focus

The Mysteries of Creativity and Meditation

August 22, 2018 By Barbara O'Neal 29 Comments

Lately, I’ve added meditation back into my writing routine.

Wait. Before you click to the next thing, hear me out. Meditation doesn’t have to be strange or alternative or hippie. It’s just a tool, a way to discipline your mind.

Writing fiction is a mysterious process. We all know this. We might not be comfortable with it, but we know it.

I mean, really…where do ideas come from? People ask me this all the time. Why did I decide to write a book about England, about a woman who has to unravel her mother’s secrets, about the connection between a British family and and Indian family?

Readers want to hear that you have a plan, so I’ll come up with some explanation. My partner is British, and there’s this strange family secret I’ll never unravel, and I like the BBC shows about old manor houses and castles being saved.

But where did these particular people come from? Why that secret? Why did the grandmother show up in this way, not that way?

I dunno. [Read more…]

Playing on Trust

March 20, 2018 By Dave King

The Lutheran church where I’m organist uses an electronic instrument in a choir loft above the sanctuary. The organ’s three huge speaker banks are hung off the loft rail so they project out over the congregation. Which is fine, except that when the congregation is going all out (Lutherans tend to be full-throated singers), I can’t hear myself play. Essentially, I’m playing on trust.

I thought about this as I read the comments on some of the Editor’s Clinic pieces. So many readers would like to change the focus of the narrative — to cut a bit of character-building interior monologue in order to speed up the action, or to pause the action to explore a relationship that may or may not be important later. This raises the question: how do you know how your writing comes across to your readership? How do you tell when you’re feeding them so much information you’re boring them, or so little that you’re leaving them confused? Do your readers see your characters as the same people you do? Have your surprises come as a surprise, or were your readers just waiting for you to spring your reveal and move on? How do you know?

Well, you can’t, not really. Remember, your readership isn’t a monolithic block who will all feel the same way about your story. If you, say, leave out some of the more obvious steps in your detective’s thinking, some readers will appreciate the way you assume they can follow along, while others will simply be lost and resentful. If you spend time developing a personal relationship that helps showcase your main character, some readers are going to appreciate knowing your protagonist better while others are going to be impatient for the story to keep moving. [Read more…]

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4 Ways to Make Notes in Scrivener

October 29, 2017 By Gwen Hernandez

Do you write sticky notes for revision ideas? Or maybe you add words in caps or use TK to mark spots that need fixed or require additional research. No matter what type of note you want to leave for yourself, Scrivener has an option that makes it easy to mark up your text and find your comments easily when you’re ready to deal with them.

Annotations and comments allow you to leave notes at the exact spot that needs attention. Document and project notes give you a broader scope.

And, you can use any or all of them in combination.

These are great tools to use during National Novel Writing Month—or anytime—to keep you focused on writing rather than researching, or from thinking too long and hard on your words. Stuck? Make a note and move on.

Notes are also great when you want to tag a section of text.

BONUS: If you’re visually oriented, don’t miss the fully captioned instructional video at the bottom of the post. ;-)

Annotations

Annotations are inline comments, meaning they are specially formatted text that’s embedded in your manuscript. I like to use annotations to mark places where I need more research, or when I can’t think of the perfect dialog or wording.

Annotations let you mark the problem at its source so you don’t forget about it and you can focus on writing.

To narrow the results when searching for annotations, you can add a word or set of characters at the beginning or end. For example, all the areas where I have gun questions, I added the word “gun” (brilliant, right?) somewhere in the annotation. When I’m ready to compile a list of questions for my gun expert, I can limit my search to annotations that contain the word “gun” and ignore the rest. (More on searching in a minute.)

I also use annotations to mark sections that might make good excerpts for marketing graphics.

Pros:

– Easy to spot.

– Easy to search (and narrow by text or color).

– Can be excluded when compiling (on the Footnotes & Comments tab), which means you don’t have to remove them before sending a manuscript to your agent/editor/beta reader/online retailer.

– Can be included during compile, if desired. You choose the bracketing character (e.g. [annotation here]).

Cons:

– Might be a little too “in your face” or distracting.

– Cannot view all of them at once.

– Can be searched by color, but changing colors isn’t simple.

Inserting an Annotation

Here’s how to insert an annotation.

1. Place your cursor where you want to insert the annotation.

2. Go to Format>Inline Annotation. Nothing appears to happen.

3. Start typing to see the specially formatted annotation text.

4. Go to Format>Inline Annotation to turn off annotation formatting and get back to writing.

TIP: If you find you use these frequently, memorize the keyboard shortcut to turn this mode on/off (Shift+Command+A on the Mac, Ctrl+Shift+A on Windows). [Read more…]

When It’s Hard to Maintain Your Focus

May 31, 2017 By Tracy Hahn-Burkett

Anybody else having a focus problem these days?

Silly question. Of course you are. News. It doesn’t even matter where you stand, which side you’re on, or Russia what you believe. The news has captured health care just about everyone’s interest, and for most of us, the climate change ability to concentrate on what we’re writing requires Herculean effort. Because subpoena when the future of our country is at stake, and news is sometimes breaking FBI at the rate of a story every five minutes, most of us, understandably, have discovered NATO we can’t look away. (And let’s not even Trump begin to talk about the additional alcohol and caffeine crazy we’re consuming, the stress eating, budget the lost hours of internet trolls sleep…) Sorry, what was I saying? It’s been a whole paragraph. I had to go check Twitter.

ARRRGGGHHH!

Seriously, let’s talk about focus. Often a problem when we’re bogged down in the clumsy middle of a book, many of us are now experiencing a different sort of distractibility stemming from stress and the fact that we’re living through a more plot-twisty story than anything any of us could have dreamt up. (And one that would have been rejected by almost all editors for its lack of plausibility.) What’s more, unlike the stories we write, this story potentially carries terrifying, generation or longer real-world consequences. It’s the ultimate page-turner. So how do we pull ourselves away from this reality and focus on the worlds we’re supposed to be creating?

The first part of the answer is that you don’t pull away. You accept that you’re going to cede some of your productivity to the news and maybe even to activism, if you’re so inclined.

But you’re probably more interested in part two of the answer—the one that gets you back to your writing. Let writing be your refuge. This constant, high-stress vigilance is exhausting. It’s not where most writers feel comfortable. So no matter how compelling that big world story may be, find a way back to that place of your own creation. Those first few moments in front of the blank page may feel strained, but the people in your fictional world are going to make sense to you in a way the people in the news don’t. Besides, won’t it be a relief to spend time on a regular basis with people whose behavior you can control—at least most of the time? What a great de-stressor, even if you end up not keeping everything you write.

Third, I’m going to share a stunningly simple tool I’ve found works to keep me focused and motivated when writing through the cumbersome sections of my manuscript. Conveniently, it’s also helping these days to bring me back to the page when I feel like my brain is so immersed in the global news vortex I might never be able to retrieve it.

At the beginning of each full draft*, I write on a sticky note a few simple mantras I intend to apply specifically to that draft and place the note where I can see it when I’m working. These mantras can be basic writing precepts, or they might mean nothing to anyone but me. It doesn’t matter so long as they function instantly to direct my attention back to the specific goals I’ve set for each draft of my book.

For example, here are my mantras for the first two full drafts of my WIP: [Read more…]

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Just Tie the Darn Knot

September 3, 2016 By Jo Eberhardt

My nine-year-old son is so much like me, it hurts. He’s sensitive and earnest; he dislikes conformity, even when it’s in his best interests; he can be literal-minded and pedantic; and when he’s anxious, he tends to adopt a “my way or the highway” mentality that’s the very epitome of unhelpful. He’s also curious, creative, intelligent, strong-willed, and has a social justice streak a mile wide.

There are pros and cons to this similarity. We understand each other without needing to put in any real effort, but, on the other hand, we drive each other nuts in a way that no one else in the world can. Because we’re so similar, I often find myself having to give him advice and guidance on situations that either I’ve faced in the past, or that I deal with every day. Thus, in the crucible of parenthood, I find myself learning at least as much as I’m teaching.

In fact, it’s my son that I have to thank for my new writing motto.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Creative Mind

If there’s one thread that seems to tie all creative people together, it’s that we’re interested in everything. A word, a phrase, an image, a scent… anything can lead our minds on a whirlwind journey of curiosity. That’s a wonderful thing — especially in the Age of Google, when answers are but a few key-strokes away. But it can also make focus and productivity a billionty times more difficult. Especially in the Age of Google.

My son’s mind works in the same way. We recently had a conversation that started with him asking a question about why some people measure in inches and we use centimetres, which veered into a brief history of the French Revolution, paused on the apocryphal tale of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake!”, took a side-route to the meaning and etymology of the word ‘apocryphal’, jumped to an overview of Les Miserables, and finished with a discussion about the difference between justice and law. At the end of it all, neither of us remembered if his original question had even been answered.

Come on, we’ve all been there.

But as cool as boundless curiosity is, it’s important to be able to tell your creative mind to take a breath. Just for a minute. Just long enough to actually get something finished.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen

[Read more…]

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