Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 24

Writing Worksheets for Pantsers

One of the biggest challenges about being a writer who doesn’t outline, or a pantser, is that the writing world expects you to outline. Everything is designed for outliners. So it’s about time we got some forms. This package will include:

50 Reverse Outline Worksheets25 Individual Character Worksheet1 Character List Worksheet25 Setting WorksheetsWhat is a pantser? – an explanation from a pantserWriter’s Toolkit: Cycling – instructions on a little-known writing tool for pantsersPlus instructions for all of the forms

All forms are fillable PDFs, so you can save on paper waste.

What makes these worksheets different from others on the internet?

Other worksheets are one writer’s process for their writing. That may not be your process or have elements you don’t need. Writing Worksheets for Pantsers is made from information from many different authoritative sources, including best selling writers.

Other worksheets are done by outliners. Writing Worksheets for Pantsers are done by a writer who does not outline and understands the needs of those writers.

Other worksheets just give you a Microsoft Word document or a printable. Writing Worksheets for Pantsers gives you enough forms to create a novel, because we all want to spend time writing the novel, not resaving files.

I want this !

February Finds

Face of glowing blue particles, consciousness, technology, soul

Image © Lidiia Moor

One of the things that came out of my annual review class was using tools like Instapaper or YouTube to save links of interest from the year (when you do the annual review, you list them).  In the Gold Rush days of the internet, people about curation, but they explained it, other than collecting and sharing links.  The links have to mean something to you personally.  Otherwise, it’s just clutter.

How do I Stay Productive In a One Room Apartment? & Getting Things Done During an Isolating Pandemic

One of my neighbors barely has left their apartment in almost a year.  Most of the tenants end up putting the packages at their door because they will not go down the few steps to get them.  I don’t get that.  How can you lock yourself away and not go crazy?  Cal Newport talks about staying productive during a pandemic—you have to get outside.  Especially as a writer, I need just to walk among trees and birds to let the creative side do what it does best.  I’ve gone outside in the morning and followed the sunrise.  It’s magical to do that.

Supporting Your Brain Health in a Pandemic

This topic is at the 59-minute mark and connects to what Cal Newport said above about getting outside.   There’s some discussion that people who have gotten COVID-19 have had a vitamin D deficiency.  The numbers they mention in the podcast are astounding.  A huge amount of the population is suboptimal in Vitamin D levels.  It comes best from sunlight, even if it is gray and cloudy outside.  I’ve been going out, even with the temperatures below freezing.  Earlier in the week, I just stood on the doorstep for some sunshine because the steps were too icy.  Writing tends to be an indoor activity, so making sure I get enough sunshine is imperative so I can continue writing.

The Key to Making Risky Decisions

Scott Young on how to deal with something that looks shiny but might not be a good idea.  I’ve been thinking a lot of doing things in terms of trade-offs.  “I’m thinking of doing X.  What’s the trade-off if I don’t do it?”  (I had to ask this about a couple of work tasks I was doing, and it turned out that the answer didn’t lend itself to me doing the task).  But for indie publishing, I asked this question after I got my W-4.  I’ve been publishing to Amazon, Smashwords, and Draft to Digital.  But I discovered I was making a trade-off of time for Smashwords.  The site is complicated because I have to publish, then go somewhere else for the ISBN, then go somewhere else to deselect some of the vendor options.  The time was not worth the sales I was getting.  So, I took it off my checklist and sped through publishing three short stories, Last Gamble, Lost Night, and Murder in the Lodge in record time.

The History of Control + Alt + Delete

Veering into nerd territory for this.  We all use Ctrl+Alt=Delete at some point or another.  It turns out it was just a programmer’s tool that became an industry standard.  It was something to save time for his fellow programmers.  I still remember the non-standard problems of switching between problems.  Print in WordPerfect was one keyboard shortcut, in CorelDraw, it was another, and in WordStar, it was yet another.  I was always mixing those up!

Writing Worksheets

Also have a look at my Writing Worksheets page.  I’m still working on getting the Writing Worksheets Bundle done, but I have some worksheets like Word Count Tracking and Reverse outline available.  These worksheets will specifically focus on pantsers and  come with instructions.  The Pantser Bundle will be out by the end of February.

Update on Pantser Worksheets

Image © by Tamara Dragovic

I’m readying the “Writing Worksheets for Pantsers” bundle in a few weeks.  This is a first look at what’s going to be in the bundle.

The worksheets:

Reverse Outline (50 worksheets)Setting Worksheet (25 worksheets) (Thanks, Peggy!)Character Worksheet (25 worksheets)Character List (1 worksheet)

If you think the number of worksheets for 1-3 should be more, let me know.  I’m just guessing at what writers will need.

I’m also including the following:

Instructions for each worksheet! What is pantsing?Cycling: The Pantser’s Toolkit

Are there any burning questions you have on pantsing or cycling?  Most of what I’ve seen on pantsing is explained by someone who’s never done it.  Included is why pantser stories can look messy and chaotic—and it’s not because the story wasn’t outlined!  But it is fixable without major revision (trust me on that one.  I’ve had way too much practice at it).

I’ll also have a separate bundle of 12 worksheets for word count tracking.  I can’t do tracking like this myself since it brings out my inner critic, but this is popular with a lot of writers.  These are for the lazy writer.  You don’t have to create a spreadsheet and fuss with formulas.  These will give you the total for each month.  All you have to do is plug your numbers in.

A Call to Pantsers

This image fits what it’s like to write a book without an outline.

Image © copyright kevron2001

I’m working on a special for pantsers—those of you who discover the story by diving in and writing:

Writing worksheets

Typically, writing worksheets tend be about creating a story with an outline.  That’s not particularly helpful if you don’t outline!

So I’m making something that that’ll help the writing process along and be a useful tool.

The proposed worksheet package:

Character worksheets: These are not going to be your typical character worksheets.  They’ll include a few fields that no one else uses but will be important to character development. 
Reverse outline worksheets: These are to be filled out AFTER you’ve written a scene, or a batch of them.  They’re like being on a path in the woods and turning around to see the landmarks of where you’ve been. One of sections is a lot of fun to think about!
Character List: To be filled out after you’ve written a large chunk of the story.  It’ll help you identify characters who need a little more work.

I’ll also include instructions how things that will help you write a novel without outlining (I wish I could say it was a step-by-step instruction) and the ultimate pantser’s tool, cycling.

Are there any worksheets you feel should be included?

Great Challenge Story #22

Talk to the paw

Image © copyright by TheKoRp

This was a rough week, writing-wise.  But normal for this time of the year.  The weather in Washington DC always gets bad in February.  We often experience our coldest weather this month.

Last weekend, the temperature was 18 with the windchill.  We got three days of snow.

Then the sun came out mid-week, the temperature went as high as 57.  The snow melted.  My sinuses went haywire.

Today, I woke up to cold rain, and by mid-morning, it was snowing enough to stick to the grass.  By afternoon, the snow was entirely melted.

And the air has been incredibly dry.

So writing was difficult simply because I didn’t feel good.  It was hard to concentrate, and easy to get distracted.

Last weekend, I discovered some story starts in a folder, so I dumped them into Evernote so I could use them.  I grabbed one that I’d started for an inspiration anthology call and never finished—it was right about the time COVID-19 was warming up, so I must have picked up on bad vibes.

The first scene looked okay, so I whittled at the rest of it, really just a few hundred words at a time until I got it done.  It’s a fantasy, called “Catspiration,” weighing in at 3,200 words.

I also did Flash Fiction #4, weighing in at 250 words.  That’s for a themed call.  The story is science fiction, on the subject of writing, and called “Idea, Input, Check.”  It was inspired by a conversation we had at a work meeting on artificial intelligence.

Too hard, too easy, just right

Learning about reading: A little girl sits next to her teddy bear and excitedly reads a book

The New Year always makes me think about what I’m going to learn that’s new and exciting.  Yet, the world races by so fast that even a year is surprisingly a long time.  With all the disruption around us, things can change, and alarmingly fast.

As an adult, I’ve always been fascinated with learning.  Not just the aspect of exploring a new skill, but also the process to get that skill.  With many of my classes, I was simply expected to absorb the information, sometimes with mixed results.

High school algebra.  This was a mandatory class.  I might have done much better, but I missed an important concept early on, and without it, the class never made sense.  I got a D, which was very demoralizing.
A “pantser friendly outlining” class.  I took the class because of all the problems I had figuring out why my books ran too short.  I knew that standard outlines didn’t work, so I thought this would be different.  The writer instructor promised it would be easy once we learned the steps.  I didn’t understand it all.  The instructor got very frustrated with me, re-explaining the same things as if I was stupid.  The other writers all exclaimed, “It’s easy.  Let me explain it to you.”  I never understood the concepts. 

The algebra class I didn’t have much control over.  It was required and I had to take it.  The teacher wasn’t teaching it very well (this was my father’s opinion at the time, and he’s a math nerd.  Though when I discovered what concept I missed much later, he was right.  Though he tried to help me at the time, he also didn’t catch the concept I was missing.). 

But the outlining class? Yeah…

After a failure like that, it’s easy to think that you’re entirely at fault, that something was in the way.  Or as some might say, they aren’t capable of it.  But there are two places where we have opportunities to influence our learning:

Establishing an outcomeThe Goldilocks PrincipleOutcome

Outcome is a very different way of thinking than traditional goals.  Goals don’t give you an emotional connection to what you’re doing.  That’s an important piece of doing learning.  A goal is more like putting an item on a to-do list.

Like “write a novel in a year.”  So my goal for the pantser-friendly outlines was to take the class. I thought it would help solve the problem, but I didn’t think much beyond that.

Outcome is a way to help focus on what type of learning to be done.  It could be based on a need or even a want.  For example, for a writing class I’m taking, my outcome is to fill in some of the cracks from my past classes and also to have a different writer’s perspective on craft to help my understanding.  I would have liked to be more specific on the outcome, but the class runs 7 months and covers a lot of topics, and is somewhat fluid.  I based this outcome on both hearing the teacher speak elsewhere, his blog posts, and classes I picked up with a bundle.

Always look for the emotional connection to why you want to learn. Write it down.

The Goldilocks Principle

I looked up the story itself for a refresher, since I haven’t read it in years: The Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (dltk-teach.com).

Like Goldilocks, learning anything is that what you choose should be challenging, but no so difficult you can’t do it.  It also shouldn’t be too easy. 

When I first read one of Jack Bickham’s books, Writing and Selling Your Novel, I was a pretty new writer.  At the time, there weren’t many books on how to write fiction.  Despite the title, it’s an advanced craft book.  I didn’t have the writing skills to understand any of it.  So, like the bed in Goldilocks, it was too hard. I didn’t learn much of anything from it.

Likewise, signed up for a description class right before I found Dean Wesley Smith’s classes.  The description class was one of those everyone teaches newbies:  You receive an assignment to describe an outdoor market, a restaurant dining room, or whatever.  You practice writing this paragraph, but there’s no connection to characters.  I looked at the class description and then at Dean’s and dropped the description class.  It was going to be too easy.

The Ideas to Story class that I did take was just right.  The outcome was obvious for me: I wanted to be able to come up with more story ideas so I could write more stories (the Great Challenge is a long-term example of what I learned).  The class pushed me just enough to realize what I was missing and needed to work on.  Then I succumbed to the siren call and did one that was too hard…sigh.

Even the process of figuring out how to learn is a learning process.

But all learning should push your skills a little.  Maybe make you feel uncomfortable.  It shouldn’t make you feel frustrated like I was with the pantser-friendly outlining class.  Nor should it be so easy that you zoom through it without much effort. 

Remember, even your time is worth money. Why spend it on something that doesn’t give you any challenge? 

Challenge Story #21

This week, the inner critic tried to wrestle control of the story from me.  I’m guessing it’s because I’m very close to the halfway point of the challenge.  It’s more stories than I’ve ever written any kind of sprint.

And I started this story without any inspiration. 

At this point, my brain’s going, “I don’t know what to write.”  So it becomes pick something. 

So I started thinking about a setting.  In May, I drove up to the Shenandoah Mountains and stayed in one of the lodges there.  The first thing that struck me walking up to my room was how it smelled.  Of this wonderful wood.  I’m thinking I might have to spend a bit more money and stay in one of the cabins, just for the heck of it.

I popped onto Pinterest, hoping I would find some inspiration.  I did find some images (trust me, I am an image hoarder.  I can always find images!), but inspiration?  Meh. 

Since it’s winter, I started writing about a snowstorm.  Clearly the weather heard I was writing about it because we’re now getting 4-6 inches today.  The dog and her boots managed to let the inner critic into the story, and by the time I hit the second scene, I wandered down a rabbit hole that had a dead end.

I did something new, which was to add some notes to myself for the next day.  I could tell something wasn’t working, so I was just brainstorming some possibilities:

Should I take the husband out? Should the deputy become something of a love interest?And what does Cassie do in her day job?

I woke up realizing everything after the first scene had to go, along with the dog’s boots, which was what steered me down the rabbit trail.  Such a little thing!

Once I did that, I saw what I needed to do and the story worked the way it was supposed to.  This is a mystery called Murder in the Lodge, weighing it at 2,600 words.

Meanwhile, some dogs in boots.

Challenge Story #20

This week was another challenging week because of all the events swirling around us with the election.

I live about fifteen minutes from Washington, DC.   The street I live on can turn into a celebration parade or a protest.  Even though I shut off all news entirely for the week, I could still fix the toxic pull of the events in the air.

Monday was a holiday, so I hopped down to the University of Maryland for research.  Not hitting the books for research.  I’ve been writing an action scene for Book 1.  The character goes to visit her father, who works at a university as a math professor.  But when I wrote the action scene, I had trouble nailing down the setting.  That’s prettty important for an action scene. 

So I needed to actually see a university campus to make a scene map. 

This was done in PowerPoint

That meant I had to cross from Virgnia, through DC, to Maryland.   All the off ramps to DC were blocked off with snow plows and a police car.  I doubted if anyone was getting into the city unless they lived there or were emergency workers.  The Federal government declared a holiday on Wednesday for anyone in DC, Alexandria, or Arlington.  DC prepared for violence.

I started the story on Tuesday using a series of pictures as a prompt.  I thought it would be a time travel story, but I always wanted to venture back into deeper emotion.

That was probably not a good idea for this week.  It immediately went really depressing and the story stalled out.

Inner critic pretty much panicked.  It actually wants me to succeed on this.  I’m on Story #20.  That’s more than I’ve written on any challenge on the past.  That’s only a few away from the halfway point.

So I went on Wednesday morning  to think about what I was going to do.  I went out early, just in case there were protests or other chaos.  I walked down a steep hill, listening to the wind shake the trees.  Maybe a try at literary?

My only goal at this point became to meet the minimum word count requirement of 2,000.  I could do that with a literary story and get some of that character I wanted to explore.

I wrote about 300 words, and it stalled.  Same problem.  Just too depressing.  I think my muse doesn’t want to ever revisit that dark place that Desert Storm left me.  And no reader really wants to read depressing stuff!

Inner critic is now pretty scared that I was going to drop the ball on the story.

I went back to the Pinterest folder and started taking out images until I had enough for one row (so it could fit on my screen).  I’d originally had eight images, but curiously, removing some of them forced me into making decisions.

I plopped a screen shot into Word and started the time travel story again, reminding myself I only needed 2K.  That’s two 1K scenes.  I also told myself that I wasn’t going to work on anything else until this got done.  So no Book 1 of any kind.

I started writing again and ended the night with 700 words.  Went to bed and dreamed that the story wasn’t working.  I re-signed myself I might have to do something different in the morning, and it was going to have to be in a hurry.

And I looked at the story in morning on Thursday.  The scene was better than I remembered. I could work with it.  I added some more, but I didn’t have the evening time, so Friday would be the push.

Friday evening, I sat down and pushed through the rest of the story.  I had to stopped halfway, to think about what the overall story was.  Inner critic kept pushing in and saying “The train needs to go through the portal!”  I stepped back from that and focused on what was already in the story.  Finished it at 2,200 words.  Inner critic squawked.  “The story is terrible!” it said.  “It doesn’t work!”

So I ignored the story entirely on Saturday and revisited Sunday morning.  I knew I needed to add some more setting and five senses in the second scene and tie up the ending better.  The problem with the ending I expected.  That always needs a second go-round to clean up.  So I cycled back through the story, added some things, took a few things out.  Then I reread the whole story, found something I’d put in initially and forgotten, added it at the end, and called it done.  Final word count is 2,400 words.  It’s a time travel story called “Time Portal.”

This is a starting board for the next one, which I think will be a mystery, set in the Shenadoah Mountains.

The Deceit of False Victories

Metrics always look like a wonderful thing.  You know, like tracking how many words you wrote every day for writers, or for our day jobs, number of tasks processed, or possibly, how many emails processed.  The numbers say “We did something.  Here’s proof.”

But sometimes it puts our focus on the wrong thing.

This was another one of my lessons learned from 2020, though I think I had to be hit with it many times before I got it.

My first exposure to metrics missing the target came from the Army.  I worked in the training office, and we had to produce a presentation called the “Quarterly Training Brief.”  One of the key metrics showed that all our soldiers had readiness paperwork completed so we could deploy at a moment’s notice.  This included making sure all our vaccinations were current, our emergency notification paperwork had been reviewed and updated, that we had dog tags.

Every quarter, we asked the Orderly Room folks (that’s the admins who handle most of the HR paperwork) to update the numbers.  Anything below 90% meant that when the company commander briefed it, she would get eaten by the group commander.

So the Orderly Room always adjusted the numbers.  They would say, “Okay, it’s easy for Private Smith to review his contact information, so we’ll take that one off.”  And, “The platoon sergeant is going to send Private Jones for his shots when he returns off leave, so we’ll take that one off.”

The metrics would then look better.  Often though, none of what the Orderly Room shaved off would ever get done.

So for this one briefing, the Orderly Room couldn’t do the metrics.  Our commander was changing command and they were swamped. 

The training sergeant asked the platoon sergeants for their metrics.  They came in on scraps of paper torn out of pocket notebooks, half-scribbled.  We tallied everything together, put the numbers on the slide, and calculated the percentage.  The training sergeant didn’t shave anything off.

It was 80%.

The training sergeant told the commander to look at that slide specifically, but she was days away from change of command and didn’t bother.  She went into the meeting and got eaten by the group commander.

At this point, you might be wondering why this matters.  Well, it was a big deal.  When Desert Shield kicked off and whole units deployed, the Army discovered that some couldn’t deploy because they looked good on paper but not in real life.

Sometimes focusing on the numbers makes us focus on the wrong things.

I think about this because I had my own experience of focusing on the wrong things.  As writers, we think about word count goals, but we can lose track of finishing projects because we still making word count goals.

It’s a false victory, where you accomplish your task but do all the wrong things for the overall bigger picture.  The success of the metrics sometimes keeps you from taking a necessary step back to figure out if you’re doing the right thing, or if you’re not solving the problem.

I needed to take that step back.  I did it this year, because I’d gone to Superstars and listened to Jim Butcher.  He made me think and I started looking around and discovered—really, stumbled into–an answer to a long-standing problem I’d had in my writing.

I’ve always had a problem with novels running too short.  I’d shoot for 60K and land in 20K.  Overall length was my metric.  Instead of asking more questions about why, I kept aiming at the metric and trying to fix it without understanding what I was fixing.

The most common recommendation from other writers was “Add more subplots,” so I drew the wrong conclusion that I must not be able to do subplots well.

It didn’t help.  Other writers suggested outlining would help.  I’ve never been an outliner, but I tried it for a while.  People will tell you that you’re not doing it right or to try a different kind of outline, not that outlines might not work for you.  I had to find that out on my own and burned a book in the process.

Then structure became the big trending thing that everyone flocked to.  We got lectured by writers like Story Fix and James Scott Bell that structure would solve all our problems.  It always seemed to come with the admonishment that the only way to get structure was to outline, so I managed to stay away from that merry-go-round until a pantser-style class on structure popped up.  I’m glad I took it because I did need to learn what I did.  And yet, it didn’t solve the problem of length.

Then I heard and tags and traits from Jim Butcher, who learned from Deborah Chester, who learned from Jack Bickham (all kinds of books are available on the topic from Chester and Bickham).  And I ran across the following statement:abou

Keep your plot simple.  Make your characters complex.

Poleaxed me.  Everything I’d been trying was to make the plot more complex because I kept looking at the wrong metrics.  In my head, word count always equaled more plot, more subplots.  Because of that, I’d chased after writing courses on plot, structure, subplots, themes. 

And in my head, I always said the same thing, “I’m good a characterization.  I can let that go so I can learn this other thing because this other thing will solve the problem.”

So early in the year, when I wasn’t able to write because of the chaos of COVID-19, I spent time on characterization workshops to fill in the gaps.

My current novel, called Book 1 as a working title, weighs in at 40K.  I had reached the climax and a character showed up as important.  All through the writing, I kept wondering about this character (the main character’s father).  Was he divorced and living elsewhere?  Should he be in the story? That was my back brain nagging at me to make the characters complex.

So I walked back to the middle of the book, stumbled around a bit while I figured out what I needed to do.  I finally discovered there was a place to add scenes with the character, and it’s been like, “Wow.  This was supposed to be here.”

Now I can feel the characters coming to life with the additions, becoming more complex.  And it’s nothing that can be measured by word count or metrics.

Great Challenge Story #19

This week–yikes!

I’ve been balancing finishing up what is officially known as Book #1. Over the last few weeks, I finally started to figure out how to balance my time better I could complete it.

Monday: I worked on Book #1. That was in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening.

Tuesday: It was Book #1 in the morning and at lunch. In the evening, I launched on another historical private eye mystery. I wrote most of the first scene. Didn’t actually have an idea in the traditional sense. Character wakes up in an alley next to a body. The cops are coming. That was the idea.

Not a clue where it was going.

Wednesday: More morning and lunch work on Book #1.

Finished the first scene of Story #19, got into the second scene.

Thursday: Rinse and repeat on Book #1.

I had a writing meeting that evening, so no work on Story #19. But that was expected. I planned to plow through the rest of the story on Friday evening and get it done.

Friday: Early morning work on Book #1. I was lazy at lunch time and watched TV instead. I’m teleworking at home. By the afternoon, a problem showed up. The neighbor upstairs had their stereo up too loud. All I got for hours was the base…boom…boom…boom. It kept pulling me out of work.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t ask them to turn it down, well, it’s not something I do. After my time in the Army, I find that people get really offended when you ask them to turn the music down and then don’t do it anyway.

At the end of the work day, I fled to a restaurant, figuring things would quiet down by the time I got back.

Nope. It was boom, boom, boom, until 9:00. I tried writing, even with my noise cancelling headsets. The problem was that I could feel the base coming up from the floor. It just yanked at my attention and yanked at my attention.

No writing.

Saturday: I dove in and did three hours on the story, got the second scene done, was onto the third scene. I still at that point had no idea what I was doing with the mystery.

Inner critic was starting to panic. Was this story going to get done?

Muse was also a little worried because something was wrong with the story. It finally hit me. The third scene had taken me into a rabbit hole where the protagonist wasn’t protaging. I went back into the story and added a note in all caps that I needed to back up a scene and dump scene 3.

Noon I broke from Dave Farland’s 318R course. One hour on brainstorming. One section had me thinking about how I could make things a little more personal for the character.

Sunday: This is the day I have to turn in the story to make the schedule. Inner critic gets me to the chair early–it likes managing the schedule!

I resaved the file, then removed the problem scene. Then I revisited the first scene, added a few things to bring in the character’s PTSD from World War II. Onward to Scene 2. I expanded that. Then I started in on Scene 3.

I still hadn’t finished by lunch time. I was still scratching around trying to figure out what the reason for the murder was. At least no music. Off to eat.

Settled back in, reminding myself that the story needed to be done. It didn’t have to be good. Finally, as I reached the climax, I had the motive, and wrapped up the story. Whew!

Muse is happy. Inner critic is fussing. It’ll deal with it.

The story is called “Lost Night,” weighing in at 4,000 words.

For next week’s story, I’m doing something different for the idea. It’s the assignment from the brainstorming class. I was supposed to use a picture book, but that’s not happening with the library pretty much closed. So I assembled a handful of photos on Pintrest. Let’s see what I come up with!