Category: Writing

7 Tips For Proofreading Your Novel

Lately I’ve been writing about what tasks authors might need or prefer to do themselves. While proofreading is a good task to outsource because it’s so hard to see errors in your own work, it remains a skill every writer needs, which is why I’m sharing proofreading tips below.

Even if you send your novel to a proofreader, it’s important to proofread your novel yourself at least once. Doing so will help you to ensure all errors are caught and to spot quirks in your writing, such as overuse of certain words. (For a while, I added the word “up” all over the place—stand up, start up, fix up—and never noticed how distracting it was.)

So here are my seven tips:

Take Time Off

After you call your novel finished—truly finished as in ready to hit publish or submit to an agent or publisher—set it aside for a week. If that’s not possible, take at least a day to do anything but write. Take a vacation day, focus on your other job or profession, binge watch a series on Netflix.

Whatever it takes, clear your mind. After that, it’ll be easier to spot errors.

Read Three Words At A Time

Grouping words in three is one of the best ways to spot grammar errors, misused homonyms, and spelling. (Homonyms, which are words that sound the same but are spelled differently, such as “where” and “wear,” are the main reason you can’t rely on your word processor’s spell checker alone for proofreading.)

As you read, pause after each third word and at the end of each line. With this technique, the first sentence of this article would read like this:

Lately I’ve been         writing about what   tasks authors might

need or prefer           to do   themselves.

Alter How The Manuscript Looks

If you normally rewrite on screen, change the format. Making the words look different makes it less likely you’ll read through errors.

A few ways to achieve that:

  • Print your manuscript and review it on paper
  • If you’re in Microsoft Word, use the Print Preview or View function to make it look more like a page in a book
  • Enlarge or shrink the page
  • Change the font or font size
  • If you’re proofreading a Vellum file, switch from iBook to the Kindle view and back every few pages
Read Aloud

It takes a long time to read a novel out loud, so while it’s ideal, it’s unrealistic. But you can shift from reading to yourself to reading aloud every few pages. It’ll help you get a fresh look and spot mistakes.

If you’ve made changes or updates, read out loud the paragraph where you made the edit and the ones before and after it. That will ensure you spot any errors you accidentally introduced.

Use A Ruler

If you proofread on paper, place a ruler under each line as you read. This will help you focus on each line on its own and will make it less likely you’ll get lost in the story. You can also run your fingers under the line as you read, but that’s not quite as effective.

If you’re proofing on screen, you can get a similar effect by proofing each line at the bottom of the page as you scroll up.

Read Backwards

Rather than starting on page one of your novel, start with the last page. Read it top to bottom, then read the second-to-last page, then the third-to-last page.

This requires a bit of double reading when you reach the end of a page, as you’ll need to glance at the following one to be sure the transition makes sense. But overall it doesn’t take much longer than reading through from beginning to end, and it will keep you from getting lost in the story and missing errors.

Aim For Perfection

Make it your goal to publish or submit a novel that’s free from all errors. Is that realistic? Maybe not, especially if your manuscript is 70,000 or 80,000 words or more.

But if you aim for perfection, the odds are, at worst, you will catch most typos. If you mentally shrug your shoulders and decide that typing “where” instead of “wear” or “therefore” instead of “therefor” really doesn’t matter, it’s likely you’ll produce work with many errors.

I hope that’s helpful. If there are typos in the above, I’ll be really embarrassed.

Until Friday—

Best,

L.M. Lilly

P.S. If you’d like a second set of eyes, the proofreader I use for my novels is great at spotting typos, missing words, and unintentional grammar errors (yes, there are intentional ones in my fiction, which she understands!). You can find more information at SMR Proofreading & Editing.

On Getting A Traditional Publishing Deal

I’ve had articles, short stories, and poems published traditionally, but a lot of my posts focus on self-publishing, as that’s how I’ve published my novels.

Because of that, I haven’t kept up as well as I’d like with current trends and practices of traditional publishers. To try to remedy that, I checked out this episode of the Self-Publishing Formula.

I hope you’ll find it as interesting and helpful as I did.

SPF-050 How to Land a Publishing Deal – with Alex Clarke, Headline Publishing

 

Best,

L.M. Lilly

Self-Publishing: What To Do Yourself And Why

Writing and self-publishing involve a lot of tasks that you might be able to outsource to someone else. As I talked about in On Not Doing It All Yourself last Sunday, it doesn’t make sense to do all of them yourself if you are able to pay someone to do at least some.

But there are good reasons to take a do-it-yourself approach to some tasks. Figuring out which ones is the key to a less stressful and more productive writing life.

The No-Brainers

Money and time are the threshold questions in terms of whether to outsource. If you have no money to spare, you’ll need to start by doing tasks yourself. Later, if you earn more at your current work or at writing, you can shift to paying professionals for tasks like editing and cover design.

On the flipside, if you have almost no time to write because you work a lot, and you’re earning good money, outsourcing everything you possibly can will make sense.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle on the money/time continuum, though. If that’s true for you, the easiest tasks to outsource are the ones you absolutely don’t know how to do and have no good way of learning quickly or inexpensively.

When I published my first thriller, The Awakening, there were few easy-to-use online resources for creating your own cover, and I lacked any experience at manipulating photos or text. It never crossed my mind to design a cover myself, nor did I want to struggle with formatting a word processing file for Kindle, Nook, or any other ereader.

These days, though, almost any task relating to self-publishing can be done by the author. Sites like Canva.com make it possible to create social media posts and covers without much graphic design experience. With Vellum, you can convert Word files to ebook files without any coding or programming expertise. So there are fewer tasks that clearly must be outsourced.

So how to choose which to do yourself? Once you get past the easy questions, in my experience, what it’s best to do yourself depends on three things:

(1) What you’re good at

(2) Whether performing the task helps you in other ways

(3) What you enjoy

Your Skills 

My general rule is if the end result will look as good as it will if I outsource it to an expert, and I’m good enough at it that outsourcing won’t save me significant time, I’ll probably do the task myself.

For example, for several years after college I temped as a word processor, moving from company to company and picking up skills as I went. I became very good at figuring out new software and exploring ways to make it do cool things. While the software to convert Microsoft Word to ebook formats is totally different from the word processing programs I used decades ago, I still am comfortable experimenting, and Vellum is easy enough to use, that my final product looks good.

Also, while outsourcing saves time in preparing the ebook files, the quality control/final correction phase is quicker when I do it myself. When I outsource and review the file I get back, I have to copy and past each error and the corresponding corrections into an email or Word file to send to the conversion service, wait a couple days for a new version, and review that. When I do it myself, I see the error, correct it, review it, then move on.

Think about your skills. Are you good at software, copywriting, or graphic design?

If so, choose a project that is low stress—a novella or short story versus a novel—and experiment. You might find it’s worth doing some tasks yourself.

And if not, at least you’ve found one task you definitely want to outsource.

Does Doing This Task Help You In Other Ways?

So far, I’ve never tried designing a cover for a novel (and I don’t plan to for the reasons listed in Your Book Will Be Judged By Its Cover), but recently I experimented with creating covers on Canva.com for non-fiction. There are a couple ways that helped me beyond learning how to do a basic cover, a skill I might or might not ever use again.

First, as I designed one cover, I refined my title. My first title for Super Simple Story Structure, was Five Steps to Story Structure. As I laid it out on the cover, though, that initial title looked out of balance.

No doubt a good graphic designer could have made it work. If I’d been in love with the title, I would have chucked my attempts and hired someone. But I wasn’t. So I tried using “5” instead of “Five” and played around with fonts and capitalization.

Finally, I experimented with other titles and settled on Super Simple Story Structure. The row of words starting with S makes the title look good aligned on the left. The alliteration makes the title easier to remember. And the “Super Simple” part does a much better job of conveying the point of the book, which is to make plotting a novel simple and clear.

Second, when I was designing the cover for How The Virgin Mary Influenced The United States Supreme Court, I was still writing the ebook. It started as an academic paper, but I wanted it to be easy to read and interesting to any reader who wanted to know whether the justices’ religious backgrounds played a role in their decision about religious objections to health insurance that covered contraceptives.

Pulling together background photos of the Supreme Court and a statute of the Virgin Mary helped me figure out how to focus the book. I changed an abstract discussion of Catholic doctrine into a conversation about how the Virgin Mary represents the “pure” and “perfect” woman, and how that view of women influences our culture and courts.

Had I not done the cover myself, though, I might never have found a good approach to the book.

What’s Fun For You?

I really like using Vellum to create my final ebook files. The display lets me see the book as the reader sees it and gives me a different perspective on how it appears. (For one thing, it’s caused me to write shorter paragraphs.) It’s also fun for me to play with the different styles for chapter headings and the symbols in between scenes. Finally, it kind of feels like magic to me the way I drop in a Word file and get an ebook file that looks pretty.

In short, it’s fun.

On the other hand, because I get neck and shoulder pain when I type too much, I hate making extensive revisions in Word, and I need to minimize my typing time. So when I’ve got a very solid first draft, I print it, handwrite changes, and send it to a virtual assistant to do the heavy lifting.

You, on the other hand, might like revising using your screen and keyboard and might hate spending time with a formatting program.

Which tasks you find fun matters.

Most of us already do enough work we don’t love at our day-to-day jobs or careers because it comes with the job title. Also, many people who write make more money at their regular jobs. So if writing and the tasks related to it aren’t fun, it’ll be hard to keep devoting time to them.

Finally, and most important, at least to me, is that the point is to live a happy life, not to write novels—or achieve other goals—at any cost.

So rather than push yourself to do writing-related tasks you don’t like, if you’re able, send those to someone else and save the fun things for yourself.

Until Friday—

Best,

L.M. Lilly

 

 

 

When To Use Brand Names In Your Fiction

This Friday I recommend a 6-minute episode of my favorite podcast on writing, The Journeyman Writer. In Nobody Says Flying Disc, host Alastair Stephens talks about when you should and shouldn’t use brand names in your fiction.

http://storywonk.com/the-journeyman-writer-207-nobody-says-flying-disc/

Wondering whether your characters should stop at a Starbucks or a coffee shop or drink soda versus Pepsi?

Alastair has the answers.

Until Sunday, when I’ll talk about how to decide which self-publishing tasks to do yourself—

Best,

L.M. Lilly

On Not Doing It All Yourself

Whether you self publish your writing or plan to seek a traditional publishing contract, there are related tasks you can pay someone else to do. Often the people you could hire have more experience and can produce a better result than you, such as when you pay a graphic designer to create a book cover or a professional developmental editor to review your plot.

Yet most of us struggle with the idea of paying for services we can, at least in theory, do ourselves.

Why?

Here are three reasons that come to mind:

  • Your time is “free”
  • It’s too hard to train someone
  • You’re not earning enough

Let’s talk about each one.

Why Pay Someone When I Can Do The Task For Free?

The problem with this question is that it contains an assumption: that your time is free. It’s not, even if you are earning zero right now at your writing.

At the very least, if you have another job or profession, your time is worth what you currently earn calculated by the hour. So if your annual salary is $70,000, you earn about $35 an hour if you work 40 hours a week. If someone else can do a writing-related task for less than that, you’re coming out ahead, assuming you have the resources to pay.

Even if you pay someone the exact hourly amount you take home, odds are you’ll come out ahead.

First, an expert can work faster and produce better results. For example, as I wrote about in Your Book Will Be Judged By Its Cover, I recently designed two covers myself for nonfiction books. My guess is that each one took me at least 10 hours, while I bet a professional could have created them in 1-2 hours. So even if the hourly rate were equal, I overpaid for those covers.

Second, if you are earning at least some money at your writing, whatever you pay someone else generally is tax deductible, but the time you devote is not. So for simplicity’s sake, let’s say I earn $1,000 in royalties on those two books and earn the salary in the example above at my other work. I spent $700 (20 hours X $35) to design the covers, but I can’t deduct that as an expense because my time was “free.” So I’ll still pay taxes on $1,000.

If I had instead paid a cover designer $200, I not only would have freed up 20 hours of my time, my profit would be $800 ($1,000-$200), and that’s what I’m paying tax on, not the whole $1,000. (Obviously, this is a general example. I’m not a tax attorney or accountant, and if you need specific tax advice, you should talk to a professional.)

Third, by spending your time on something that’s not your area of expertise, you incur what businesses call “opportunity costs.” If instead of spending 20 hours on covers I’d spent it finishing the second non-fiction book, that would be out there potentially earning royalties right now. Instead, I’m still making last revisions.

Okay, I better move on soon, because I’ve convinced myself that designing those two covers really wasn’t the best move and I’ve lost 20 hours.

If you find yourself in the same position, though, and you no doubt will at some point, don’t worry too much about it. With any endeavor there will be missteps and money or time you wish you had spent differently. I think of it as “tuition”—money or time that’s required to learn a new area, a concept I borrowed from Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad fame.

It Takes Too Long To Train Someone.

This is the objection that applied most often in my solo law practice because there was a steep learning curve with a lot of the work I needed help with. In the beginning, training a new lawyer or an assistant would have taken more of my time than it saved. But I was being shortsighted. Even if it had taken me four or five or ten times as long to train someone, once they were trained, my time would have been freed to do tasks that only I could do, or that I could do best.

The many hours I spent learning all my clients’ different billing programs, for instance, could have been devoted to legal work that paid me by the hour or to finishing my novels more quickly. In other words, it would have been well worth it over the long haul to spend some time training.

In writing, the case for outsourcing is even stronger. if you self-publish, it’s almost certain you could be paying someone to do something that you aren’t that skilled at. Most writers are not also graphic designers, they don’t know how to convert word processing files to Kindle files, they don’t have web design experience, and they aren’t usually terrific editors of their own work.

Also, when you outsource work, you get the benefit of an outsider’s perspective. The graphic designer may propose a wonderful concept that never crossed your mind because you are so immersed in your story. Recently, my virtual assistant typed in some edits for me that I’d handwritten on a manuscript. She spotted a few awkward sentences I’d read right past because I knew what I meant. When she flagged them, though, I realized she was right.

I’m Not Making Enough At Writing To Justify Paying Someone.

Even if you are earning money at your first profession or job, it can be hard to justify to yourself paying someone to help with your novel if your fiction writing isn’t generating a lot of income.

But no matter how little or how much your fiction earns right now, time and money can always be exchanged for one another. As I talked about in Tips For Writing Novels While Working More Than Full-Time, by paying someone to do anything that you could do yourself, you are literally buying time.

Also, when it comes to financial goals such as paying your bills, saving for retirement, or paying down debt, the overall dollars matter, not where they come from. So if I can pay someone $200 to do a writing-related task and that allows me to spend time doing something that earns me $300, hiring someone makes financial sense regardless whether I earned that $300 through royalties, practicing law, or selling vintage Barbies on eBay.

Another way to think of this is that lots of people spend money on hobbies and leisure activities, most of which don’t have the potential to earn them any money. Supplies and equipment are needed for activities as diverse as building model airplanes, kayaking, and playing golf. Even birdwatching requires purchasing binoculars. In contrast, whether or not your writing earns you money now, it has the potential to do so.

Finally, think about why you’re writing and how long you’re willing to devote to the business side of it. If you want to sell books, it will take time to find your market (whether you intend to do that on your own or through a publisher).

Also, to establish yourself, you will need more than one book. In fact you’ll probably need at least four or five. The faster you can write those books, the better for your career, assuming your quality remains good. So paying someone else to do things so that you can write more in the long run will almost certainly earn you more and help you get your career off the ground.

I hope these points persuaded you at least to consider some tasks you could pay someone else to handle, assuming you have even a small amount of funds to do so. Next week I’ll talk about how to decide which tasks make the most sense to outsource. (There’s no one-size-fits all answer. What’s best for you to do yourself will vary from writer-to-writer.)

Until Friday-

Best,

L.M. Lilly

To Be or To Do: The Oscars, Writing, and Active v. Passive Voice

Last Sunday, I wrote about how vital conflict is to story, and how lack of conflict is usually the reason a novel lags, if it does, or a reader loses interest.

Today, let’s talk about keeping your writing interesting on a line-by-line basis. One of the best ways to do that is to use active rather than passive voice.

Here’s a quick comparison:

“An evaluation of pluses and minuses was made.”

Puts you to sleep, right? Even though it’s only eight words. That’s passive voice.

“We weighed the pluses and minuses.”

That’s active voice, and it sounds a lot more interesting.

Why is active voice more engaging?

The second sentence, written in active voice, is stronger and more engaging. Here are a few reasons why:

  • People:

Most readers would rather read about people than abstract concepts like “an evaluation.” Even in types of fiction that are about new concepts or advances in technology or dystopian societies, readers choose fiction rather than non-fiction because they want to immerse themselves in stories about people, not simply about a new machine, an evil empire, or a medical advance.

That’s why active voice is stronger than passive–it keeps the focus on the actor, making it more personal. If you won an award or a race, don’t you want people to know you won it? And be excited about it?

“I won the race” sounds a lot more exciting than “A race was won” or even “A race was won by me.”

  • Action:

We like to read about people doing something, not sitting there. “An evaluation was made” calls to mind a bunch of businessmen in gray suits boring each other to death around a conference table. I’ve attended that type of meeting many times and have no desire to sit in on a fictional one.

“We weighed the pluses and minuses” isn’t exactly “We saved the world from killer cyborgs,” but it sounds like these people are doing something, not merely sitting. Waving their arms as they argue, maybe, or drawing circles and arrows on white boards, or pulling out a scale. Something.

  • Words (fewer of them):

Active voice also helps you get rid of words you don’t need, so it shortens sentences and makes them easier to read and understand.

The second sentence above is 6 words instead of 8, so it’s three-quarters the length of the first. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference when you look at one sentence, but it’s the difference between an 80,000-word novel and a 60,000-word novel. 

The 60,000 word novel would move faster and provide a more exciting reader experience. Or you could use the extra 20,000 words to expand your plot, deepen your characters, or add a sub-plot.

When should you use passive voice?

There are times, however, when using passive voice is better.

  • Sometimes you want to be anonymous

When the wrong film was announced as the winner for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Award ceremony, PricewaterhouseCoopers took responsibility, but used a bit of passive voice, which de-emphasized who made the error:

“We deeply regret the mistakes that were made during the presentation….”

President Ronald Reagan also famously used “mistakes were made” when talking about his role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Who made the mistakes? Perhaps no one will focus on that. Just ignore the man behind the curtain….

  • You don’t know who did what

To be fair, PwC may have used the “mistakes were made” type of language in its initial statement out of uncertainty over who specifically caused the mix up. (And it did say “We regret,” which is active voice. Still, you can regret something happened that you had nothing to do with, so we’re back to the passive “mistakes were made” phrasing.)

PwC’s motives aside, passive voice works well when you don’t know who performed an action: “A tower had been built in the village” might be the only way you can frame a sentence if you don’t know who built the tower.

  • You want to emphasize the object of the sentence

Sometimes the object of the sentence is the point. Above I said “When the wrong film was announced…” to make “wrong film” the focus of the sentence. It didn’t matter to me who made the announcement.

Similarly, if you and your friend love a certain dessert, you might say, “Flourless chocolate cake with pineapple sorbet will be served at nine.”

If you’re me, you’re showing up at nine regardless who is serving the cake.

  • You’re not sure which pronoun to use

Sometimes writers use passive voice rather than “he” or “she” if they don’t know the gender of the person involved:

“The store was robbed last night.”

You can often refashion the sentence to make it more active, though:

“A thief robbed the store last night.”

Spotting passive voice

The grammar check in whatever word processor you use may highlight passive voice for you. I’ve heard good things about the site Grammarly, too, though I haven’t used it myself.

You can also use the Find function (or your own eyes) to search for “to be” words: was, were, is, are. The word “by” also often signals passive voice (think “was followed by” or “was loved by” or “was won by”).

The rule of thumb

A good rule is to phrase your sentences in active voice unless you have a strong reason to do otherwise. Try it with a chapter of your latest novel or your next email or article and see how much more compelling your writing becomes.

Let me know how it goes!

Until Friday–

Best,

L. M. Lilly

 

 

The Writing Vacation

Last week I wrote about 7 ways to fit in writing a novel when you work more than full time. That article included tips that applied any time throughout the year.

There’s another great way to enjoy getting a concentrated amount of writing done, and that’s to take a writing vacation. It can be a day, a week, or more, and it doesn’t need to cost a lot, or anything at all.

Why a writing “vacation”?

Thinking of the time away from your work as a vacation makes it easier to carve out the time because vacation is fun. How often have you thought to yourself, “I should make some time to write” and not done it? That’s because put that way, it sounds like an item on your endless To Do list. When it’s a vacation, it still takes effort to arrange, but it’s designed to make you happy, not add work to your week or month.

Also, when you’re working tons of hours at your “first” career or job, taking time away to write is relaxing and fun. I usually came back to my regular work refreshed and excited.

Finally, “vacation” implies to other people that you’ll be away and should be contacted only in a true emergency. If you tell people you’re taking a vacation day or week, most will at least try to respect your time. Tell them you’re taking time to write and they’ll contact you just as if you were at work.

How to plan a fun, productive writing vacation

At home or away, here are a few things that’ll help you enjoy your writing time and use it well:

  • Decide in advance which writing project to focus on
  • Set a goal that fits the time you have. A 1-day vacation goal might be writing a few paragraphs about each of your characters, a first draft of a novel chapter, or a plot outline (check out my Super Simple Story Structure if you’d like a quick guide–it’s 99 cents (or free if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber), and it includes links to free worksheets). If you have a week and you already know what will happen over the next quarter of your book, you might set a goal of a 50 pages or more.
  • Figure out before you go/stay home a place to write where you can turn off your Internet connection and your phone
  • If you get a lot of email or calls, put an Out of Office message on both just as you would if you were on another type of vacation
  • Don’t tell anyone unless you absolutely must that you’re taking the time to write
At home writing vacations

If you’re planning your writing vacation at home, there are a few additional points.

People

If you have a live-in partner, spouse, and/or children, the at-home vacation only works if they will not be there during the day. It’s next to impossible for people you live with to view you as “not there” and leave you alone, and it’s on you, not them, to be sure your writing time is sacred. If your home is occupied during the day, find a separate space in advance. Some possibilities are coffee shops, libraries, office sharing spaces, or the home of a friend who lives alone and is away at work during the day.

Pets and Chores

If you have a pet, do whatever you normally would if you went on vacation or were away at work. Get (or keep) a dog walker, feed the cat first thing in the morning the same time you would if you were going to work.

Also, no squeezing in a few chores. (No, not a single one, not even laundry if you will have no socks tomorrow.) Deal with it all just as if you were truly away and there was no possibility of doing any of these things.

If you go away

Ideally, go away alone so you won’t be tempted to skip writing and go sightseeing or sip cocktails and chat with your friend/spouse/significant other. But that’s not always possible, and if your partner or another person in your life will be upset by you going away alone, that’s important too.

One solution is to plan a trip where the other person can do something fun. If your spouse loves to do yoga, go to a yoga retreat with plenty of activities for him/her during the day while you write. Or go to one of those areas of the world that you have no interest in seeing but your friend has been dying to visit, so long as that person is okay sightseeing alone. Or suggest that’s a great time for your spouse to visit that in-law you can’t stand or that best friend she or he would rather hang out with alone while you stay home and write.

Whether alone or with someone else, check ahead of time so you’re sure there will be a place you can write undisturbed. It’s also helpful if you landlock yourself. Find somewhere with food options in walking distance, then take public transportation or a cab or airport shuttle there. Without a car you won’t be as tempted to leave to do something other than write.

What else to do during your vacation

You won’t be able to write 24 hours a day, and most people won’t be able to write 12 hours a day for that matter. And if you do, you may find yourself feeling depressed and isolated.

So wherever you take your writing vacation, plan some other relaxing activities. Have a nice dinner somewhere with a view, take a walk on a beach, catch up with your friends and family after your writing day is finished. Bring books to read or line up shows to watch, especially if both are something you never get enough time for the rest of the year.

However you handle it, a writing vacation can be a wonderful way to make progress on your novel away from day-to-day stresses.

Have you taken a writing vacation? Please share your experiences in the comments.

Until Friday–

Best,

L. M. Lilly

P.S. Remember to check out the Free 5-Point Story Structure Blueprint if you’re in the planning stages of your novel or are just getting started and would like a guide to help figure out your storyline.

 

What Does The Weekend Mean For You?

Weekends are supposed to be a time to relax, yet most of us find them filled with all the responsibilities and tasks we didn’t get to during the week. When you’re also fitting writing into your schedule and/or you have a career that requires working weekends some or all of the time, that can add to the pressure. Instead of relaxing, you’re stressing more because you’re not relaxing.

That’s why this Friday I’m recommending an episode of The Petal To The Metal where two authors talk about weekend time and the balance between enjoying life and getting things done. I was drawn to this because they offer tips and alternate perspectives and acknowledge that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. As I noted in Tips For Writing Novels While Working More Than Full Time, not everyone can follow generic advice (like get up an hour early, write every day, or write during your lunch hour). But that doesn’t mean you can’t finish a novel or that you shouldn’t enjoy life while you do.

http://thepetaltothemetal.com/ep006/

 

Until Sunday–

Best,
L. M. Lilly

Tips For Writing Novels While Working More Than Full Time

Okay, I admit it. When I was in law school, one of the main reasons I sought a position at Chicago-based large law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal (now Dentons US LLP) was that author Scott Turow is a partner there. It wasn’t just that I wanted to meet him, though that crossed my mind. Mostly, I figured a firm that touted a novelist/lawyer in its marketing must be comfortable with attorneys who pursued other vocations along with law.

In contrast, at the other big law firm where I interviewed, a partner glanced at the one line on my resume about fiction writing and said, “You know, you won’t have time to do that here.”  Points for honesty.

As anyone who practices law knows, regardless whether a firm or company tends to hire lawyers with outside interests, juggling law and the rest of life is a challenge in itself, let alone pursuing another avocation. I’m sure that’s true for other professions and jobs, too, not to mention being a parent. The reality is, few people who write novels have more spare time than anyone else. And Scott Turow notwithstanding, most published authors don’t earn enough to quit their other jobs.

So below are a few suggestions on fitting writing into an already too-packed life.

(1) Seek Out Something Different

The less time you spend wracking your mind for ideas, the more time you’ll have to actually write. Stimulating your mind with new activities and information can generate a lot of thoughts and ideas on which to base your fiction.

If you’re too busy to add anything new outside of work, try to vary within your profession. Work with someone you don’t usually partner with, have lunch (or coffee if you’re short on time) with a colleague you seldom see, pick up a project that’s just a little outside your comfort zone. Talk to someone whose views are completely opposite to your own.

And if you can do something new outside of work, that’s a great way to get your creativity flowing. Attend a play, a movie, a concert, or just take a walk along a street you don’t normally travel and really look and listen. It doesn’t matter if you like what you’re doing. Sometimes at a play that bores me out of my mind I come up with great new story ideas.

(2) Develop A Habit

In the classic Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill said, and I’m paraphrasing, you are what your habits make you, and you can choose your habits. In that way, writing is a lot like working out (though I’m far more likely to do the former than the latter). If you need to decide every day whether to go to the gym or what time to try to squeeze it in, it’s less likely to happen. Same thing for writing. But when it becomes a habit, the pages start churning out, and it feels great.

If you don’t already have a habit of writing at a particular time or for a certain number of minutes or hours per week, figure out when it’s most likely you’ll be undisturbed, even if it’s only a half hour a week on Sunday morning or Friday night. When that time rolls around, write, even if you write about how you don’t have anything to write about. Or you can use that time to sketch out what you’ll write about in the following session.

Once you have the habit, you can increase the amount of time you write, and the quality of what you write.

(3) Create Time

If finding half an hour a few times a week is a challenge, look first at television, social media, and video games. I’m always surprised how many television shows my lawyer friends, even those with kids, find time to watch, until I remember–they don’t also write.

If you’re already lean on recreational activities, look at your work. Is it possible to work less and write more? Some firms or companies allow reduced schedules for reduced pay. I did this for several years at Sonnenschein, though I concede with mixed results. Sometimes I still billed more hours than people on regular schedules and just earned less. On average, though, it did allow me to write more. Likewise, when I ran my own firm, after a number of super busy years, I began deliberately cutting back. First I turned down new cases other than from existing clients, then I turned down any new matters at all.

If that’s not an option, consider buying time. With the advent of virtual assistants and a sharing economy, almost anything can be outsourced. This is especially wonderful when you can pay someone less than your time generates in your own profession. If you earn two-four times as much per hour at your day-to-day paid work than you would pay someone to clean your home, remodel your bathroom, grocery shop, do your taxes, wash your car, fix typos in your manuscript, or keep your financial books up to date, do what you do best, and pay someone else to handle those other tasks. You can then use the extra free time to write.

(4) Harness Your Unconscious

Much of the creative process takes place behind the scenes. Even if you’re extremely busy, your unconscious can come up with story ideas and scenes and flesh out characters. The key is to stimulate the unconscious without stressing out. One way I do this is to ask myself a question before I fall asleep or head to the office, such as–when I was plotting The Awakening–“Where is the most unnerving place for Tara to be confronted by a stranger who claims to know the meaning of her pregnancy?”

If I ask a question like that every so often, then put it out of my mind, eventually a scene or idea pops into my head.  (In that example, the scene takes place just before midnight in a deserted Laundromat where Tara works. The stranger enters as she’s closing for the night.)

(5) Use Your Downtime Well

One of the things I love about TV law shows is how no lawyer goes to court and sits forty minutes waiting to give the judge a status report. You also never see lawyers waiting at the gate when the flight to the deposition is delayed.

In the real world, most of us spend some time waiting. That’s why I carry a note pad everywhere and pull it out if I have more than five minutes. (You can also use the note function on your phone for this, but judges frown on lawyers appearing to be emailing or playing on their phones while in the courtroom so I carry paper.)

I particularly like scribbling about characters, because if I’m cut off in the middle, it doesn’t matter. In fact, my unconscious will probably keep going with the train of thought. Now and then I write snippets of dialogue or openings for scenes. While the legal pad pages rarely make their way to my writing desk, and the exact words almost never get typed into a manuscript, my thoughts flow more freely when I do have time. It’s a big part of why I’m usually able to turn out pages as soon as I sit down to write.

You can also use time stuck waiting in line to observe fellow customers. Notice their chins, their noses, how they carry themselves, their expressions. Think about how you’d describe them in writing. This can be especially helpful if your physical descriptions of characters tend to get repetitive or rely too much on describing eye color, hair color, and height.

You can find specific writing/thinking prompts for short time periods in Writing A Novel 15 Minutes At A Time.

(6) Set Small Goals.

Most professionals are goal-oriented people. That’s how we got where we are. Large goals, like writing a best-seller in two years, are inspiring, and they work well when pursuing a pre-set program like graduate school. But they also are too easy to put off truly pursuing until tomorrow.

So break those goals down. If you have a regular schedule, your first-draft goal could be a page a day or seven pages a week. If you have an erratic schedule, a goal of a number of pages per month or per three months may work better. One of my best writing instructors, author Raymond Obstfeld, called this latter approach the spare change method. Rather than writing X amount per day or week, you throw whatever you can into the writing equivalent of the spare change jar. So when I practiced law full time, one week I might have written 4 pages, the next 10, then next none, but at the end of the month, I’d written 30 pages.

(7) Write Something Bad.

If you’ve tried cases for twenty years, you might be able to think through an opening argument the night before trial and give it the next morning. But when you started out, you probably outlined the argument, practiced ten times in front of a mirror, and tried it out on a colleague or two. Yet, for some reason, many of us insist on trying to make every sentence of our fiction perfect the very first time.

Hemingway said all first drafts are sh*t. I find this very freeing. Many of my first drafts are rambling or too sparse (or both) and include pages that ultimately don’t need to be there. A first draft is a thing of beauty not because it’s perfect, but because it’s done. Trying to write well the first time out can keep you from writing at all. So the biggest key to finishing–no matter how much time you have or don’t–is being willing to write something bad. Then you can revisit, rewrite, and polish all you want.

There’s no magic to finding time to write, any more than there is to finding time to study in college, or to raise children, do volunteer work, or care for your parents while working fifty hours a week. There will be things you’ll miss while you sit and write, and carving out the time to write may mean, for a while at least, earning less than you could if you focused all your efforts on a more immediately lucrative profession.

But if you love writing the way I do, it will be worth it. Much as I enjoyed practicing law, nothing satisfies me more than finishing a piece of writing and feeling I’ve done my best with it. (Though practicing law did mean I eventually got to meet Scott Turow. Pretty cool.)

Until Friday, wishing you a productive and not-too-stressful week–

Best,

L. M. Lilly

P.S. If you’re starting a novel and are looking for a clear, quick way to plan it without being bound to a rigid outline, try Super Simple Story Structure: A Quick Guide To Plotting And Writing Your Novel. It’s free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers (reg. $0.99 for Kindle, $4.99 paperback). The Kindle version includes a link to helpful worksheets. It can save you a lot of time.

In The Beginning There Was Conflict

Before you put pen to page or hands to keyboard, there is one thing absolutely every novel needs:

Conflict.

A weak conflict–or none at all–is usually why a reader loses interest early in a novel or halfway through.

The Cardinal Rule

If you’ve ever watched a soap opera, daytime or otherwise, you know the cardinal rule. It applies to any drama or comedy, but it’s most obvious in serial television shows. Once a character reaches a moment of happiness, that character disappears until things go wrong again.

If everyone’s happy or at least content, the reader or watcher isn’t interested. Without conflict, there’s no story. There’s no suspense, no question that keeps the reader turning pages in the hope of an answer, and no one to root for or against. This is true whether you’re writing a novel, telling a ghost story around a campfire, or improvising a skit at your local comedy club.

The best way to have a strong conflict is for your main character to want something hard to achieve.

Warning: 

If you haven’t read or watched Gone With The Wind, Beware – Spoliers below 

 

For example, throughout almost all of Gone With The Wind, Scarlett O’Hara is madly in love with Ashley Wilkes and wants him to love and marry her. There are many obstacles, some present from Day One, others that develop. Here are just a few:

  • He and Scarlett are unsuited to one another (she’s driven, ambitious, outspoken, high-spirited, and has little interest in book learning; he prefers a quiet and scholarly life, is reserved, refined, and has little interest in starting a business or earning money)
  • Ashley gets engaged to his cousin, Melanie, which is a family tradition
  • Scarlett marries Melanie’s brother on the rebound and is quickly widowed, limiting her social interactions, and bonding her to Melanie
  • The Civil War begins, and Ashley leaves to fight in it, perhaps never to return

As Scarlett’s experiences show, life should be hard for your main character. As you plot your novel, resist the temptation to allow your protagonist smooth sailing or to make things easy. Instead, think about how things can get worse. This is one time negative thinking is a plus!

Your First Page

There needs to be conflict from the first page of your novel. There’s a saying that your protagonist must want something on page one, even if it’s only a glass of water. The reason behind that saying is that if your protagonist wants nothing, there’s no conflict.

So although there’s nothing about Ashley on the first page of Gone With The Wind, nor about the upcoming Civil War, we learn in the second paragraph of the book that Scarlett’s internal nature—willful, outspoken, and “lusty with life” is “distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor” and the strictures Southern society places on women. Because there’s immediate conflict, the reader is willing to wait a while as the larger conflicts, both personal and societal, unfold.

Further, seeds are sown about the Civil War in the very first scene. Margaret Mitchell doesn’t do that by simply telling us war is on the horizon or by giving us a history lesson. Instead, she frames the prospect of war in a very personal way to our protagonist. Scarlett is talking to twin brothers who both carry a torch for her. She wants to hear about them being thrown out of school (yet another conflict), and they want to talk about war, a subject that bores her. She becomes impatient and insists there won’t be any war.

Finally, in that very first scene, Scarlett becomes upset, but hides it, when the twins tell her Ashley is getting engaged to his cousin Melanie. This is yet another conflict that will feed into the larger story arcs.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re searching for ideas for a novel, are in the midst of writing one and are stuck, or your feel your scenes are dragging, you are likely missing conflict. Look again at your main character. What does that person want and why? What obstacles are in the way? That’s where you’ll find your conflict and your story.

Until Friday–

Best,

L. M. Lilly

P.S. Super Simple Story Structure: A Quick Guide To Plotting And Writing Your Novel provides a clear, quick way to figure out a plan for your novel. It includes questions to walk you through the process, examples from well-known stories such as Gone With The Wind, and tips for when you are stuck. It’s free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers (reg. $0.99 for Kindle, $4.99 paperback).