Wroodles, Scrivener, and the Macbook Air.

Hey fellow Writers!

First off, another apology. My main machine is busted and I had to wait for my secondary machine to ship. On top of that, I had guests over, discovered we will have to move places some time this month, and I simply have not been keeping up with my wroodles.

Wroodles? What, you don’t know this awesome term that I just now came up with? Wroodles is to Writing as Doodles is to Drawing. Spread the word! Tell your friends!

So, an update on how Project Infinite is going.

It hasn’t.

Some of you know that I decided to rework the manuscript, because the direction I was going was wrong. Sometimes writing by the seat of your pants is like finding your way through a maze. When you hit a block, you need to backtrack to find where you went wrong, and I went back quite a ways.

Don’t start your novel over. Just finish it and figure out what you’d like to fix, then go back and rewrite what you must. Do as I say, not as I do!

That being said, I’ve broken other rules…

Like the Bubble rule. Only opposite. I found that I simply cannot write at my house.I just… can’t. I can write at work, I can write in a cafe, I can write anywhere but at home. One reason is my house is full of distractions, like Netflix and the internet; the other is that I’m just so darn popular with my roommates that they must talk to me whenever they feel the urge.

Aside from my failure to continue on the Writer’s Path this summer, I have taken the steps I feel are necessary to improve my writing. I’ve been wroodling with friends, restructuring ProjInfinite, and did I mention I bought a secondary machine? That’s right, I broke down and dropped dollars on the Macbook Air.

The Macbook Air has so far proven to be a faithful, hassle-free companion to this writer. I’m a PC user by default–my main machine is Windows 7, and is a beautiful piece of equipment. But I use a Mac at work, and when my PC broke, I relied on the Macbook Pro to get by. I enjoyed the distraction-free OS and decided a Macbook Air would be a lovely secondary machine. I’ve been saving for a secondary machine for a few months at this point, something ultraportable with a full size keyboard, and the Macbook Air fit in perfectly with my requirements.

I also purchased Scrivener. Scrivener is, quite possibly, the only word processor I will ever use again. It’s easy to use–it took me less than an hour to setup a novel, import my writing, and assign a few necessary shortcuts the program seemed to be lacking. You have the ability to outline your document before you write it, using either the outline view or the–get this–CORKBOARD view. That’s right, you can assemble your very own digital corkboard, complete with chapter headings and notes. You can store your research in a binder (a menu on the left-hand side of the screen) that won’t be part of your manuscript, keep old drafts in their own folder, break down the document into scenes, and when you’re finished… you can compile the document into an editor-friendly document with little to no flibbity-flam on your part.

Scrivener was made for me.

With Scrivener and my little Air, I’ll be unstoppable. Once I finally move. And… settle into my new place. Sometime this month. I hope.

 

>The Creative Bubble

>Alright, one more blog for the weekend… then I need to focus a bit on Project Infinite.


Lovely afternoon, isn’t it? Today, we’ll be discussing the Creative Bubble.
In several how-to books, we’re instructed to set up place where we can write, undisturbed. It’s kind of like making an art studio, only our brush is the keyboard, and our strokes are actually words. How does the creative bubble work, though?
By setting aside a space for ourselves, we theoretically can channel our muses easier than if we were faced with the distractions of roommates or children or, Heaven forbid, the television. We decorate this corner of creative genius with post-it notes scribbled with positive messages, portraits of our favorite authors carefully clipped from the backs of our paperback novels, and we may or may not play inspirational music softly in the background. This is our bubble; this is our little spot on the planet where we can dip our hungry, bucket-shaped souls into a well supposedly brimming with genius.
This works for many. Maybe life is too full of distraction and you need that tiny plot of Fantasy-land to properly summon your imagination. In that sense, having a place to escape within can seem beneficial.

So… why does it sound like I disapprove of the Creative Bubble when writing?
To be honest, I always had trouble with the Creative Bubble. I won’t go into the gritty details of my childhood, but I will say that where I grew up, it was impossible to have your own little place to be yourself. I had to learn to write where I could and when I could, but I craved having my own little bubble to hide away in. Naturally, when I went off to college, I made one.
I found myself spending my free time building up this little space where I could write freely and without distraction. I decorated my desk with all sorts of thoughtful knick-knacks, as if these things were talismans I could combine and derive magical writer powers from. I wrote famous quotes on post-its and stuck them to my desk. I dutifully arranged my how-to books in specific orders, from worst to best, from best to worst, from big to little, from thin to thick. All my time and energy would be poured on making the perfect little place to escape. But, always, my desk chair would take the place of my laundry basket. Then I wouldn’t want to write at all… obviously, by the time I finished fixing up my space again, I’d be uninterested in writing.
Creative Bubbles are more like creative vacuums, sucking out all the bits of genius debris we have. We hope the genius debris will combine to form a giant lint ball of amazingness, but all that happens is it gets tossed in the garbage after awhile. My experience with Creative Bubbles didn’t result in novels with beginnings, middles, and ends. I felt safe there, peaceful there, but I rarely got anything done.

Granted, that could just be my experience. But let me tell you another thing that harms us when we rely on Creative Bubbles. Human beings are creatures of habit and routine. We like to take the same route to work because we can rely on it. We prefer eating dinner at roughly around the same time we usually eat our dinners. Our bodies are programmed to wake at a certain hour, whether we like it or not, and to fall asleep at a certain hour.
When you rely on a creative space to do your writing, you’re programming yourself to only work in that space. If you’re at work and inspiration for a the next chapter strikes you, do you write it out in an email and send it to yourself? Or do you decide to wait until you can get home and hit that bubble of yours? What if you forget it by then? What if the drive to write it is gone by the time you get home?
It took me a few years to ditch the idea of a Creative Bubble and return to my old ways of writing when and where I could. I didn’t think it was something a lot of people suffered from, until I attended a small panel by writer Phil Athans. He brought up the process of carving out your space to write and how detrimental it was to our writing process. By learning to write whenever and wherever we can, we can better conquer our distractions as well as learning to tap into our wordflow easier.
My recommendation to any writers aspiring to be published, or any people aspiring to write, is to invest in something portable on which to do your writing. Rowling used all manner of things to get her writing done, from notepads to napkins. We have it a bit easier than that… we can invest in a netbook, for example. Those fit easily in our bags, have an amazing battery life, and suck at everything except word processing. I had a netbook for awhile, until it fell into disrepair after I accidentally wrecked the charging port. I plan on getting myself another one, however, for the sole purpose of being able to write anywhere and everywhere I want to go.
Another fantastic resource, though a little limiting, is dropbox. Dropbox is a free-to-use, cloud-based, file hosting service. By setting up a folder on your computer that you can share with dropbox, any computer with your dropbox account can access your works-in-progress. Don’t want to/can’t install Dropbox on your work computer? No problem. You can go to the website itself and download the most up to date version of your story, and upload it when you’re done.
I’m not saying write when you should be working, but you can always fit in a couple hundred words during your lunch break. I find I get most of my writing done during my lunch hour.
The point is, if you feel you must have a creative space in which to fulfill your destiny of being the next Dean Koontz, than by all means, make yourself that Creative Bubble. But do yourself a favor and invest in a netbook, and link your netbook with your desktop using a file sharing service like dropbox. Teach yourself to write outside of your refuge and you’ll find that your progress will soar.

Disagree with me? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Until then, get some writing done today.