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Interested in writing? Then bookmark this page and come back often. I'll be posting materials to help you jump-start your work, much of it material from my workshops. And if you would like to copy anything here and distribute it to your class, club, or friends, feel free. All I ask are three things:
- Please don't charge for or profit from this work; it is for nonprofit and educational use only.
- Please credit this work to me, and include my website address: www.tommorrisey.com
- If you get the chance, please drop me a note (FYI) to let me know how you're using it: tom(AT)tommorrisey.com (Just put an ampersand where the "(AT)" is; doing it this way keeps my site from getting spammed with thousands of e-mails from direct marketers).
Fair 'nough?
Many thanks.
-- Tom
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Writers conferences are times when I know I’m going to get a lot of questions, and the question that stymies me the most often is, “Where do you get your ideas?”
In general, that’s easier to answer, because novel ideas come from everywhere. They hit you when you’re in church, while you’re showering, in those moments when you go suddenly deaf and dumb, right in the middle of a conversation. On rare occasions, they arrive prepackaged. I once had the staggering experience of having an entire novel pop into my head – every chapter, every scene, and practically every line of dialogue – while I was crossing the lobby at my publishing house. But such Moses-goes-to-the-mountain moments are rare. The ideas are far more apt to come in increments.
Take my current novel, In High Places. If I trace that back to its genesis, I would have to say that it first came to me in my change at the 7-11. It was 1999, and I was buying – I don’t know what – a soda, probably. Anyhow, when I got my change back, I automatically counted it (a habit engrained in me practically since birth by my frugal Irish grandmother).
 But it wasn’t a state quarter. It was a Bicentennial quarter – the kind with the Revolutionary War drummer on the back. And while I might have to pause and think a while if you were to ask me what I was doing in, say, 1983, 1976 is another matter entirely. It was a year of tall ships and fireworks on the National Mall, a year when red-white-and-blue was in vogue and just about everything was lemon-scented. It was a time that was easy to remember, and as I walked back to my truck, I got thinking about that. In 1976 I had just finished college, and I spent much of the summer rock climbing. As I lived in northwestern Ohio at that time, the nearest truly challenging rock was in West Virginia: Seneca Rocks, West Virginia.
And as I started up my truck, it occurred to me then that I had, right there, all of the elements of setting. I had a time (1976), a place (Seneca Rocks), and a niche – the athlete-philosopher world of climbing. It was a stage, empty and waiting for its actors.
Who would those actors be? Most good stories are about relationships, and we have in our lives two great mega-relationships. The first is with our parents, and the second is with our soul mates. You only get one set of parents, but your soul mate – or the person whom you think is your soul mate – can change as you grow. And one that always stands out, I think for everyone, is the first love – not the teacher you had a crush on in grade school, but the very first person you ever looked at and truly thought, “This could really be my ever-after.”
Seventeen is a good age for both of those relationships – the age when you’re old enough to have your own car and the trappings of adulthood, but you’re still living at home with your parents. And so, as I already had a hunch that I was leaning toward a relationship novel, I began to get a shadowy glimpse of Patrick, the lead character in my new book. He would be seventeen throughout most of the book, and he would still be living at home. This was a month or two after I got the quarter, and a couple of years before Patrick would have a last name (Nolan).
Now, if I wanted to explore mega-relationships, one of the two was easy. The first love is the first love. But for a parent-child story, I couldn’t be general. For the intimacy that story requires, I really needed to concentrate on one parent or the other.
That was an easy choice, as well. My father passed away in 1985. He was only 65 at the time, an age when most people are just launching into retirement, yet he had already been ill for several years, and it often seemed to me that, although he had seen the world as a young sailor in WWII and come back to raise a family and get his own piece of the American dream, a lot of unachieved potential had died with him. I missed him, and still miss him bitterly, and it almost went without saying that, even though I was now thinking about a story of first loves, and coming-of-age, I was thinking about a father-and-son story, as well.
My father died as a man with gray hair, and I must admit that I put most of them there. There were years when we were very much at odds. Looking back, I felt that I an apology was overdue … and also impossible. But I could find some personal solace by making Patrick an atypical teen – a kid who was tight with his parents, who didn’t sway to social pressures or archetypes, but was individual enough to skip the awkward phase when parents aren’t cool, and embrace at least some of that time that I had so little of with my own father – a time when parent and child can relate as adults.
A story that explored such a father-son relationship would be therapeutic for me, but it would be deadly boring for a reader, because it lacked that most essential element of plot. It lacked conflict. And about a year after getting that quarter in my change, I was straightening my bookshelves and came across a scuba-diving logbook that had belonged to a niece of mine. A dead niece. A niece who had died a suicide.
I hope that you will never have the experience of having someone close to you die by his or her own hand. If you do, I can assure you that the “what-ifs” will multiply and compound your thoughts for years afterward. So will the guilt. It is impossible to lose someone in that manner and not wonder either if you did something to contribute to such an extreme state of despair, or if you failed to help provide some semblance of that essential element – hope – that keeps a person breathing in and breathing out.
That added another brick to the foundation that I was laying. To me, one important element of Christian novel is that it addresses an issue or question of spiritual importance. And the issue that seemed to be arising as I thought about this still-nebulous book was hope – not where it comes from (to a Christian, that is obvious) but what its really is, its true nature.
The open issue was who it was that should die in that manner. Such a death firmly places an elephant in the room with every survivor, and that aspect would be compounded if the person who died was someone in one of those two mega-relationships with the central character. So I had Patrick and his father come home from a climbing trip in 1976 (that quarter, again) to learn that Patrick’s mother had gone out to the garage that morning, dressed to the nines, and had started up the car and sat in the closed garage until she passed out of this world and into eternity.
When my niece took her own life, I reacted by leaping off the grid. I left the country, and tried to lose my grief in a change of scenery and culture. Of course, the grief followed me. I decided to give Patrick and his father (he had a name by now – Kevin – and a job as an engineer in the auto industry) a similar experience. They would sell their home, Kevin would quit his job, and they would try to start a new life running a climbing shop in the setting inspired by that quarter – at Seneca Rocks in West Virginia. And there Kevin would react to the situation ignited by the lingering questions posed by his wife’s death. He would engage in self-destructive behavior, a self-destructive behavior that I arrived at by remembering a phrase from a Dylan Thomas poem (“… and you, my father, there on that sad height…”) and then taking it absolutely literally. Patrick would be faced with the challenge of trying to heal his father without tearing what was left of his family apart – at the same time that he was falling head-over-heels for his first love.
I could tell you more, but then we’d move into spoiler territory. And besides, we have here all the bits and pieces I needed to start In High Places – a setting, characters, and a conflict for the characters to resolve.
So if you’re casting around for your own idea, but you only have parts of it, take heart. The rest will probably come in time. Until then, do what good writers do: read, make black marks on white paper …
… And remember to count your change.
(Posted June, 2007)
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From time to time, and not too often, I receive mail from readers gently reminding me that a sentence should not begin with "and," that ellipses should only be employed to indicate omitted material, that dashes belong in Morse Code and nowhere else, and that any sentence lacking a subject, a verb or an object is not a sentence at all, but a fragment.
The academic point of view, and the one that my MA-in-English self agrees with wholeheartedly, is that a sentence should express a complete thought, and should not begin with a conjunction.
But the artistic point of view, and the one embraced by my MFA-in-fiction self, is that writing is actually graphically recorded sound, and punctuation is primarily intended to convey stops, pauses, breathings and inflection. In other words, it is all part of the sheet music for the little voice singing in the reader's head. Given this, sentence structure that is sometimes disjointed or fragmentary may ring more
authentically, sound more like the implied narrator, and contribute most effectively to suspension of disbelief ("... Pay no attention to the man behind the keyboard....").
Of course this, like all good things, becomes tedious unless done in moderation.
As novelists, we exist in a sort of literary hypostatic union, one in which we are all writer, and all artist, both at the same time. As to which should prevail, I must admit that I bow to the one that will accomplish my purpose without rousing the reader from the dream we have agreed to share. If that means opening with a conjunction or writing in sentence fragments, I will do so without a second thought or a single glance back.
Yet I can only with great difficulty compel myself to use "which" in places where "that" should be used, and even if the character's idiosyncracies lend themselves toward it, I have a hard time installing a "who" in the lawful dwelling place of a "whom." Isn't that odd?
(Posted December, 2005)
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DO:
Include your name, address, phone number and (most importantly) e-mail address on the first page of every piece of your proposal. If your idea looks good, the proposal will get split up, duplicated, and handed around. The cover letter may very easily be lost or misplaced. The publisher could end up wanting your novel, but having no earthly idea of how to contact you.
Double-space your sample chapters and leave margins large enough for someone to write comments. The support material can be spaced at 1½ or 1¼ lines or whatever (single spacing can be a little taxing), but you want the samples in a form the editors are accustomed to reading. Put it on white-white paper (92 brightness or better) in black ink. Most people use Times New Roman 12 pt, although any easily readable serifed font will suffice. Format is not terribly important. Not being a pain-in-the-anterior to read is.
Give them your first two or three chapters as the sample chapters (they want to know you can start a story, not just tell one), and make sure your chapters are great, tight writing, polished to a shine. This is the most important part of the proposal. Unless they know that you can write well, all else is in vain.
Indicate your genre. Don’t make them guess. It’s okay to just call it a “general fiction” work, or a “literary/fine-arts” work. Not everything has to fit a niche.
Tell them if they, or a colleague, or a writer they know and trust, recommended you to them. Tell them to what degree this person knows you and your work.
Demonstrate that you know the market, and show how your book does not duplicate anything out there on the market, yet is complementary to what readers are demanding today.
Include an author profile that supports the proposition that you are the logical author for this work.
Indicate in your cover letter when the full first draft of the book will be available.
Include a brief synopsis that demonstrates that you know how the book is going to end. The bane of the fiction-editor’s existence is the writer who can start a story, but can’t land it. If you have never published a novel before, finish the draft before mailing the proposal, and indicate that a complete draft is available.
Include your website address if you have one. Maintaining a website shows that you have a clue about marketing without making an I’ve-never-done-this-before statement like, “I will be happy to speak and help you sell this book.” Well, no duh.
DO NOT:
Lie. If you say that your good friend Michael Cunningham recommended you to the agent or editor, Michael Cunningham had better know who the heck you are when they call to check the reference. Sales figures, previous publications, and titles-in-print are checkable in a heartbeat on the Internet. If you prevaricate, you will be found out, and once you are found out, you will be Typhoid Mary as far as the publishing industry is concerned.
Try to pass off print-on-demand, vanity press, or self-publication as commercial sales. If your POD novel sold 100,000 copies, by all means mention it. Having a following is a good thing. But don’t get all mealy-mouthed and try to say that it was published by some nebulous “well-known international press.”
Include business cards, leaflets, capability brochures, etc. If you have never been published, for Pete’s sake do not include a brochure advertising your mentoring services for writers! Commercial promotional materials for upcoming books not yet on the market (books that have been sold, but are not yet published) are acceptable.
Include 8 X 10 glossies of your smiling face. You are an author, not an actor.
Bind or staple the manuscript. Editors do not hold the entire manuscript when they read. They handle one page at a time. A paper clip or banker’s clip is fine.
Put the manuscript in a brightly colored folder, gift-wrap it, enclose balloon animals or fill the envelope with confetti to draw attention to it. The attention so drawn will not be the kind you want. You never want to appear desperate.
Print the manuscript in bright blue ink to show how creative you are. One constant among good editors and agents is that they all suffer from eyestrain.
Leave out the synopsis, sample chapters, marketing overview or author’s profile. As one editor told me, “Why should I help somebody who does not give me the minimum information I need to make an informed decision?”
Impose a deadline. Once you have your first offer, it is perfectly acceptable to poll those who have not yet responded for their offers, or to take the novel to auction. If doing the latter, know exactly what you are doing or get an agent. You will not have a problem finding a good agent for a novel with an offer pending on it.
Give up on a great idea. It is not at all unusual for 25 or 30 publishers to pass on a manuscript. Their decisions may have nothing whatsoever to do with you or your writing (they know what their line will be for the next couple of years, and you do not). It only takes one “yes” to publish a novel.
(Posted November, 2005)
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Even though I can answer the are-you-published question in the affirmative, and can do the same for the standard followup, "But you don't do that fulltime, do you?" ... I m troubled by these questions because I suspect that most people who ask them have a motive of diminishment. What they are actually asking, I think, is, "So... are you a real writer or just some pathetic wannabe dreamer?"
Throughout most of her life, Emily Dickenson would not have had a good answer for the are-you-published question. William Faulkner generally wouldn't have had a self-affirming, self-esteeming response for the can-you-really-make-a-living-at-it question. Yet, if I may be so bold, I would like to step forward and pronounce these people real writers.
I try to remember this when I meet other writers at conferences and signings. They are writers because they put words on paper and they love their art. If I want to know if anyone has make books out of their work, I can just wait until I get home and check Amazon. There's no reason (no good reason) to put them on the spot.
In the last decade or so, it seems to have dawned on people that individuals are not necessarily defined by their occupations. This is refreshing, but I attribute it more to the fact that changing occupations is fairly common today than to any sudden and miraculous dawning of good manners or taste. The idea that individual worth and net worth are somehow synonymous seems, after all, to still have considerable currency.
Aren't you glad that Jesus doesn't look at us that way?
I make my money by writing, but I do not write to make money. I write fiction that I like to read, and I write to fill the hole in the body of literature—the novels that I want, but that no one else is writing. It only takes one satisfied reader to make a person a successful novelist, and if that reader is also the writer, then so be it.
For what it's worth, here are a few things I pass along to participants at writers' conferences:
1) Forget "write what you know." If writers only wrote what they knew, we would have no fantasy, no science fiction, no futurism, no speculative fiction. Write what you love. Write the story you want to read, and if information and backgrounding are necessary to make your work believable, I'm sure you'll work out a way to find those things.
2) Forget the paycheck. Writing with advances or sales top-of-mind is like picking out a mate based on his or her earning potential. Sure, that capability may enter into the equation at some point, but a decision based solely upon the finances is likely to result in a cold and hollow relationship. You are going to live with your novel for months, or even years. So live with a novel whose company you will enjoy.
3) Trust your instincts. I recently spent the morning with a novelist whose first novel (she'd spent years writing it) was kicked back to her by better than 25 agents and a whole gaggle of publishers. She most certainly would have gotten that pat-on-the-head look from people asking the and-are-you-published question. Her first novel was eventually placed with a small West Coast publisher, it was a New York Times bestseller, it had its paperback rights auctioned off for a dazzling second advance, it is an audiobook (both abridged and unabridged) and it has not only had the film rights optioned; the rights have been picked up by a major producer and director, and big-name stars are being cast in it.
Ain't denouement grand?
One superfiically kind, but I think still-mean variant of the are-you-published question, by the way, is, "What have you written? I would love to purchase a copy." I confess that I take absolute (and admittedly sadistic) glee in hearing this in bookstores (or, in one case, Sam's Club...), where I can take one of my novels off the shelf and say, "Well, as a matter of fact, I wrote this one, right here—would you like me to sign it for you?" The look of shock—these folks generally figure that the guy with the two-day-old beard, the ratty jeans and the old cowboy books couldn't possibly be Anybody Worth Knowing—is priceless.
Writing is its own reward and you cannot expect a non-writer to understand that. When this fiction thing is working right, publication is simply the profitable recycling of previously written material. Story comes first. Art comes first. Truth comes first. You come first.
(Posted October, 2005)
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At a recent writers' workshop that I taught, I asked the participants to comeplete this sentence: "Writing is recorded _________________."
The answers I got included "thought," "philosophy," "action," "emotion" (must've been a poet there), and "story." All very introspective, but none of them rung as the bottom-line, inclusive answer to me.
I believe writing is recorded sound. The sound of words, and the sound of a story being told well, existed long before people began to chisel, press or ink marks onto paper and assign values to those marks. Writing began as a means of conveying the sound of our words to people separated from us by time or distance, and when we read good writing, we hear a little voice in our head, and the sound that voice makes is exciting, or pleasing, or otherwise appropriate to the story being told.
This makes cadence important. It makes meter important. It makes the relationship between sound and action very important. Love scenes need soft, liquid consonants and vowels, while battles require harsh consonants and clipped sentences. The sound of your words is the filter you apply to the lens of your storytelling. It colors the way the reader hears your story.
The old method of checking to see whether your work was doing this well was to read the story into a tape recorder and then listen to it. That's okay, but you can still "help" a weak sentence out with your voice. To hear your story with minimal inflection, listen to it being read to you by a text-to-speech engine. If you save a copy of your story in Word as a Microsoft Reader E-Book, you can use the Microsoft Reader Text-to-Speech Engine, available as a free download from Microsoft, to do just that. A good text-to-speech engine will deliver enough inflection to convey, say, a question, but no more. That means you'll quickly hear when the sounds of your words are working, and when they are not.
Write for your reader's ears, as well as their hearts, their souls and their minds. You'll take your fiction to the next level.
(Posted October, 2005)
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I thought that would get your attention, and yes, you can get high-quality advice on writing, promoting and selling your fiction. My friend Randy Ingermanson offers a monthly e-zine, The Advanced Fiction Writing E-Zine that does all of the above and more. Randy is the creator of the Snowflake Method, a flat-out brilliant method of plotting and planning a novel, using a spreadsheet program (such as Excel) as a thought-mapper. To subscibe to Randy's newsletter, just go to the The Advanced Fiction Writing E-Zine website and fill in the refreshingly brief three-line form.
Randy has a contest going, by the way. If you refer someone to his e-zine, he'll toss your name in a hat. When his site hits 5,000 subscribers (which should be any day now), he'll pull a name and send the winner an I-Pod Nano. You can use me as your referral if you want, but I should let you know up-front that I have already asked Randy to exclude me from the drawing. I'm only passing his link along because his e-zine is great (I read every word of every issue) , and I want to be of help to up-and-coming writers.
(Posted October, 2005)
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 One thing I always tell people is that writers need to be in contact with other writers. This is important. Novelists, especially, spend enough time alone behind a keyboard; it's vital to have a sense of community. And I always like it when that sense of community crosses cultural and geographic borders. Here I am more than 1,200 miles from home, in Manitou Springs, Colorado, workshopping with Christopher Yellow Eagle. Christopher is a novelist who teaches Native American Studies at the college level during the academic year, and is also a musician and interpretive commentator with the Native American dancers at Manitou Cliff Dwellings, not far from Pike's Peak. During a break between presentations at Manitou, Christopher and I got a chance to sit down for about an hour and share chapters, comment on one another's work, and compare notes on the formidable task of creating a well-written and publishable novel. I never share details on other writers' works-in-progress, but I can tell you that what Christopher showed me is a throroughly 21st-century novel that is authentically derived from the Native American tradition. Christopher writes the kind of fiction that I absolutely love to read: an original voice with a strongly visual prose style. I'm saving room for this novelist's work on my bookshelf....
(posted July, 2005)
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There are many, many ways to write a story. As you progress with your fiction writing, I hope you’ll discover several. For right now, here’s one way – a method that produces provably readable fiction.
1) Use an intriguing opening line. The opening line of Dean Koontz’s Life Expectancy is “On the night that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made ten predictions that shaped my life.” Who among us doesn’t want to stick around to see what – at very least – the first prediction was? This type of opening line is called a teaser. It’s like the barker standing outside a sideshow, trying to get the audience to pay their money and come inside. If you want to take risks, you can load that first line with emotional content. For instance, in the beginning of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, we read: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” That line should awaken some measure of reproach in you (and if it doesn’t, we can arrange counseling) – thus the title of the book. The line is a signal that we are going to visit characters we don’t want to know personally – and it awakens the same sort of curiosity that a car wreck, or a house fire might. And while it might also establish setting, a good opening line always begs a question. In Cuba Libre, Elmore Leonard begins, “Tyler arrived with the horses February eighteenth, three days after the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor.” This gives us an exact sense of time and place, but still leaves us with two questions: A) Who’s Tyler? and B) What are the horses for?
2) Make your lead character approachable. This usually means “make your lead character fallible.” This is an ancient truism that traces its roots all the way back to Greek mythology, and then some (remember Achilles and his heel?). If the hero is too strong and stalwart, or the heroine too beautiful and self-confident, the reader (who is fallible, like the rest of us) will lose the sense of identity that is so crucial to suspension of disbelief. In Deep Blue, as I introduce Jennifer Cassidy, I write: “The face in the mirror still looked efficient – younger than her twenty-four years and vaguely boyish, mostly because of the hair – what there was of it. She turned the mirror back to where it was supposed to be and put her makeup away. On the journey to ‘beautiful,’ ‘cute’ was about as far as she’d ever gotten, and she’d learned to comfort herself with the sentiment that things could be worse.” I get a lot of mail from people who read my books, and they all love and identify with Jennifer.
3) Establish conflict early. It’s even possible to begin your story in the middle of the conflict (this, too, is an ancient technique known as in media res – “in the middle of things”). But you might find more success if you write just enough to establish the peace that the conflict is going to shatter, and then introduce the conflict. In the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, the thing that makes the corruption of Mordor so awful is that it threatens the Shire, a place where we’d all like to live. Remember, human beings arrive on this earth hard-wired for the Garden in which we were always intended to live. And the thing that makes story so compelling to us is that we want to see how the conflict gets resolved (or dissolved) and how order is (or is not) restored.
4) Add a touch of humanity to your antagonist. When all is said and done, Satan is still an angel – a fallen angel, but an angel nonetheless. And it is the little bit of good that best paints the bad in your character. In Yucatan Deep, I don’t want the reader to like the character Viktor Bellum (I even gave him a sinister name); nor do I want him to be a lifeless and depthless pastiche of a villain. So I gave him an undertone – he is trying to destroy the missionary foundations planted by his father among the native people of the Yucatan Peninsula, but he is doing that because he feels that those people got the love and attention that his father should have given to him. He is a drug dealer, an antiquities smuggler, and a power-mad jerk, but underneath it all, he is a lonely little boy who wonders why his father does not love him.
5) Build tempo. The course of the classic story, once conflict is established, is generally referred to as “rising action.” If the stakes don’t go up, if jeopardy does not build, and if the threat does not become larger, the reader is going to think that the story is turning dull. I always pretend that my reader wants to go to the restroom – and my job is to keep him/her in the chair, reading, despite that fact.
6) Show, don’t tell. Which works better for you: “Little Mary was very frightened…” or “Mary cowered in the far corner of the big walk-in closet, the rag doll clutched to her chest, her blue eyes wide and staring, the whites showing all around. She rocked back and forth, and her lips moved, mouthing over and over again some phrase that Phillip could not hear…”? Okay; that's over the top, but you get the point. Think of your story as a play being acted out on the stage. If you absolutely have to – if there is no other way – you can have the author walk on stage and explain what’s going on, but be aware that such a technique (called an “aside”) is almost impossible to pull off without interrupting the action (and thus working in contrary to Rule #5).
7) Keep it real. “Real” being, of course, a relative term. In the Harry Potter books, warlocks and witches change shapes, make doors appear in solid walls, and dine under an enchanted ceiling that has the appearance of the sky – but they do all of this in accordance with a constant background, so they are always true to their surroundings. One of the best ways to keep fidelity is to make the dialogue sound the way we think dialogue should sound – not highly polished, but not slice-of-life-verbatim, either (if you were to transcribe everything the average person said in a day, at least half would be run-on or fragmented gibberish). In In High Places, a book I’m working on right now, a teenage son and his father have moved to a new home in the mountains of West Virginia following the death of the mother/wife, and we have the following exchange as they walk toward the house. It loses something out of context, but see if you can’t sense what it is the father is thinking, even though he doesn’t say it:
… then he stopped walking, looking at the house.
“What?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about Christmas…” He shook his head. “This will be… It’ll be a great place at Christmas, Sport.”
And the look in his eyes was so empty that I shivered, despite the warmth of the evening.
8) Give your dialogue some oxygen. There are two things that will help in this regard – one is to use speaker attributions only when necessary and try to restrict them to “said,” and the other is to insert a “beat” or two (the clock ticking, or somebody doing something) to break the wall of text in quotes. Even in the brief exchange above, the father’s head-shake adds a beat to the dialogue.
9) Solve large. I say “solve” because a conflict can resolve (highly recommended) or dissolve (risky and far too easy to mess up), but either way, it is a solution to the conflict. Your solution will be big if it is both logical and a surprise at the same time (see any of M. Night Shyamalan’s films for a considerably amplified demonstration of this principle in action). Readers will tolerate occasional clichés in your writing, but they absolutely will not tolerate them in your plotting.
10) Don’t just end – resonate. There should be a lasting image, or a lasting emotion that projects itself beyond the end of the story. Good poetry does this: in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” we are left with that sound of lakewater lapping on the shore. Think of your story as an orchestral piece and work for that lingering stillness that comes just before the audience’s thunderous applause.
One postscript: these are not rules. They’re suggestions, they're suggestions, they're suggestions.... Great writing violates them with impunity and aplomb. But if you follow them when you start, you will probably find it easier to come up with a piece that will satisfy both you and your readers.
(Last updated June, 2005)
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Back when most of my writing was adventure-travel material for magazines, I also did most of my own photography and occasionally exhibited some of my better work. And when I did, it amazed me that the question people most often asked me was not, “Where did you study photography?” but, “What kind of camera do you use?”—as if skill and talent were absolutely incidental to the process, and having the equipment was everything.
I eventually got over that (well, now that I’ve re-read the paragraph above, maybe I haven’t…). And I realize that people like good equipment because it reduces the number of hurdles that stand between them and their concepts. So, for the record, here’s what I'm working with these days.
 They’re amazingly expensive for something made out of a material that grows on trees, but when I’m traveling extremely light in rough environments, or am taking notes that will require maps or sketches, I like to carry the hardbound Moleskine notebooks from Modo & Modo of Italy. They have stiff, acid-free pages that don’t fold or tear in a breeze, an elastic band that holds the cover shut while the notebook is riding in a rucksack, and a little pocket in the back that is perfect for holding bus transfers and the like (I just looked in the pocket of my current notebook and found a Bermudian $2 bill and an American Priority Mail stamp).
I know some writers go all geeky over certain brands of pens, but I am not one of them. I’m not fond of writing (or sketching) with pencils or ballpoints, but just about any rollerball, gel pen or felt-tip in a dark color, disposable or otherwise, will work for me. For drawing maps, I favor the various brands of disposable, metal-collared felt-tips that have replaced the old-fashion Koh-I-Noor Rapidographs I once used during a brief stint as a scientific illustrator (a traditional Rapidograph is a nice pen for precision drawing, but it's fairly high-maintenance).
 My trusty “axe” for early drafts and revisions is the AlphaSmart Neo, essentially a keyboard that stores keystrokes so you can later stream them into any open PC or Mac application that accepts text. Originally developed for use by public-school students, the Neo is Sherman-tank tough, which fits my bull-in-a-china-shop personality; I have the bad habit of setting stuff on my car roof while I fish out my keys, and my Neo has now nose-dived to the pavement twice, with nary a scratch. Battery life is 700 hours of screen-time on a set of three AA alkalines (that translates to new batteries every year or two, and there's a lithium backup battery that preserves memory in the event that the AAs bite the dust early…). Neo is instant-on, and the monochrome display is readable in any light in which one can read a book and can be set to display anywhere from two lines of text to six. It is so simple to use that reading the User's Guide is entirely optional.
Neo has basic word-processor abilities (cut-and-paste, spell-check, etc.) and holds about 80,000 words, scaleably distributed among eight files. As it sits, it is USB plug-and-play compatible with any PC from Windows 98SE on, and most modern Macs. If you install the included AlphaSmart Manager 2 software on the computer(s) you use most often, you can also export text from your computer to Neo for your early revisions.
I opened my Neo up and installed a glare-resistant screen protector from PocketPCTech, not because I thought the screen needed protecting, but to reduce the reflection from the reading lights on airliners. Other than that, I found it perfect, straight out of the box. And after I'm done composing something on the Neo, I fire up the PC, connect the two with a USB cable, hit one button, and whatever I wrote goes squirting onto the screen wherever I placed the PC cursor.
When I'm not near my computer, I can also use the Neo to beam a backup copy of the text in a file to a Palm OS device. I have two of these: an AlphaSmart Dana Wireless and a Palm Tungsten E2. But since the Dana is the same size as the Neo, it rarely makes sense to carry both (I primarily use the Dana for writing research notes in libraries that have wifi internet access). When I'm out and about with the Neo, I usually have the E2 in my pocket.
There are a couple of tricks to beaming from a Neo to a Palm device. The first is that you must have Neo set to send text to the Palm as an "AlphaWord" file (it can send as a Memo file as well, but Memo will only accept a few paragraphs of incoming text, while AlphaWord's appetite seems bottomless). And to receive text on the Palm end in anything but an AlphaSmart Dana, you will need to add an inexpensive Palm application called Wordsmith (WordSmith and AlphaWord are the same word-processing application, as far as Neo is concerned). That leaves your text safely stored on the Palm in a basic word processor that you can use for further editing, and from which you can also beam back to Neo, if you want to revise on something with a full-size, non-folding keyboard.
Because the E2 has an SD card slot, I go one step further, and keep yet another Palm application on the E2, a word-processing (and spreadsheet, and PowerPoint...) application called Documents to Go. Documents to Go will save as a "native" Microsoft Word file (i.e., a file that is readable and editable, just as it is, with Microsoft Word). So after text has been beamed into WordSmith, I cut-and-paste it into a Word document in Documents to Go, and save it on an SD card, which I can simply pop into my laptop (see below) like any other media. That allows me to access the file for revision in the laptop without having to sync it with the Palm.
This sounds extremely complicated and convoluted in description, but in practice, it really is not. In description it would not be, either, if Documents to Go would accept a beamed file directly from Neo. But Documents to Go does not do that in the current version, which is why I use WordSmith as a "bridge."
I like to think of the Neo as the 21st-century version of the Flair pen and the yellow legal pad … which is how I once wrote my first drafts. Of all my writing gear, I consider the Neo to be the most essential, and the one "desert island" tool I would not want to be without.
 When you write for a living, you need more than one computer and you need to back up your work often. Otherwise, you’re temporarily out of business if your computer goes into the shop. So I have—well, a few PCs, as well as a Mac Mini that I use for design work and reviewing documents in page-make-up applications like Quark and Adobe Creative Suite 3's InDesign program (actually, my page-make-up work is almost all InDesign, these days).
When it came time to get a new notebook computer for writing, I’d previously thought I’d go to a new PowerBook, as I’ve long admired the quality and robust operating systems of Apple products. But experimentation with the trial version of Microsoft Word that came with my Mini eventually convinced me that I actually prefer the PC version of that program, Evil Empire and all.* So I went shopping for a light, compact and sturdy notebook PC that would run a well-debugged, late-generation version of Windows XP. And as I vastly prefer to work outdoors when the weather permits it, I was instantly drawn to the HP Pavilion dv125cl multimedia notebook, which has a BrightView-technology screen that is actually viewable in direct sunlight.
I use the notebook to do the more involved revisions that include embedded comments from my editors and going through extremely large blocks of text at a time. And one bonus with this particular notebook is that it comes with a remote control. This allows me to hook the computer up to a projector and run PowerPoint presentations from anywhere in the room when I’m doing a workshop. When not in use, the remote control stores in the notebook's PCMCIA slot, which is good, as otherwise I would almost certainly misplace it.
My main “desktop” computer is a slightly larger and slightly older HP notebook. I no longer regularly use a conventional desktop or tower computer, as notebooks have caught up to them in both function and quality, and I like the flexibility of owning multiple notebooks. For moving files back and forth between the computers, a USB flashdrive does nicely.
(Last updated November, 2005)
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*This just in: Novelist Deborah Raney informs me that I am all wet (not in so many words, Deb being far too kind for that) and that the Mac version of Word is every bit as feature-rich and easy-to-use as that which runs on Windows XP. Which means that either my trial version was lacking in several features, or I was too dense to infer their implementation. I strongly suspect the latter. A moot point, as I've already purchased the HP; happily, I'm more than pleased with it....
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A reader recently asked for more information on how I use the AlphaSmart Neo (see above) in my writing. Here's what I wrote back (the bit about the antiglare shield repeats what's above, but it is so useful that I think it bears repeating):
When I'm traveling (which is often), I generally have dive gear with me, and so have to pack sparingly when it comes to other things. That being the case, my travel-writing -- and my fiction-writing that I'm doing as I travel -- is usually done on a laptop computer, as I also need the computer for accessing e-mail, storing images from my digital camera, etc., and I prefer to travel with just one device.
But when I'm at home, the Neo is still my primary writing device. I like the fact that I can easily see the screen, even in daylight (I live in Florida and do most of my writing on my patio), and it's one battery-powered device that I know will not run out of power when I'm in mid-sentence. When I'm starting a novel, I do 3-5 chapters and write a synopsis -- much like a film treatment -- that goes to my publisher to get their buy-in on the project.
Once I have that, I sit down with the Neo and do a scene-by-scene overview of the entire novel -- each scene gets a single bulleted sentence describing the action (and sometimes the purpose) of the scene. This "scene map" is where I do most of my rearranging and revision and creating and finalizing it can take a month or more. When it's finished, I transfer a safety copy to my computer, but keep the original on the Neo (generally in File 8). Each day's writing then becomes a fairly straightforward process: I review what was written the day before, read the description of the next scene to be written, write that scene, delete its description from File 8, and then move on to the next scene. Writing in this fashion is the most efficient for me; as long as I have my voice and tone down pat, very little revision to the work is necessary and my first draft is usually my final draft.
When I run out of gas for that day, I transfer my work from the Neo to Microsoft Word on my computer, back up the computer file (all of the novel is on one big file) onto a flash drive, and then delete the draft (but not the map of the remaining scenes) from my Neo.
That's pretty much the process.
Two notes on Neo:
1) When you push "Send" on Neo, it doesn't move the entire file onto your computer all at once. It sends one character at a time -- like a ghost typing on your computer very quickly. With some computers, Neo can quickly outstrip the keystroke cache, so you might need to slow down the transfer speed a bit to find a speed that your computer likes ([CTRL]-[S] on the Neo). All in all, it is probably better to use AlphaSmart Manager 2 (which comes with Neo) to just move the text en masse into Microsoft Word, but I use Word's embedded commands (such as doing _this_ to get italics), and these have to be typed sequentially to work in Word, so I still mostly use "Send."
2) Neo is great to use on airliners. It won't run out of gas on a transoceanic flight and it has no screen to fold back toward you when the person sitting in front of you reclines his seat. But the screen is very shiny and can reflect the reading lamps on airliners (which you'll want to use at night, as -- to help conserve battery power -- Neo has no backlight). To cut down on glare, I opened my Neo up (you'll need a set of small Torx screwdrivers to do this) and installed an anti-glare screen protector on the screen. Opening Neo to do this allows you to hide the edges of the screen protector, which makes for a better-looking installation. It takes about 15 minutes to do (including cutting the screen protector to fit) and makes the Neo ever so much more pleasant to use.
[Posted March, 2008]
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