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How Writers Write Fiction 2015

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This year’s free fiction MOOC from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is just beginning, and you can register here.

(Look for the ‘Sign Up’ link on the right side of the header.)

More info on the course here. Info on IWP MOOC’s past, present and future, here.

If you’re interested in the approach that the IWP takes to writing, and you would like to put together a workshop where you are, you should also check out the new MOOCpacks, which are designed with that goal in mind.

The MOOCpacks are available to anyone, anywhere in the world who wishes to use them in a group study, classroom, or workshop setting. The MOOCpacks provide course content and teaching tools for your use, but you can structure your group in any way you would like.

If it works in Kazakhstan, it should work anywhere. More about MOOCpacks here.

— Mark Barrett

WordPress Editor Jump Fix

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For the past six months or so I’ve been bedeviled by an intermittent problem in WordPress that has made me insane. Until today I was unable to figure out what was causing it or how to stop it, but I believe I have the fix if you’re bedeviled too.

The problem only happened on longer posts, but not consistently so. I would be typing and editing as usual, then suddenly the cursor would jump one line higher than the editing window, meaning I could no longer see what I was typing. I could confirm that the cursor was in that location by scrolling up a line, but if I edited any text it would jump up again, making it impossible to see the line I was working on. (This happened using the text editor in both normal and distraction-free modes, and the visual editor.)

My memory is that the problem began when WP changed its default settings to accommodate mobile screens and tablets. One key feature of that change was dumbing down the interface and slaving the scroll bar and mouse wheel to the post as a whole, instead of assigning functions depending on the location of the cursor, as had been the case.

If you are having this problem, click on SCREEN OPTIONS at the top of the WP screen while editing a post. A settings menu will drop down, at the bottom of which you will find a checkbox, checked, and beside it the following ironic text: Enable full-height editor and distraction-free functionality.

For real distraction-free functionality, uncheck that checkbox.

Not only should that solve the jumping problem, but if you work on a desktop it will give you back scroll-wheel control of the editing window when the cursor is in that space, instead of defaulting to scroll the whole page. (The scroll wheel will still move the whole page when you move the cursor outside the editing window.)

— Mark Barrett

How to Preview Your Book in Word

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Maybe everybody else figured this out years ago, but I’m passing it along in case other self-publishing writers are still stumped….

I write in Microsoft Word. Specifically, I use Word 2003, which is the last version of Word prior to the introduction of both the ponderous ribbon interface and the defaulting of all MS Office docs to the web-happy in-house .docx file format. (When Office 2007 debuted I decided I was done learning new productivity tools, particularly when the people making those tools were repeatedly and unrepentantly inclined to radical and proprietary changes that did not benefit my productivity. See also Windows 8.)

When you format a document for printing as a book, the first page of your document will become the page of your book that appears on the right-hand side when the cover is opened. Thereafter, all left-hand pages will be even-numbered, all right-hand pages odd-numbered. When previewing your book in Word, then, what you want to see is the first right-hand, odd-numbered page all alone on the right side of the screen, followed by pairs of left-and-right-hand pages showing the correct pagination and formatting (particular the gutter margin) as you scroll through the document.

In Word 2003 there are five different view modes available under the View menu — Normal, Web Layout, Print Layout, Reading Layout and Outline — and not one of those views will give you what you’re looking for. Normal view only shows one page at a time, inline. Web Layout shows the entire doc as an endless scroll. Print Layout will show two side-by-side pages, or more if you zoom out, but the first odd page will always be on the left when it should be on the right. Reading Layout, which does show two pages side-by-side, like a book, also incorrectly puts the first right-hand page on the left. And of course Outline view shows the entire document as a single-page outline.

Way back when I formatted my short story collection, the only way I could figure out how to force Word to display the first right-hand page on the right side of the screen was to add a dummy page at the beginning of the doc (effectively page zero). The problem with that hack was that Word would then display all of the correctly numbered and formatted right-and-left-hand pages on the wrong side of the screen. For example, page two, which should have a larger gutter margin on the right side of that page, would correctly display on the left of the screen, but because Word then counted that as page three of the doc the larger gutter appeared on the left — meaning the outside of the two-page display. Worse, headers and footers were also affected and had to be scrupulously ignored.

Although I repeatedly searched for a solution, I could not figure out how to get Word to display the first page of my doc as a single right-hand page, followed by the correct side-by-side view as if I was reading a book. Because I’m now monkeying around with another book I recently found myself confronting the same problem, and again I refused to believe that Word could not somehow be configured to give me the view I needed. So I did yet another series of searches, and this time I found the answer, which was apparently there all along:

It *does* work, at least in Word 2003 (and every previous version AFAR). I
have a four-page test document. If I select “Mirror margins” then switch to
Print Preview and choose 1×2 pages, I get page 1 on the right. Paging down,
I get pages 2 and 3, then 4. Same if I check “Different odd and even.”
Either of those settings has the desired result.

So there you go. In Word 2003 and earlier, and perhaps later, set Mirror Margins in the Page Setup dialogue, then select Print Preview under the File menu. (It doesn’t even matter what View mode you’re in at the moment.) The first page of your book-formatted doc will appear alone on the right side of the screen, followed by side-by-side-pages the rest of the way as you scroll.

If that works in later versions of Word, please drop a note in the comments. I don’t want any other writers wasting time trying to solve this completely contrarian problem.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Laura Resnick

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Speaking of reclaiming busted links, one benefit I didn’t anticipate was that chasing down lost pages put me back in touch with information and sources I previously found valuable. For example, while I was ultimately thwarted in my ability to recover an excellent post by Laura Resnick concerning cover design, digging around on the web for that missing content led to two informative discoveries.

First, I eventually found what I think is a more recent discussion of the same subject here. (The first link at the bottom of that interview is the same busted link I was trying to track down.) Second, when I went to Laura’s new site I found a great resource page that every independent author should bookmark and peruse.

Sure, the fact that I don’t have a resources page suddenly makes me look very bad in comparison, but that’s all the more reason to visit Laura’s site and check it out.

— Mark Barrett

2015 Iowa Poetry Writing MOOC

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Several of the busted links I recently splinted together involved last year’s poetry and fiction MOOC’s from the University of Iowa. In tracking down those errant U of I pages — or at least the most recent placeholders — I ran across mention of this year’s free offerings.

Fortuitously, the 2015 version of How Writers Write Poetry just opened for registration on April 13th, after an initial delay. Registration will close on June 1st.

Having weathered an avalanche of entrepreneurial hyperbole about MOOC’s coming from Silicon Valley and its academic proxies, I think it is a good sign that the University of Iowa is continuing to make these courses available. The bottom line with any MOOC — as with anything else in life — is that you’re only going to get out of it what you put into it. For people in far-flung locations around the globe, however, having access to such experiences could be life changing.

— Mark Barrett

The Sixty Percent Solution

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This post is for those of you afflicted with the desire to write. Maybe you’ve tried all the right medications, maybe you’ve gone through rehab and gotten clean a few times, maybe you’ve even been through conversion therapy and pretended to be a happy human being who enjoys getting up and going to a job. Yet, for some reason your mind keeps coming back to an empty page.

If this is you, and if you’ve been at it long enough to write what you consider to be a large document — maybe fifty pages, maybe five hundred; it doesn’t matter — I’d like to pass along a little psychological survival tip that has kept me from doing something foolish over the years, either to myself or the project I’m working on.

While any first draft has its agonies, the fact that you don’t know how long your work will eventually be prevents you from thinking about your percentage of completion — assuming you’re not one of those numerologists who believes documents for certain mediums should always conform to specific page counts. Once your first draft is finished, however, you know exactly how much work you have to do to get through the next pass, and that in itself can prove daunting.

For example, if you’ve written a three hundred page novel, you know going in that you’re going to have to gut through a hundred and fifty pages just to reach the halfway point of the next revision. No matter how much you love writing that’s nobody’s idea of fun, and the more passes you have to make the more such awareness can take a toll, turning each draft into its own little death march.

Well, here’s the good news. When you’re revising a long document all you need to do is make it to 60%. If you can get there, if you can hang on that long, finishing the other 40% is easy precisely because of the math involved. (You may think, based on your prior history with math, that you’re not the kind of person who pays attention to percentages, but there is a primal part of your brain called the percental cortex that is solely devoted to doing exactly that.)  [ Read more ]

Note Cards

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Over the past few years, while initiating two personal non-fiction projects each running hundreds of pages in length, I found myself struggling to structure coherent wholes from the dizzying sums of the respective parts. I knew generally what I wanted to say in each case, and I had no shortage of content to work with, but in contemplating the structural expression of my ideas I became overwhelmed both by the complexity of the issues and the amount of information on hand.

Having learned to write in the pre-computer age, when every word had to be hand-chiseled into a block of marble, and having been liberated by the amazing technological advances in word processing that continue to this day, and generally being the kind of person who believes that software is a better medium for grappling with ideas than stone, I invariably tried to use computer programs to wrap my mind around each project. Unfortunately, each tool I tested proved more trouble than it was worth because visibility of the whole became obscured by the inherent limitations of the computer screen — by which I mean an old-fashioned desk-top monitor.

It’s a given today that the only thing worth holding in your hand is the latest-and-greatest smartphone, but I’m going to suggest you may want to expand your arsenal of helpful physical objects when you’re writing something that can’t be adequately communicated with your thumbs. And yes, as you undoubtedly surmised from the title of this post, I’m talking about note cards. What you may not yet realize, however, is that I really am talking about real paper note cards just like your grandparents used when they were structuring their long-form projects.[ Read more ]

It’s Not About the Money

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Last week author Tony Horowitz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times detailing his tragicomic experience writing an e-book:

Last fall a new online publication called The Global Mail asked me to write about the Keystone XL pipeline, which may carry oil to the United States from the tar sands of Canada. The Global Mail promoted itself as a purveyor of independent long-form journalism, lavishly funded by a philanthropic entrepreneur in Australia. I was offered an initial fee of $15,000, plus $5,000 for expenses, to write at whatever length I felt the subject merited.

At the time I was researching a traditional print book, my seventh. But it was getting harder for me to feel optimistic about dead-tree publishing. Here was a chance to plant my flag in the online future and reach a younger and digitally savvy audience. The Global Mail would also be bankrolling the sort of long investigative journey I’d often taken as a reporter, before budgets and print space shrank.

Alas, things did not go well. If you’re eying the e-book boom Horowitz’s piece is a must-read because it comes from someone in the trenches, not someone selling you a shovel that you will eventually only use to dig your own grave. Based on the totality of his experience I don’t begrudge Horowitz his eventual retreat, but if you’re new to the writing game I think it’s important to understand what has and has not changed during the past few years of publishing upheaval.

Making money as a writer — to say nothing of making writing a career, even for a few years — has always been brutally hard. If you’re passionate and lucky and plucky and willing to do whatever it takes, and you meet the right people at the right time, and you have the chops, and you’re less trouble than you’re worth, you can, maybe, get a gig. If you do a decent job and meet your deadline you might get another gig, or even an actual job with regular hours and benefits and somebody else paying two thirds of your social security taxes. But it’s hard. Always.

While the e-book craze is in large part being driven by people who hope to profit from doing so, and it’s always nice to make a buck, the real value of e-books, and by extension, self-publishing, is the fact that you no longer have to ask someone for permission to write what you want to write. You may not make any money following your bliss, but when was that ever guaranteed? The best you could usually hope for was to write for hire, to get someone to pay you for services rendered, then use that income to cover the cost of personal projects. Even if you were a literary lion your high-dollar advance came with expectations and limits.

If you want to make money as a writer you’re looking at a hard life, but it was always thus. What’s changed — what the e-book revolution and self-publishing are really about — is that everyone now has access. So while you’re right to think about how much money you can squeeze out of the marketplace with your talent and guile, take a moment to ballpark the opportunity cost of the self-publishing and internet distribution options currently available. What would it take to replicate those opportunities if you had to pay for them yourself? A billion dollars? Ten billion? A trillion?

The e-book market will sort itself out in time, at which point it will become just another market you can sell your services to if you aspire to be a working writer. What you no longer have to do is wait for someone to say yes if you’re willing to bet on yourself, and I see that change as priceless.

— Mark Barrett

2 University of Iowa Creative Writing MOOC’s

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Two free creative writing MOOC’s are now open for registration at the University of Iowa. The first course, How Writers Write Poetry, begins June 28th. The second course, How Writers Write Fiction, begins September 27th. Both courses run six weeks.

One of the great obstacles in learning to write, compared with most of the arts, is that it’s impossible to observe another writer’s process. You can watch a sculptor sculpt, you can watch a painter paint, you can follow a photographer and observe the composition of endless images, but when it comes to writing it’s all cerebral except for the tap-tap-tapping of keys. After hours you can learn to drink by hanging out with writers, you can learn to do drugs, you can even learn to be a cynical, jaded hater, but when it comes to craft and technique there’s nothing to note except perhaps a preference for hardware or software, as if that ever meant anything.

Whether you’re merely curious about how writers write or you’re worried that you’re doing it wrong, these courses are an invaluable opportunity to check in with people who, somehow, despite the odds, found their way. And as I’ve mentioned before, that’s literally — if not literarily — half the battle.

Spread the word. Enjoy.

— Mark Barrett

The Uncertainty Principle

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Following up on the previous post, it’s worth mentioning that while journalism can make use of storytelling techniques and still maintain its ethic, the routine crime committed by for-profit news outlets is the same as that committed by duplicitous authors: exploitation of audience uncertainty. This basic dynamic in communication between two people — one who knows and one who does not know — can be harnessed for good or ill by anyone, which is why the real test of a journalist is whether questions an audience has (or would have if they were more informed) are being answered, or whether audience uncertainty is being fed, led, and otherwise exploited as a means of generating ratings or sales.

Exploiting uncertainty (and its sibling, fear) is the modus operandi not of writers, storytellers and journalists, or even advertisers, attorneys and politicians, who often stoop to that level, but of con artists, propagandists and fear mongers. As a technique uncertainty is commonly generated by entertainers in all mediums precisely because it’s effective, but even then there are standards to such practices. The power of any fiction turns on withheld knowledge because the author could simply reveal all outcomes at the beginning, but as audience members we understand that the best experiences necessitate going along for the ride. What we will not forgive, however, is finding out at the end of a story that the uncertainty at the heart of a work was contrived: that information was withheld from us unfairly or that we were lied to in service of outright deception.

In the case of the missing Malaysian airliner that CNN has been exploiting for profit, simply understanding the context of such a search was and probably still is outside the cognitive capacity of most human beings because the scale of the search area is so vast. While anyone can confront how big an ocean is by going sailing on the high seas — or, alternatively, by looking at a globe and extrapolating — it’s not up to patrons of the news to do this. Rather, it’s up to purveyors of the news to anticipate or detect confusion and uncertainty and work assiduously to defeat it. Doing so, however, obviously shrinks the number of nutso conspiracy theories that can be sourced from the internet and debated by a panel of paid experts. (Here’s one example of how it might be done for web-centric news junkies.)

The test for whether you’re being honest or not in your communications with others is simple: how are you handling audience uncertainty? If you’re authoring a work of fiction, are you being honest in the telling? If you’re a journalist, preying on your audience’s lack of information means, by definition, that you’re not honest. You may get away with it for a while — you may even be able to make an Orwellian career out of misrepresenting yourself as an arbiter of honesty — but you’re still dishonest.

— Mark Barrett