Backup, backup, backup

[Note: I use a Mac for all of my writing, so this post is geared towards Mac users. If you have a PC you need to find a replacement for Time Machine or SuperDuper  — Windows Backup does not work well and I haven’t found a good enough replacement — but otherwise the rest of my post is still relevant to you.]

It doesn’t matter what you are writing, whether it’s a paper, article, short story or novel, if you are typing into a computer, you need a backup system.

Start out by investing in an external hard drive, one that isn’t a portable 2.5’’ drive (those are less reliable over time), but a full sized drive from a reputable maker (Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Tanscend, Lacie, etc). Buy the largest HD that you can afford (4-5 TB should have you covered), and make sure that it connects to your computer via USB 3.0.

Then setup Time Machine and/or SuperDuper (if you are on a Mac) to backup your entire hard drive regularly. I scheduled Time Machine to backup my HD once an hour to my external Lacie drive. Over the years I have had a chance to restore my entire computer from it when my cat decided to take a walk all over my keyboard, causing a kernel panic and somehow corrupting my filesystem. This is the backup that you will use when you accidentally spill juice over your laptop, or have a HD crash, etc.

A local backup of your entire computer is great, but it isn’t very useful if your house burned down, if you had a power surge, an earthquake, tornado, etc. That’s what online backup is for, and for this I use Backblaze. For $5 a month you get unlimited, unthrottled online storage, and a nifty and very simple to use piece of software that flushes all of your files to the Backblaze severs. This is not a bootable backup, but a backup of all of your data. It’s for the I-lost-my-house-and-everything-in-it kind of scenario, where you have to buy a new replacement computer, but still want all the data that you had on your old computer. As an added bonus, you can access your Backblaze files from anywhere, so if you just want to checkout a file or two, or flush your photo library between computers, Backblaze can help you with that too.

Dropbox is not a replacement for Backblaze, because it’s not geared towards online backup (not in pricing nor in its interface and options), but it is a good file sharing and syncing service. Use Dropbox coupled with Scrivener’s “Backup” and “Backup to…” to create up to date backups of your current project that you can access and update from anywhere.

Finally, remember — if your backup system relies on you to remember to back something up, the it’s not a backup system. 

How I find Time to Write

I work full time at a hi-tech job, which means that I also put in some overtime, although I carefully selected a workplace that has an 8 hour standard work day, in which work starts relatively early. I also run 2-3 times a week, and spend one afternoon a week drawing. Finding time to write when I was working on my thesis was gruelling, and this was the major reason why I eventually had to give up on it. When I decided that it was time to work on my own (fiction) writing, I knew that I had to do something about my schedule and my habits if I wanted to succeed.

I now write 500 words a day, with 200-400 word blog posts several times a week, and I haven’t quit my day job, or stopped running or drawing. I also haven’t given up on sleep, my family, turned into a social recluse, or completely cut off my leisure time. What I have done is made some small changes to my daily routine, replacing old unproductive habits with new, more productive ones.

1. Unwinding Time

I used to come home from work, and flick on the TV, and just veg out in front of it for an hour, and hour and a half. I was decompressing from work and transitioning into “home mode,” but I certainly didn’t need a full hour or more in front of the TV to do it.

TV has this affect on me, where I can zap around between channels, moving from one to another as soon as a show ends or a commercial break starts. I lose track of time quickly this way, and it is very difficult to tear myself away from it once I have turned it on.

I now don’t allow myself to come home from work and turn on the TV to decompress. I can do other things for the same effect — put a load of laundry in the washing machine, play with my cats, read the newspaper, read a few pages from a book.

The result is that I have now vastly downsized TV from my life, without actually “banning” TV.

2. Get Down to Writing as Soon as You Can

As soon as I’ve cleared my head a little, I sit down to write. No “I’ll just browse this website first,” or “let me just spend an hour or two on twitter”.

3. Eliminate friction

Have Scrivener open on your project at all times, and have it the main window on your computer. It should be the first thing that you see when you open your computer. Have all your notes out and next to your computer. If you write by hand, have your notebook open and a pen or pencil ready next to it.

Eliminating all this little points of friction have stopped me from finding silly excuses to not writing, such as “well I can’t be bothered to find all my notes now,” and from procrastinating on my way to do actual writing (“Oh Tweetbot is open. Let me just have a glimpse at my twitter feed before I open Scrivener. It won’t take more than a minute”. It never takes only a minute).

4. All dead time is writing time

If I have 15 minutes spare, then I can write at least 100-200 words in them, or even an entire blog post. 10 minutes spare is a great time to think about my next scene. If I’m doing housework, then I’m either thinking about my next scene, figuring out what to do with X or Y character, or listening to podcasts. 30 minutes is more than enough to get close to finishing my daily quota, or quick draft my next scene.

If you are waiting for a chunk of a few hours during your “peak productive” time of day, then you have a long wait ahead of you. By the time the stars align and you sit down and write, I have written thousands of words, and more importantly, built up my writing habit muscles.

5. Put a daily word quota on yourself

I started small, with 200 words a day for about two weeks, and then moved to 500 words a day. Use a word log to motivate yourself to persist, keep yourself accountable, and show progress over time. Habits build over weeks, so it is more important to set a goal that you know that you can handle every day, then be overly ambitious and then fall into an anxiety spiral.

6. Sit down and write. Don’t get up until you are done.

No browsing. No texting. No tweeting or catching up on Facebook. I just sit down and plough through my quota until I am done. If I’m in the zone, I keep on going. But until I am finished writing I stop for nobody. Starting back again after you paused for a break is just so much effort that I oftentimes fail to do it. Better to get it done in one go than to stop and start, stop and start. That way you can build momentum.

7. Make it easy to pick up where you left off

Don’t stop mid-sentence, but do stop in a logical place in your writing, and leave yourself a note (or better yet, quick draft) as to where you plan to go to next. Again, this is all about eliminating friction.

The Results

I have cut down my TV time to about 3-4 hours a week, and I have been consistently writing 500 words a day for over a month. Neither my work, family, friends nor my other hobbies have suffered for it. All I did was eliminate friction, remove dead time from my schedule, and teach myself that even 15 minutes of spare time is enough time to write in.

This post took 20 minutes to write, and is almost 1000 words long. What could you have written during that time?

Writing Links

A few interesting writing links for this week:

The Stupid Fast System | Medium

If you’ve only got 30 minutes to write, fine, write for those thirty minutes. If you’ve got a crying baby in the other room, don’t use that as an excuse not to write. (Although you should probably, you know, check on it first.) But make a little effort up front to clear what distractions you can. You want to set yourself up for success.

This article has some pretty solid advice on how to get more writing done with the time that you have. Apart from the “no writing when editing advice” I pretty much agree with everything said here.

On Pencils and Process | WritersDigest.com

Jason Kottke said that people’s love of pencils is “partly childhood nostalgia, partly how a craftsman comes to care for her tools, and partly the tactile experience. It’s also a blend of appreciation for both their aesthetic and functional qualities, and (especially these days, but not only these days), a soupçon of the disruptive passion that comes from willfully embracing what poses as the technologically obsolete.

I use a pencils a lot in my writing – particularly when it comes to places in my narrative where I get “lost for words”. Pencils are my favourite tool for quickly trying out several options, as they are particularly helpful tools for this kind of thinking.

David Vann | Advice to Writers

I write every morning, seven days a week, and the momentum of writing every day is tremendously important to me, because I have no outline or plan and view writing as a transformation by the unconscious. I don’t know what will happen on the page each day, but there’s a shocking amount of pattern and structure that emerges, and I think this can happen only through a daily practice.

There’s a lot that Vann says in this interview that I disagree with, but it is still worth a few minutes of your time, if only for the list of authors that influenced him.

Kill Your Darlings: Five Writers on the Cutting Room Floor | The Millions

Five contemporary authors discussing the most painful thing that they had to cut out of their novels, and more importantly why.

Make three lists | Seth’s Blog

Very brief blog entry from Seth Godin about things to consider before embarking on a new project. Not aimed specifically at writers but certainly relevant to them.

“Type as quickly as you can, and always carry a pencil”

Clive Thompson in a fascinating, short (~10 min) talk about the benefits of writing with pencil  and typing, and when it’s best to use one or the other.

I used to write all my drafts longhand. Now I just quick draft, outline and try out things (i.e. “big thinking”) with a fountain pen or pencil, and type out my actual draft on my computer (using a “clicky” keyboard, which I highly recommend).

Give yourself a break – it’s a marathon, not a sprint

I’ve had a rough writing week this week and last. For the first time since I started writing I missed a few days of daily writing (four to be exact), and in two other days I didn’t hit my daily 500 words quota. I can try to chalk it up to rough days at work, but if I look at my word log I can see that the truth is it was due to social gatherings with friends or family. For the first time ever I got an insight into the mindset of all those authors who became social recluses 🙂

As the week progressed I started stressing out that I wouldn’t meet the deadline I had set to myself  — finishing another chapter by this Saturday. I also gave myself a hard time for not doubling down on the days that I did write, to make up for all that “wasted” time. This only served to make me write not great stuff (to say the least) earlier this week, and procrastinate when it came time to sit down and write.

Yesterday I sat down and reminded myself that this wasn’t a sprint, but a marathon. There are going to be good weeks and bad, and as long as I didn’t let non-writing days grow into a habit, everything would work out well in the end. I looked at the writing I did earlier this week, and spent my writing session quickly repairing what needed to be repaired for me to move on (no polishing, just necessary fixes). I finished that up today, and it went well enough to motivate me to write non-stop for about an hour after that. Nobody was more surprised than me to look at the screen and realize that I managed to polish off chapter 3 today.

For me these past two weeks were about realizing that I am allowed to have a social life without feeling guilty about it, and that as long as I don’t let my lizard brain take over and push me into a spiral of guilt, paralysis, and then more guilt, then I’ll be just fine.

Ira Glass on Storytelling

Speaking of podcasts, Ira Glass, the talented host/reporter/producer/storyteller of This American Life, did an interview a while back on storytelling.

He talks about the basics of storytelling, what makes a good story a good story, and how you can ruin a good story with bad telling. He also expounds on how he got started in radio storytelling, what are some of the challenges a beginner has to overcome, how to get better at storytelling, how to find your voice, and how to cut yourself some slack when you are starting out.

Well worth your time, the interview can be found here:

An audio only version can be found here:

Ira Glass on Storytelling, Radio and Politics (part 1)

Ira Glass On Anxiety, Fame, and the Early Days of This American Life (part 2)

Podcasts for Writers

I stumbled upon a list of “8 Great Podcasts for Writers” today, and even though the title was clearly click bait, I read it.

Apart from the wonderful “Grammar Girl”, which I highly recommend, I found little on this list that spoke to me. Composed of mostly of podcasts of men talking about horror fiction, I felt decidedly fooled by the misleading article title. These were neither “great” podcasts, nor podcasts for writers.

So although I dislike list blog posts, I thought that I’d create an alternative list. I listen to several hours of podcasts a week, and all of these podcasts worth your time and attention, especially if you are a writer.

“This American Life” – often dubbed the 800 pound gorilla of podcasting, this hour long weekly show is the one podcast you should listen to if you have time for only one podcast. This podcast will teach you more about storytelling in one hour than a dozen creative writing books can. If you are a writer, take time to notice the pacing, the choices the reporters make in selecting their recordings, and what the music in the background is doing. There is a lot of time, effort, talent and experience that goes into each and every episode of TAL and just by listening to it and paying attention you can learn a lot about what it means to be a superb storyteller. Also, Ira Glass.

“Serial” – if you haven’t heard of the TAL spinoff with Sarah Koenig, you were probably spending the last year or so in a writer’s retreat in the Mohave desert. Imagine a podcast episode of “This American Life” expanded into a serial, and this is the podcast that you’ll get. The story is fascinating, but the way Sarah tells it is what is most worth noticing. She is the best “first person narrator” that you could meet, and listening to her struggle to understand the story she found herself a part of is highly illuminating. If you ever plan on writing a story with a first person narrator (reliable or not — you’ll hear in “Serial” that reality is not that clear cut), this podcast is a must.

“99% Invisible” – another podcast that showcases great storytelling, 99% Invisible with Roman Mars is worth listening to for the way it creates mood and tone. Just listen to “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” or to “Three Records from Sundown” to get what I mean.

“Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin” – Alec Baldwin has intelligent conversations with creators of all kinds — actors, authors, journalists, musicians and more. If you have a bit of spare time, delve into this podcast’s archive. You can learn a lot about creative people’s mindset, work process and failures from these candid and relaxed conversations. Baldwin’s conversation with journalist Gay Talese is a pretty good place to start from.

World Building on the Go

World-building is one of my favourite parts in writing, and one of my favourite pastimes in general. Since I know that I have such a penchant for it that I could spend hours on it, fleshing out every little detail about the world I’m working on, I don’t allow myself that time.

Yes, there are some basic things you need to know about the world your story is taking place in. No, those details do not include creating several languages, a fully fledged mythology, and a comprehensive law system.

Before I started I had a very general idea about the world that my novel takes place in, and I wrote none of it down. As I began writing, I got a better idea of what I need in my world and what major conflicts need to shape it for the theme of my novel to work. Then I sat down and wrote a few key things: a pertinent facts about its history, the names of a few key places, and a general map of where the main things were.

A lot is still blank at this point, and that’s because I chose to keep it that way. As the story evolves, so will the world around it. This way I don’t “burn” useful hours on superfluous trivia, and I am not forced to change  my story because of a geographical or cultural detail that I had committed to months before, when I had yet no idea where the story might take me.

I plan on “world-building on the go”, leaving plenty of blanks as I start, and building my fictional world gradually as I write. I have a feeling that it will be a more organic, more compelling world that will be less troublesome for me to write stories for. What’s more, building a world this way helps make sure that I don’t break off my story on an irrelevant tangent just for the purpose of showcasing a background detail that I want to show off but the reader doesn’t really care for.

Everybody knows that author. Do your readers a favour and don’t be that author.

Writing Resource Thursday

This week has been pretty rough at work, so I missed two (!) writing days and one blogging day. Hopefully I’ll be able to make up for at least one day during this weekend.

While I play catchup with my word count, here are some intereting things to peruse:

Seth Godin wrote a blog post with 19 tips for authors that is unique, insightful, and thought provoking. If there’s one thing I am going to take from it it’s this piece of advice (number 2 in the list):

The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.

Why your characters are boring is an interesting (with a bit too many unnecessary pictures) post from Ben Schmitt on the importance of giving a character something they want or desire, and making sure that each scene expresses a movement towards fulfilling or attempting to fulfill that yearning.

For a scene to truly be a scene, each character in the scene has to want something. There has to be conflict, an obstacle inhibiting the character from getting what they want, and before the scene ends, one of the characters has to be different as a result of that scene.

Finally, another blog post from Ben Schmitt, this time on Now Novel, with 11 pretty solid tips on how to write even when you don’t want to. While I don’t agree with all of them (number 4 for instance. The best time to write is when you have time to write), the majority of them have worked for me in the past.

Have a great weekend, and keep on writing!

On the Importance of Being Bored

Lately I’ve been letting myself get bored again.

On the bus on the way to work I leave my phone in my bag, and just while the time daydreaming, sneaking glances at my fellow commuters, or staring outside the window.

In waiting rooms and when queuing in line, I leave my phone in my pocket, and just let my mind wander.

If I’m alone in a restaurant and waiting for the menu or the food, I just look around or while the time in thought.

It is extremely difficult, as like many people today I’m very much addicted to my smartphone. We now have an always on entertainment system that ensures that we will never be bored again if we don’t want to. And it is up to us to muster the tremendous willpower to put it aside and allow boredom to seep back in.

I am forcing myself to do that because it is while I have nothing “important” on my mind that stories begin to seed, form and grow there. It is then that I notice curious things around me that can become story ideas, or figure out how to end that scene that I was stuck on. It is then that I also discover glaring plot holes, or something that I may want to use as a red herring or a little tidbit to flesh out one of my characters.

Try letting yourself be bored every once in a while. You never know what interesting idea will creep in to keep you company.