Kids writing together

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The fourth in a series about finding your writing process, discussing the value of finding other writers to help tow you in from the vacuum of space.

For a writing process, this one is a little different. But it is one that has truly helped me to develop (and re-find my love for) several of my short works and poems, as well as scenes and chapters from my longer work. It also provided a happy relief from that vacuum so many of us writers find ourselves creating in.

What I’m referring to is the online writing workshop. These come in lots of flavors and forms–including the Meetup.com variety, but sadly the pandemic has put a hurting on those for a bit.

Most online writing workshops involve sharing your work–or chunks of it–online for others to read and review, like a regular in-person writing workshop, or a regularly writing gathering at the local coffee shop.

Yes, I feel a little insecure about that sharing thing, too. But on the whole I’ve felt pretty safe with one writing site: Writing.com.

I’m sure there are plenty of others, but other than sharing some stuff on Wattpad.com, which is more a place to get readers to read ongoing series pieces, Writing.com is the only one I’ve tried so far, because it felt just right for me.

Both Wattpad.com and Writing.com offer a lot of value for free, with the option to get more value for a nominal yearly price. Unlike Wattpad.com, Writing.com is designed for getting your stuff thoroughly reviewed, rather than just “Liked” and commented on.

In fact, the site employs its own friendly economy for that purpose, where writers (and the site) reward each other for reviews given, in whatever amounts they want, by way of Gift Points (GPs). You can buy these, of course, if you need more; or you can earn them by reading others’ work and giving honest, detailed reviews, just like you would in an in-person workshop.

The GPs can then be used to reward others, motivating them to review your stuff, to get what I’ve found to be priceless audience perspective on how your work is coming across. They can also be used (if you have enough) to pay for Upgraded or Premium tiers, which give you more features, more space to post your work, and all kinds of tools you can use to help your writing.

But the Free tier is generous, with space for at least ten works to be reviewed at once. They also have endless writing prompts, a plethora of writing contests (rewarded in GPs), advice columns, and lots of opportunities to share ideas and advice with fellow writers. I was even granted a free upgraded membership from some lovely anonymous soul through a program that lets you donate to help other writers succeed. It’s a pretty awesome thing.

They also have groups, which allows you to make your work private to just a small select group of people in your genre or area of interest. I’ve used both their Free and Upgraded memberships and been a part of an amazing genre-specific group there, and received wonderful feedback from them, while being amply rewarded for the same.

Even the most polished piece can suffer from data you forgot to mention, confusing visuals, or inconsistencies, because the story is so ingrained in your head after working on it so long. Your fellow workshoppers will help point these things out, along with any errant grammar or sneaky punctuation goofs. And they’ll try to do so nicely, with empathy, because that’s how things are done there.

Whether you go with Writing.com or another online forum, I recommend making an online workshopping group part of your process. It provides both the feedback and support a writer needs when that vacuum comes calling.

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I thought I’d take a break from the serious writing stuff and share something I wrote nearly a year ago (2/1/2020) about delight, and crying. The good kind.

Background: OPB*, “The Show of Delights”

So, I’m getting ready to get out of my car at Starbucks, but I can’t seem to stop listening to the radio. It’s OPB, airing a This American Life segment about Delight. It is oddly delightful, beginning with the story of a poet who wrote a book about deliberately finding delight in his life every day for a year and what he learned about that.

Turns out, it had a lot to do with curiosity and being open to finding new things that bring delight. It’s also about embracing your inner child, who sees everything as new–not the jaded way we adults look at things. Like when a kid runs in telling all the adults in the room that there’s a rainbow outside–a fairly common occurrence–and everyone runs outside and “shares a gasp” with each other.

There’s another act where a daughter tells the story of her aging mother who decides one day she has just so much time left, so she’s going to dedicate it to finding delights. This adventure annoys her daughter, who has to help her out doing “whatever she wants,” involving a lot of spontaneity that her daughter seems too adult to put up with. Then one day, while interviewing her mom about this thing she’s doing, the daughter finally “gets it” and seems transformed.

This is followed by another segment following a girl who works at a zoo, at night, putting the animals to bed. I won’t go into everything that happens there, but it’s my favorite part. She sounds so young and (dare I say) cute. The narrator following her on her rounds does also. But that’s not the reason I can’t get out of my car on a cold night, despite coffee and warmth nearby urging me to vacate my rapidly chilling car on a January night.

Instead, I was enthralled by this girl who has what seems to me to be a dream job, where she’s finding delight in caring for all of these animals who frankly could be in a better place (nature), but it’s her job to make them happy anyway. And it’s obvious that the animals appreciate her for it.

For some reason, by the end of this segment, tears are running down my face and I’m truly moved… but I’m honestly not sure why. Perhaps it’s the happy young voices and my inner child wishing I could have gone into a more fun career when I was younger. Perhaps I’m suffering an onset of hypothermia.

Whatever the explanation, I suddenly get the feeling that when I cry this way it means something. Something important.

What’s Happy Crying For

Okay, so I’m finally indoors ordering my coffee at the counter, all the while distracted thinking about happy crying and what it means … To me; perhaps to everyone. If only we knew. When we cry like that, quietly, delightedly, movedly**… doesn’t it feel like a reward of some kind? A gift from life?

When things feel so unexplainably, primally good, could this be something evolution built in a long time ago to say, “Yes. This.”

At this moment, I want this to be true so much that I force myself to sit down and write this note you’re now reading, because I know from experience that when you have these feelings, once you stray away from them, they fade. Like a dream, leaving a vague notion of Epiphanies Lost.

When I don’t write things down I spend the rest of the day feeling sad about losing something I don’t remember. I can almost hear the Universe in those moments, in the background softly murmur, “Okay, maybe next time.”

But it’s a sad murmur, because I think if there’s this complex thing called life, there must actually be a wonderful purpose to it, because we Keep Doing It for so long, all of us Animals of Earth. And the Universe is sincerely trying to tell us this, or our own DNA, or whatever it is that gives us that little nudge in our hearts when we do something right. Like crying at the good bits of life.

Or perhaps it’s some giant metaphysical machine churning away, like the mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Who knows how stuff really works.

To go to all this trouble of being born, learning how to walk, talk, think, make friends, learn complex algebra, and become creators of whatever our own reality and hearts desire… there really must be a deeper purpose to all that.

And how else will we know which way to go with our own purpose in life than to pay attention when life rewards us, like it does when we do sex right (I mean truly, mutually right). Or make someone smile. Or cry, happily, like there’s too much loveliness inside we can’t quite contain it.

A Happy Mission

So, like that early OPB segment, about the poet who spent a year recognizing and writing about Delights, I’m having this sudden urge to spend a year (or more) keeping track of the things that make me happy cry, and seeing where that attention leads me.

Because I get the feeling that the Universe really is trying to help us find our happiness, even if it does have all of these nasty obstructions ready for us to climb over. But then without things to overcome, how will we find the joy of accomplishment?

So, Cry #1 is this: Noticing the magic of crying at stuff. Yay!

* OPB: Oregon Public Broadcasting (the local affiliate of National Public Radio).

** Yes, I am horribly guilty of inventing my own adjectives. Sue me. Or give me a cupcake! ^_^

the eight-sequence method for novels and screenplays

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The third in a series about finding your writing process, continuing with borrowing wisdom from the big screen to write your novel, using the 8-Sequence Method.

The 8-Sequence Method is nothing new. In fact, it began when cinema began, when movies were only as long as film reels could hold, about 15 minutes of rolled plastic. When they figured out how to quickly change reels in the projection room, the movies we know now were born; and even today when reels are rare, they are designed to give us an interesting turn of the plot every fifteen minutes or so. (If you write screenplays, you might want to check out Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach.)

It just works. Fifteen minutes is just long enough to give us some fun with the current state of affairs, but about the time we’re looking for something new to happen. Boom, the main character falls down and must reassess and set out on a new plan.

Why eight sequences? The diplomatic answer is that two hours (8 times 15 minutes) is as long as the average viewer can sit focusing on one thing, while I think it has more to do with the size of the human bladder (have you seen the size of drinks in cinemas?). It does seem to be the perfect length though.

Using the 8-Sequence Method to write novels isn’t new either, with more than one writing book seeming to claim the idea. One such book, by Alexandra Sokoloff, (the first I found on this method) is so comprehensive on the subject, it is a veritable reference book on novel writing. It includes some great exercises along the way, too, but the best part for me is how she breaks down the plot into its most powerful components to make a great story. She does so using the same sequence structure used in film.

As expected, these sequences once more dovetail with the ubiquitous 3-Act Structure, where every other sequence begins on an Act boundary (Act II breaking at the Midpoint).

This is the version of the 8-Sequence Method I derived from reading the book (yours might be slightly different). Each sequence is a set of scenes propelling your main character in some inevitable direction, only to hit a new challenge at the end of the sequence, propelling them in a new direction. Every sequence is a little story of it’s own, with a minor climax at the end–the ones at the Act breaks more life-changing for the character.

Note the pair of numbers in the brackets beneath the sequence’s purpose. These denote how far into the story we are at this point:

  • The hour:minutes through the movie,
  • The pages in a novel.

(It’s important to get close to these marks, because the audience or reader will be getting edgy to see something happen here, whether they know it or not.)

the eight-sequence method for novels and screenplays
The 8-Sequence Method for Novels (and screenplays)

Sokoloff not only breaks down the importance of these sequences and how to set them up for those of us who like using index cards to plot our scenes, but also delves deeply into the dramatic “elements” that usually appear in each sequence, elements audiences have grown to expect from reading and viewing the mass of work that came before; things that make a story satisfying. She defines these elements not just for the plot, but for character development, setting, theme, plants and reveals, and a bunch more stuff too numerous to mention here.

I suggest getting her book, Story Structure Basics: How to write better books by learning from the movies* to see for yourself. I keep mine handy as a checklist for revising my own drafts.

*affiliated link

Oh, wow… I just noticed she now has a series of writing books out on the same subject–and they’re very inexpensive for what you get.

I guess I know what I’ll be reading for a bit.

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No, this is not a Six-Word Memoir, but a celebration of my awesomely talented friend, Melanie Green, who just published another collection of her gorgeous poetry.

Through daily life challenges that might feel like a battle for many of us, Melanie has somehow found an overflowing of peace, cheerfulness and a sense of gentleness that she generously shares with everyone around her. Her poems are a lovely contemplative journey, a respite from the stress of the world, an invitation to enjoy the peace waiting for you beneath the surface.

In A Long, Wide Stretch of Calm, Melanie Green establishes herself as an astute observer and reverent appreciator of worlds within and without. With the ease/ of non-striving (“Revelatory”), she explores the momentarily unshackled/ now (“An Unconfined Astronomy”) of birds, flowers, trees, lakes, galaxies, and a human body that can overdo into illness/ and fatigue (“Blessing for Self-Kindness”).

Haiku-like in their intensity of language, Zen-like in their meditative quality, these lyrical poems invite us to pause, catch our breaths, and marvel at a poet who invites us to Feel/ the psalm/ of lingering/ calm/ in afternoon’s/ echo of light (“The Luster of Silence”).

—Carolyn Martin, author of The Way a Woman Knows
and A Penchant for Masquerades

I heartily invite and recommend her poetry to everyone. If you enjoy it enough to want more, I invite you to get in touch or comment here, for there may just be copies of her previously published books available.

Get your copy here at the Poetry Box.

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I fell across a blog recently regarding the one software application I love–and hate–the most in the whole wide world: Evernote. If you haven’t heard of it, it might be worth a quick Google, especially if you’re thinking of going “paperless”. It seems to be the buzzword lately when it comes to Getting Organized (eek!).

The blog is by Mark Carrigan, who also has problems with Evernote; and he asks the question that got me thinking about my dependency on this most amazing–and frustrating–hunk of software: “What do you actually use Evernote for?“. The question intrigued me enough to write a reply … which I realized had quickly evolved into a blog. So I’ll post it here instead. It goes something like this:

evernoteI was sucked into Evernote for probably the same reason most of us were: it’s just a perfect way to get at things that used to be horrors to keep track of, because they were hiding inaccessibly in file folders (real paper ones or on a hard drive). Without tags to filter what you need to look for, the grouping of the notebooks to filter out what you DON’T want to dig through, as well as searches to pinpoint a specific target, all that information we tend to collect was either useless or just too time consuming to scan through manually to find anything. Eyestrain, paper cuts, paper everywhere! I think this is where Evernote is at it’s finest.

That said, Evernote (to me) seriously sucks at APPLYING that data in any usable way when it comes to relating the individual notes in an organized manner. For example, I’m into writing novels and screenplays. Evernote makes it too awesomely easy to grab whatever device is at hand to jot a random scene or character idea just as it pops into my head. There are no end of ways you can throw an idea at Evernote and they all magically collect in the right place by just tagging the note with the project name. But … once enough of these ideas collect to the point I actually want to start writing, there is absolutely NO way in Evernote to start organizing these notes so that the cards on the screen begin to look like the outline of an actual story. For a brief moment I tried playing with multi-level numbering schemes prefixing my note titles to get them to fall right, but that got old (and insane) very fast.

scrivenerScrivener is my favorite way of organizing these ideas together … all those lovely index cards to drag and drop until a story pops out. It’s amazing! But … getting ideas from Evernote to Scrivener is a major PITA, and disheartening to do one at a time after I’ve taken all that time to collect them in Evernote in the first place. To migrate them piecemeal is like going back to chipping words in stone again (and we all remember that, right?).

And once you do, how do you keep Evernote and Scrivener synced up? If I want to jot another note, Evernote is still the go-to app, because Scrivener seriously sucks for not being on all my devices–they don’t have anything for my lovely little iPad, and its data exports don’t play nice with ANY other app. How do I know which notes are not yet in Scrivener?

So I just stop using Evernote for that project for fear of losing the ideas amongst all the others.

This is where the Evernote fanatics start grumbling and warming up their keyboards to defend their undying love for Evernote and how it “wasn’t designed for anything but to hoard data and find it later, NOT for anything else,” blah blah blah. I’ve never seen people so zealously defend what an application is NOT supposed to do, as if the original posters they’re attacking (and there are bunches of them, just like me) were threatening the American Way of Life or something.

@MiscEvernoteZealot: We’re not going to harm YOUR lovingly hoarded mound of data by asking for a new output feature. Relax. I understand what Evernote wasn’t designed for (I’ve read it enough on their forums). Evernote does what it does very well indeed, thank you very much. I still use it for all that …1200+ notes so far and growing. I’m with you on that.

But I can typically generate 1000+ notes (or twice that) for one story project alone (and I’m gleaning most other writers often do, too). And writers are not exactly a “splinter” crowd (ask any publisher or agent. And although I WISH Evernote would take a moment and add a feature to manually sort our notes, I’m aware they just won’t.

Meanwhile, Scrivener, as awesomely gorgeous and perfect as it is, has been promising an iOS app for over three years now, which must be a record for an iPad app (Guys … hire another developer or three already; the investment will return quickly–just look at your forums). So Scrivener is just about out of the picture for me as a writing tool, as well.gingko

Lately this has become something of a quest … minus the swords, dragons and fair maidens (dammit), but with plenty of wizards! One of them bade me go forth and find an odd yet-little-known creature known as Gingko (mispelling deliberate). This turned out to be a browser-based writing tool that turns Scrivener on its ear, offering an elegantly simple technique to amass almost any genre of writing project. I’m hesitant, having never tried to write a project fully on a browser before, but I love how I can access it from anywhere, and it looks every bit as easy as Scrivener at organizing scenes and ideas into stories. I’ll let you know how this goes! =)

But, alas, it isn’t that lovely data-bucket I can drop notes in randomly from every direction like Evernote is. With all the gadgets Evernote has popped out lately–scanners for business cards, OCR, searchable PDFs, searchable handwriting; you name it . . . you’d think a simple thing like manual note sorting would be a cinch for them.

They’re so focused on the IN, they’re barely looking at the OUT of it at all.

Why bother collecting all this information if we’re not going to actually USE it somehow in an organized fashion? A skeptical side of me is beginning to wonder if they’re collecting all of our data for themselves, instead of for us… just sayin’