos in a Year/Month/Day folder tree, and the computer lives in my main backpack. It often stayed in the room while I was out all day. After the netbook went belly up, I used hotel computers to transfer to Site 3.
  • Site 3: An External Drive. If you’re shooting a dSLR, you have no reason not to go buy at least a 500 GB drive. My WD drive is small enough that I regularly copied my Lightroom folders to the external drive with incremental backup software, and then carried the external drive in my camera bag while out for the day.

Backing up your work may seem like an extra expense or effort, but if you’re one of those people who only has one copy of your key works, how would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and it had disappeared?

I worked at an outdoor shop in Squamish when I first moved to British Columbia. Squamish is a popular climbing destination, and carries the not unusual stigma of being a town where you run a high risk of having your car broken into at the parking lots outside of town. Every now and then someone would be walking around the store making a list of items and their costs to report to their insurance company. Chatting about the theft and bad luck, it came out on two separate occasions that students on a summer road trip had lost the computer with the single digital copy of their entire grad thesis. Sure, they had various printouts and notes that they could piece back together, but the bulk of the writing was gone forever.

How many hours have you put into your manuscript, and how prepared would you be if your computer just didn’t turn on one day?

PS: If you would like an extra 250 MB of space on a free 2 GB Dropbox account, please use this Dropbox referral link.

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By Mark Feenstra – July 15, 2010

Word Zero

I cut all of my hair off a few days ago. The reflection of my nearly bald head in the mirror still confuses me, but it was time for a change. My hair had begun to brush my shoulders on the side, and most days it took an hour or two to dry after my shower. My hair was getting everywhere; little rogue swirls of it collecting under the bed to jump out and ambush my socks. I haven’t paid for a haircut in more than ten years, and was feeling too lazy to use the scissors, so out came the buzzer and off went the hair.

There are a lot of friends I don’t see that often now that I’ve quit my job. Invariably, when I do see them I am asked how the writing is going. Lately, all I can say is “up and down” while rocking my hand back and forth in the international hand signal for ‘meh’. During a three week visit to Victoria, I actually had to plug a cable into my computer when I wanted to get online, and this inconvenienced me so much that I managed to neglect this blog for the entire three weeks. For the first week back in Vancouver, I was still feeling the lag and let another week slip by. As the month drifted past without any blog posts, time spent working on my novel also trickled to a halt. Perhaps ‘sudden’ and ‘abrupt’ might serve better in place of trickled. The first few days in Victoria, I settled into the house we were looking after, eked out a quiet room to write in, and got used to the new location. After four days of sleeping in and lazing about, I sat down to write. I produced 12,000 words over the course of four days, and haven’t managed another since.

Three years ago I sat down to write my first novel. I have sordid history of not finishing personal projects, and I was going to prove to myself that I could write a novel length piece of fiction. It was a horrible story. Something I’d never have let anyone read or ever considered for publication, but it was easy to write and I was more concerned with finishing than I was with quality. I quit around the 40,000 word mark. I’d been accepted into a year long writers’ studio, and decided that I didn’t need this silly novel project to prove to myself that I was a writer, I’d be paying a few thousand dollars tuition to take care of that. The novel was abandoned and its carcass left to rot on my hard drive with the many other short story drafts that had accumulated over the years.

This current project has turned into a struggle. It was supposed to be a practice run for the project I really cared about. It was supposed to be written quickly and relatively effortlessly. It was supposed to have been done sometime last week. Instead, it sits and festers just a thousand or so words longer than my previous best effort. The temptation to move on to the next project has been strong, but I’ve been trying to convince myself that I need to finish something for once. It may be difficult, but this story needs to be finished before the next can begin.

The problem is that I’m just not happy with what I’ve done to my current work in progress. There was a good idea in there somewhere, but I lost that thread months ago. I’m officially dropping the draft and moving on to the next project. I don’t know that I’ll be able to look on this as anything but a failure until I finally manage to complete a full draft, but I guess that’s just something I’ll have to live with. I’ve managed to convince myself that it’s smarter to work this way. I’m switching to a story that’s been tugging at me for the last nine months, and it’s the idea that really pushed me to take this time off. It is the idea with the best likelihood of publication, and the one I’ve always planned to put the most revision work into. If I can finish a first draft of this story, I’ll be able to put it in a drawer while I go back to work on the last 30,000 words of the Hero project. This should give me enough distance to effectively tackle the rewrites.

Of course, at this point I can’t tell if this is sound logic or just a coping mechanism, but the truth of it all is that my free time is passing me by, and soon I’ll be back under the constraints of a work schedule. Now is my time to write, and this is the project I really want to be working on. Back to word zero it is.

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By Mark Feenstra – July 5, 2010

The Longhand Rant

Writing longhand does not make you a better writer. You may feel as though you can think things through more thoroughly, or that the feeling of scribbling your crayon across the page helps you better tap into the muse, but that is the difference between opinion and universal law.

Last week I attended a reading where the two featured authors slipped into a sidetrack exposition on the virtues of writing longhand. They told us how applying pen to paper and writing slowly gives the work a depth that pecking away at a keyboard just can’t provide. The two technophobic old farts also explained how the new generation is in too much of a rush to write these days. I was told that we don’t like to write bridge scenes anymore, and that our work is always rushing towards action and conclusion, never taking the time to slow down and smell the flowers.

One of the authors put it like this:

“It seems that people don’t want to write long anymore, but strangely enough a lot of people still want to read long.”

I think the author is confusing what writers want to do with what the general reading public is looking for. Looking at books on my shelf published in the last five years I see short poppy contemporary literature, sitting next to long and intricately woven narratives. Shorter books are indeed popular, but is this more because a certain demographic chooses to be distracted by myriad other activities instead of reading, or is because writers are just getting lazy with their keyboards? I’ll let you chew on that one for a bit.

While I’m on the rant, I’d also like to mention that Mrs. Longhand’s book barely tipped 200 pages of wide margin and large fonts. Not having read the book, I can’t comment on the writing, but the snippets she read to us gave the impression of a fast moving book that didn’t sound nearly as interesting as the research that went into it. Maybe if she’d used a computer she might have been able to put a few more words on the page before finishing each writing day, and ultimately put a little more flesh on the bones of her story.

This whole writing long hand is The One True Way argument would be a lot more powerful if it wasn’t always pushed on my by people who look like they still own a VCR continuously blinking 12:00.

Write however you damn well want, it’s all just words when it’s rolling off the press.

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By Mark Feenstra – June 3, 2010

Grand Gestures

Quitting my job to write full time has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. In some ways, it helped me to access a depth of confidence and creativity that I’d long thought beyond my reach. That said, I’d never recommend it to anyone else.

Making a drastic life shift like this came after a lot of thought and planning, and if I’m being honest, more than a little desperation. For two years I planned my departure from the regular working world, and it wasn’t until the last few months that I decided to make writing the focus of my time off. Somewhere in the plans to travel and generally goof off, I’d realized a few things. It’s not likely that I’ll ever again be in a situation of having so little responsibility. No kids, no mortgage, no car payments, no debt, no job, and a fair amount of fiscal freedom. For a few months at least, I could live the dream and finally get down to work.

It’s never that easy though. Last week I received an email from a young writer who is sitting on the opposite end of that spectrum. He feels that his job at a call centre is crushing his ability to be creative, and that the stresses of life are frustrating his attempts at writing. I can easily relate to this, because I felt my job was doing the same thing. I was lucky enough to be in a great working environment, but the work itself was tiresome and frustrated me to no end. I felt I couldn’t possibly write anything worth reading unless I could break free of that external pressure.

I was wrong. To be fair, I’ve known this for a very long time, but a part of me didn’t really want to admit it. You see, I suffer from something I call Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome [GIGS]. You might be afflicted by GIGS if you’ve ever uttered the phrase “things will be so much better when…” or “I could write so much more if…” Unfortunately, all I have to tell you is that the circumstances don’t matter. You will either write, or you won’t, and there is a very strong likelihood that you will write better if you’re struggling against external pressures. For many writers, there is a power in suffering that translates into the work they create. It is a writer’s job to make the reader feel something, and many writers use energy from the extremes of their emotion to write the words that will make a reader feel most keenly. Everything that happens to you is fuel for your work, but this is nothing new, and you’ve read this all before. You don’t really want to know that it’s just as difficult to work when you have all day to focus on it exclusively.

What I offer you, if you’re stuck and feeling as though life is keeping you from achieving your goals, is the idea of a grand gesture. I’m talking about doing something big and scary in the name of your art. For me, it was quitting my job, but for you it may mean hiding your TV in the closet and putting a desk in its place. Maybe you’ll rent a workspace for two hours every week so that you have a proper place to work. You might sign up for a year long writer’s studio, or even a weekend introduction to fiction writing class. Maybe it will be as small as buying your first notebook in a very long time, and deciding that you will write one creative sentence every week. Only you know what little push you need, and the thing to remember is that you must do something that scares you a little bit, and that the act itself is meaningless without the followthrough.

There is power in grand gestures. You may not think you have the ideal circumstances to be creative or productive, but the only thing that separates you from the great masters of this world in this respect is that they didn’t let such a silly thing stop them from trying. Making a grand gesture in honour of your work may not put your ass in the chair every day, or keep you working hard, but it might just give you enough confidence to convert you from someone who wishes they could do something, to someone who does it.

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By Mark Feenstra – May 27, 2010