Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 101

5 reasons it's better to spread your NaNoWriMo novel draft over multiple document files

Most of the things I've posted about NaNoWriMo have to do more with the writing, about getting your story to the 50,000 word mark and beyond. Now however I want to focus a little bit more on the nitty-gritty. I think you should separate your NaNoWriMo novel into multiple documents.

I can hear some of you objecting already, some people just love to open a shiny new Word document and plunk their entire book in it. I will concede, it does make the word count a little bit easier because the word count of your document is the work out of your entire book, but there are quite a few reasons why putting your entire novel on one document is a bad idea.

For NaNoWriMo, or really any time you're attempting a first draft, I highly recommend starting a new document for every writing session. There a few big reasons to do this:

You're less likely to lose your whole novel. Sometimes terrible things happen to computer files. It's just a fact of life. Sometimes when you're trying to backup a file, you end up overwriting the file you really needed with an older version. Sometimes your whole computer crashes spectacularly and you lose everything. When you're talking about relying on one file to house your entire novel, that's putting a hell of a lot of faith into something as unreliable as computer files can be. Stop and think about how you'd feel if an entire month's worth of work was corrupted, overwritten, accidentally deleted or was trapped on a computer that had crashed or was virus ridden. When you separate out your book and submit multiple files. You greatly reduce the chances of losing the entire thing. The occasional file fail, would, in this case, only affect a part of your story and not the whole thing.
You get less bogged down on what you've written before and focus on moving forward with the story. One of the hardest things about writing a first draft is the temptation to go back and edit what you've written before. If you force yourself to start an entirely new document every time you sit down to write, this temptation not only isn't there each day, it's gone completely. Instead of getting bogged down in questions of how good yesterday's writing was or whether the last scene still needs work or not, it forces you to move ahead on the plot, which gets you to the end of your story that much quicker. Editing is something you do after you finish your first draft and separating your document into multiple documents helps you remember the important fact.
A first draft of multiple documents makes for an easier editing experience later. When it comes time to edit your book, you're going to be moving things around. Having your novel spread out over multiple documents to begin with makes this process that much easier. It also helps you to get more into the spirit of the slash and burn that editing requires if you're not looking at one big chunk. I like to start a new document for my second draft, and then evaluate each piece of my first draft separately. Only the stuff that's good enough to be in the second draft actually makes it into that second file.
Multiple files simplifies the backup process. The real trouble starts when you're using the same file all the time. Questions come up like which version is newest? Which version did I fix that scene in? With multiple files, you write it, back it up, then leave it the hell alone until it's time to edit it. The less fooling around you do with the file, the less chance something can go horribly wrong with it. Google Docs can be very helpful for this.
I saved the most important reason for last because it's not going to seem like the most important reason at first. Separating your first draft into multiple documents is the best way to learn more about yourself as a writer. Taking note of exactly how many words you wrote in each writing session can teach you a lot of things about your writing habits there really is no other way to learn. For more detail on this benefit, please consult this article.

To me, those of the biggest reasons to separate your work in progress into multiple documents. But if you're a firm believer in the single document draft, please share some of the benefits of that method with us below in the comments. In the end, you'll need to stick with whatever works for you.

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Wait, so how are you going to do NaNoWriMo if you can't use your hands? Writing the handsfree novel.

Regular readers know that I've been having some serious problems with my hands since late June. In short, I cannot use my hands for using the computer mouse, playing video games or… typing. So about now you're probably wondering, how is she going to do NaNoWriMo if she can't use her hands?

Well, I'm going to write the entire novel using a dictation program. This has its advantages and disadvantages. I've been practicing writing using dictation for weeks and I wanted to go over with you some of the advantages and disadvantages of writing using voice to text.

Disadvantages

I can't work in a public place, while listening to music or while watching TV as the dictation program requires silence to work correctly. (As for in person events like write-ins, I'm just going to have to suck it up and try to type with my hands as best as I can.) This also eliminates working with someone else in the room, unless the person understands that they can't just talk to you whenever they feel like it.
Dictation is much harder on the voice than typing is on the hands. Before I developed hand trouble, I could write for many hours before I started to develop any pain or tiredness. My voice gets tired after only a few minutes, unless I continuously drink water and tea as I work.
If I lose my voice, cough, or sneeze, it can seriously screw up my writing. The dictation program interprets everything as a word. As I learned last week, having a cold can seriously impair your ability to type.
I have to keep stopping to make corrections. Before I tried a dictation program, I thought it would be better for NaNoWriMo because I wouldn't be able to look back at what I've written and I would be able to resist the temptation to edit it. What I didn't count on, however, was the fact that the voice program is constantly in need of training. This means that, if the voice program makes a mistake, you have to go back and correct it immediately to train the program to work better. Therefore, instead of just writing without stopping I find myself having to edit more than I would normally if I were just typing.

Advantages

I can talk faster than I can actually type which should, in theory, mean that I can get the novel done that much faster.
It's easier to maintain narrative voice between characters when I'm actually speaking the dialogue and narration out loud.
I don't have to think about spelling at all, that's all automatic.
I can write in circumstances I normally wouldn't be able to such as while I'm doing the dishes, while I'm driving in a car, or while on the treadmill.
I can still do NaNoWriMo even though I can't use my hands. Let's be honest, for all its flaws, the ability to still write even though I don't have the use of my hands is worth some difficulties.

I'm going to give you updates throughout the month on how the handless NaNoWriMo process is going, but for all its disadvantages, using voice to text software can give anyone an opportunity to take on this writing challenge even without the use of their hands. Even if you don't have a recurring condition like carpal tunnel or arthritis and have the use of both your hands, the strain of NaNoWriMo can give you hand pain by the end and you may want to try a dictation program for some of the writing to alleviate stress on your hands.

Have you ever done any significant writing using a dictation program? What were the advantages and disadvantages that you found? Please share with us below.

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Obsessing over your word count: Nerdy fun with NaNoWriMo numbers

We're all writers, right? But the sneaky little fact is that most of us are totally nerds too.

I'm a total nerd about NaNoWriMo. You probably guessed that when you saw my NaNoWriMo Advanced Word Count Calculator. (If you want to see my nerdiness up close, take a look at the calc in Google Docs which includes a bunch of very nerdy stats and graphs for your enjoyment). But I think that NaNoWriMo is a really great way to learn something about how you write all the while you're working on writing a novel in a month.

Here are my tips from one nerd to another on how to treat NaNoWriMo as an informative lab study into your writing habits:

Become a little more meticulous with how you keep track of word counts. While many people prefer to only keep track of their total word count for the month (that's how the NaNoWriMo website prefers it as well), I highly recommend keeping track of your word count daily or even based on the exact times that you started and stopped writing. While that may seem insane, you'll never get a better opportunity to examine your writing habits in such detail and doing it over the length of a project (such as an entire novel) is an excellent way to see where you need to improve and where your strengths lie. Keeping track of your word counts based on exact times especially lets you find our your average words per hour over the course of the entire month which can be a very handy thing to know about yourself for future projects.
Visualize your progress with graphs and charts. I love me some graphs! Sometimes the numbers blur into gobbledygook but graphs and charts give you a visual look. Track your word count progress per day to see what days are your best writing days and when you need to work harder. A nice pie chart of words written vs words left to go is a fun way to motivate and charting time spent writing vs words generated can help you to work more efficiently. Take your numbers and transfer them into a more visual form for a literal picture of your writing habits. 
Rate each writing session once you finish. Sure, we are only supposed to look at quantity but sometimes its fun to track quality as well. Rate each day's writing with a number, say 1 to 5 based on how you felt about it. At the end of the month, you'll be able to see some powerful info. Do you like your writing more when you write more words or less? Did you usually like what you wrote in the morning better than at night? Best of all, once the challenge is over, you can have the priceless experience of rereading everything and realizing how you love the sections you labeled as 1 and would like to disown some of the 5s.

That's how I'm nerding it up this NaNoWriMo but what about you guys? What are your nerdy little NaNoWriMo habits and tips?

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On busted hands, writing with dictation, and trying not to get frustrated

Well well well, have you missed me? This is the first personal posted I've had a chance to write in a while. So, to be clear, everything you see from the online, whether it's on Facebook, Twitter or here on the blog, I'm writing with the dictation program. I'm trying to proofread everything really well but if you do get strange typos, that's probably the reason.

For a while there, I was actually using the dictation program so much that, coupled with the cold I had, I lost my voice entirely. Not only was my voice raspy and the program couldn't understand it, but I kept coughing which made the voice program interpret those coughs as words. So, overall it's been a frustrating and discouraging last couple of weeks, but I'm remaining optimistic that we should have a solution soon.

My hands are still in a lot of pain, but I have been to see a hand specialist, finally. We still don't know exactly what's wrong and are still in the testing phase, but I should hopefully know what the problem is and have some sort of solution within the next three weeks.

I have to confess, I feel really crappy about the fact that I wasn't able to finish the draft of Mistress Novel before the end of October as I promised myself. I understand that there were extenuating circumstances, but I can't help but beat myself up over the fact that I didn't get it done. I guess the lesson is to work on stuff when you have the time and not rely on having time in the future, because you never really know what could happen. I'm really hoping that what we find a cure with the next three weeks and then maybe I can finish the editing while writing my NaNoWriMo novel. But at this point I've sort of resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be able to meet that goal.

I know, I know. They'll always be time in the future for me to finish. But I hate breaking promises to myself. It feels like there's always something.

I didn't mean for this post to sound discouraging. I actually felt pretty optimistic today because I retrained the dictation program and it was working really well again after not working last week. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't frustrated. I wrote out a timetable of everything that's happened with my hand for the hand specialist and was somewhat horrified to discover exactly how long this has been going on. I first hurt my hand at the end of June, which means we are approaching five months of not being able to use my hands normally. Somehow, just seeing it all written out like that made it that much worse.

I've been trying to focus on the fact that the most important thing is getting better. Obviously, being able to use my hands for the rest of my life is more important than anything I might have to do in the short-term. And while that philosophy is all well and good on a philosophical level, when the work piles up around me and I simply can't do it I find it impossible not to get bogged down by it.

I know you're probably sick of hearing about it. (Imagine living with me!) I haven't put updates about the situation on this blog for that very reason, I didn't want to sound like the all hand problems all the time channel. But, by the same token, I don't want everyone to think I'm ignoring them or being a slacker just for fun.

While I can definitely "write" faster with the dictation programs than I can type, I lose my voice faster than my hands get tired so I seem to be able to write less than I would be able to do if I was typing normally.

I apologize for the haphazard and disorganized flow of this post. Normally I would go back and rearrange everything so it made sense with editing, but revisions are really hard with the dictation program so you're stuck with the first draft version. But this was just a little update let you know that I'm alive and kicking and am more than just scheduled NaNoWriMo blog posts.

You guys did know that all those NaNoWriMo posts are written ahead of time and scheduled to post when they do, right?

So, how are you?

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NaNoWriMo Mania!

November is National Novel Writing Month, an international event where participants attempt to write a 50,000 novel in 30 days. As I am the Municipal Liaison for my area this year, you'll find the website somewhat "taken over" by NaNoWriMo posts for the next few weeks.

I appreciate your patience if you aren't participating in the challenge and will return you to your regularly scheduled blog in December.

You can peruse all my NaNoWriMo posts at http://nanowrimo.hillarydepiano.com.

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What sort of music do you like to listen to while writing?

I love working to music. Music is pretty much playing all the time, every second that I'm at the computer. When I work, I like to sing along and seat dance. The only time I shut the music off, as a matter of fact, is when I'm writing. But for some people, music is a very important part of the writing process.

If it's your first time writing something long, like a novel, you may not be sure what works for you yet. In this post, I want to talk about what works for me and then I hope you'll share what works for you below in the comments.

I find it very difficult to write when music is playing that I know the words to. Oddly enough, if it's a new song I've never heard before, it's usually not a problem, but as soon as I've know the song well enough to be singing along, it becomes a distraction. I find myself either singing and not writing or writing down the lyrics that I'm listening to.

I do like having something playing in the background, it really helps me to focus especially if I'm in a noisy public place. So one of the things I've tried in the past is listening to popular music in languages that I don't speak. For instance, one of the things I enjoy is Celine Dion in French. The music is just like the sort of thing you'd hear on the radio but because she's not speaking English. I don't find myself singing along or getting distracted by the lyrics. I also find that musical artists such as Enya, where the music is haunting, but you can't quite make out the words of most of the songs can be good writing music.

But for me, the all-time best writing music is instrumental music. Most free Internet radio stations such as Pandora or Yahoo music have a film scores station. 99% of the time, when I'm writing, this is what I listen to. The music for films is usually very dramatic, lending additional air of gravitas to everything that you're writing and can really help to get you inspired and into the mood of the scene. And that drama can really push you to be a better writer and give your scenes a little more pizzazz. The one downside to listening to the film scores music is that every now and then that something like Indiana Jones or Star Wars will play, which is so recognizable you find you can't write to it because it's too familiar. But nearly all those Internet radio stations have a skip this song feature, which would enable you to move on in those cases.

Some writers are firm believers in having playlists for certain characters. They compile a list of songs that remind them of their character and get them into their story's mindset. They listen to this playlist only when they are working on that story to help themselves get into that frame of mind. I have never been able to do this but if this is the sort of thing that sounds like it might be helpful for you, I encourage you to try it out.

But let me turn this over to you: What music do you like to write to? Do you live and die by the playlist? Can you write anything to anything or are you a film scores junkie like me?

I love to hear about how other people work.

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Why Google Docs is a writer's best friend: writing on the go, instant back-ups, advanced organization & tons of space

There's lots of fancy novel writing software out there. Open Office and Microsoft Word are also some of the best known of the word processors out there. But a writer's best friend is Google Docs.

If you've never used Google Docs, it has several big things to recommend it. Namely:

It's free.
It's everywhere.
It works just like the word processing program that you are already used to.
Even the free account comes with a ton of space, room for thousands of documents.
It auto-saves as you write so it's almost impossible to "lose" work.
It works both online and offline, syncing the on and offline versions as it goes.

Sure, if you've never used Google Docs before, it'll take you a few minutes to upload all your documents and, if you are OCD about formatting, not all of it will carry over. But the advantages of the program outweigh these by far. If you're a writer, let me break down why Google Docs is a writer's best friend:

You have access to everything, everywhere. How many times have you found yourself with a little extra time on your hands only to curse the luck: you forgot your work in progress on that other computer? Everywhere you have access to the internet, you have access to your entire Google Docs library so there are no more excuses. You always have your work at your fingertips. For challenges like NaNoWriMo or just anyone trying to fit writing in around a day job, this is a huge lifesaver. When you have access to your writing everywhere, you tend to do work on it more often and those minute here, minute there really starts to add up to getting more writing done. This is also really useful if you don't have your own computer or use multiple computers.
The near infinite memory they offer makes for the perfect writing back-up system. When you first sign up, take a minute to upload every single text document on your computer and be amazed what a wee little bit of the space they give you it takes it. Convert them all to Google Docs format and they'll take up even less space. Not only is every document in your life at your fingertips everywhere (see #1), next time you have an epic computer crash, you won't lose a single written word. Even if you still prefer to use novel writing software or a word processor, I'd still recommend converting them to RTF and uploading to Google Docs as a back-up. Your words are precious, take of any advantage you can to back them up.
I also find that this large amount of space gives me more freedom while editing. Rather than hem and haw over whether to change something, I just make a copy of my story before editing so, no matter how big a change I make, the old version is still saved in the original should I find myself needing it later.
Makes it easy to find and organize your writing. If you're like me, you've had that moment when you're desperate to find this one scene you wrote but you can't remember what you called it, what the characters' name was or when you saved it but you are 100% sure someone in it says, "Blatherbits!" Google Docs, as you would imagine, comes standard with Google search which makes finding parts of writing very easy, even if you don't remember the details of the file. In the example above, I can search the content of every single document for a single line I remember and find my scene quickly with no more info than that. By the same token, this features makes it very easy, when editing, to find the phrases you use too often or to easily change a character name or other details through many files.
The other great feature are the folders which operate more like labels. This means that you can have a single file inhabit more than one folder at a time. So a file could, say, be in the Book Title, NaNoWriMo and Rough Drafts folders all at once. You'd find it no matter which folder you looked in and can always move it around later as needed.  So, I could move it to the Second Drafts folder once I finished editing it but it would still stay in the other two folders with no issue.
Sharing, editing and collaborating. Like to let your close friends read your work in process but not everyone? Want to give your beta readers instant access to your story so then can critique it right away? The "Share" button gives you a host of options for sharing your work with others. Decide who can access your work (with many levels from only you to the whole world, depending on what you need) and what they can do with it (only read it, edit it, print it, etc).

The good folks behind Google Docs come out with new services and advancements all the time so it is constantly improving. While I understand some people are used to a certain software, I highly recommend giving it a try, even if just as a back-up service.

Have you used Google Docs in the past? What features worked best for you?

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What to expect if it's your first NaNoWriMo

You decided to sign up for your very first NaNoWriMo.  Congratulations!  You have guts for signing up for such a difficult challenge and also for putting it out on the line and making the month long commitment.

If it's your first time, you're probably wondering what to expect when November 1 actually starts.  Let's go over a few things in a handy list:

The NaNoWriMo website will be down for almost the entire first week.  You'll hear this and you won't believe it but, trust me, the NaNoWriMo website will be broken, buggy, slow or just plain down for the first few days of the competition if not the entire first week.  I know it's tempting to want to visit the forums and update your word count every 5 seconds in the first week of the competition, but do your part and try to stay off the website whenever possible so the poor servers get a break.
Any NaNoWriMo related web site will also probably be either down or significantly slowed during the first week.  Any website that mentions NaNoWriMo will, by extension, also be down that first week.  NaNoWriMo advice, word count widgets, novel writing software, any site tangentially related to the competition will probably also be experiencing serious traffic issues in that first week.
You'll probably feel a little overwhelmed.  After all the anticipation, the beginning of NaNoWriMo can sometimes be killer on your creativity.  You'll be staring and that blank page with this feeling that all of your ideas have completely left you and you have absolutely no idea where to start.  Believe it or not that's totally normal.  I've been doing is competition for for several years now and every time the month starts I feel that same raw terror so don't worry.  You're in good company. 
It's both fun and hard.  You'll hear two different voices throughout the contest.  The people for whom it's going great will tell you the NaNoWriMo is nothing but fun.  Some of these people will hit their 50,000 word count within the first day or so of the competition.  The people that are having trouble will tell you that NaNoWriMo is hell and impossible and way too difficult.  Many of those people will quit long before they reach 50,000 words.  Unfortunately, they're both right.  NaNoWriMo is what you make of it.  It can be a ton of fun and a creative flurry or it can also be absolute hell, if you let it be.  In the end, it all depends on your attitude.  Focus on the fun and what you trying to accomplish and try not to let stress overwhelm you.
A novel is much longer than you think it is.  At some point over the course of the month, 50,000 words is going to feel like an impossible amount to write, every word like drawing blood.  There are also going to be days when you're sitting there saying, "I really only have to write 50,000 words? That's it?" because your writing that day is going so well.  You'll also invariably realize that your story is not exactly 50,000 words long, few stories are. You'll find this is true of any kind of writing, even outside of NaNoWriMo.  In fact, I think this is the most important lesson NaNoWriMo has to teach new writers.  To grow and change as a writer, you really need to understand just how long and how short a book can feel and then exactly how long it takes you to actually tell it.  There are some writing lessons the you can only learn by writing a novel and getting all the way to the end.

I think that pretty much covers everything you might not be prepared for as a first timer.  If you have any questions, or if any NaNoWriMo veterans want to weigh in with additional advice, please add your thoughts below and the comments.

Happy noveling everyone!

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