Epiphanies

Aside from getting through a couple of disastrous months, I've been working on refining my writing process. My primary motivation for messing with my methods was to boost my productivity, but I've also clung to some old-school habits that really belong in the bottom of a tar pit, such as sticking strictly to paper for everything but composition.

It's tough to let go of putting everything on paper, and I have seventy-one books' worth of rough draft/edited/final manuscripts, novel notebooks and research materials in my closets to prove it. I love every towering pile of my paper stuff, too, and I will keep some of it for posterity, if only to amuse future generations. But even a dinosaur like me has to admit that keeping electronic files instead of printing out everything is faster, cheaper and more efficient. When I learned a good friend has gone entirely electronic, I decided to do the same. Much, much easier.

Going all-digital led to another epiphany. Since nearly losing eight years of my writing in a computer disaster I've been religious about backing up everything I write to multiple hard drives, CDs, memory sticks and anywhere else I could put it -- daily, and sometimes hourly. Backing up is great at first. Then you begin to accumulate backed up stuff. I now have a lovely collection of about 684 memory sticks, a million CDs, and countless obsolete towers that I'm afraid to erase because I haven't had time to look through every file to assure I did back up all of those. After twenty years as a pro my back-ups are mountainous, and last year Irma really had me worried about what would happen to them if we did lose the house to some disaster.

The solution was pretty easy: backing up the entirety to a secure offsite file storage service. For about a hundred bucks a year everything I've ever written now remains backed up in secured storage, away from my house, and accessible only by those I trust. I've also made one master copy that I keep in another place that shall remain nameless. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, the writing will survive me in my books. But now if my house burns down or gets leveled by a hurricane, I won't lose twenty years of backups.

Another major change I've made to my process is changing when and how I work. Over time I've gradually migrated from being a night writer to an early morning writer. I'd do other things in the morning, too, which sometimes ate into my writing time or distracted me. Now the first thing I do after I wake up and soak my head in a vat of tea is write my daily scheduled quota. I use the Pomodoro Timer to remind me to get up and stretch regularly, and to have breakfast and lunch breaks, but other than that I don't stop writing until I hit quota. The big bonus is that when I am done writing, I have the rest of the day to do whatever I want.

Being an empty nester now it's easier for me to devote mornings and early afternoons to the work. There was also an immediate benefit I didn't count on: without the distractions and multi-tasking I started writing faster and cleaner. Because I'm no longer scattering my household tasks in with my writing I get my chores done quicker and better, too.

Finally (and mainly because my guy retired last month) I made one new, not-to-be-broken rule about my work time. If my home office door is open, anyone can interrupt me at any time. If it's closed, anyone can interrupt me only if there's a major emergency. Major as in the house is about to burn down, there's a burglar on the premises, an asteroid is close to hitting the planet, etc. I leave my door open most of the time, but if I'm in the middle of something that needs all my attention, then I close it for an hour or two. So far my guy has been great about respecting this one rule, too. As I'm now our sole source of unfixed income, and he's home to actually see everything I do all day, he understands my busy schedule better. I think he's realized at last that I do have a real job, and I need to have the time/space/focus to do it well.

Have you had any epiphanies lately that have improved what you do at home or work? Let us know in comments.

Title Logic

After getting into an interesting discussion about story titles over at the Chicas I tried to remember if anyone ever taught me how to come up with my own. In school the teachers were more focused on beating Chekhov and Conrad into our heads than the mechanics of giving a name to a story. Most of the how-to books I've read tend to skim or even skip this topic as well.

Like most of what I do with the work, titling stories evolved as part of my natural writing process. With the very first stories I wrote I used character names as titles or part of the titles (Jean, Glenna, The Diary of Sebatina Hariski) and I think that is a pretty common default among young writers. I then went through a mercifully brief flirtation with Faulkneresque titling (The Wounds of Yesterday, The Power and The Glory) and shock-o-ramas (Postcards from Hell, Let's Drink the Draino) before I began shedding all my drama and paying a little more attention to the story itself and mining what I'd written for title gold.

The first title I can remember being proud of was Realm, a 100K fantasy novel I wrote in four weeks back in 1984. I wanted something that sounded as epic as the story, and since the otherworld I'd built in the book was called the Realm nothing else would do. I wish I could take credit for it, too, but while world-building I actually borrowed it from the very first computer BBS I ever visited (local via the old Prodigy network, and it didn't last long, but it was a neat place to hang with other writers.)

I know the influence that one title had on me as a novelist. I loved the sound and the brevity; it had impact without all the frilly hoopla of my earlier titles. Had I published that book the title probably wouldn't have survived the editor's first pass, but that experience got me thinking in what would be the right direction for me.

From that point on I tackled titling with three goals in mind:

Keep it Simple -- use only one or two words whenever possible.

Make it Unique -- draw the ideas from obscure sources or the story itself.

Go for Memorable -- choose something that would be easy for the reader to remember.

I used to drive myself crazy trying to find that one perfect title (and occasionally still do) but lately I've been trying to change that. Presently I compile ten to twenty possible titles for every story, a list to which I constantly add during the writing process. I'll use my favorite from the list as a working title, but if the editor or marketing doesn't like it, I've got plenty more on hand to offer as alternatives. I can't give you statistics on how many writers' original titles are changed by their publishers, but about half of mine didn't make it onto the cover. If like me you're invested in titling your own stories then it's probably a very good idea to have some backup ready, just in case.

Related PBW links: Playing with Titles ~ Poetry Sparks ~ Ten Things to Help You with Titles ~ Titles That Brand ~ Wordling Poetry