10 tips to help writers stay focused

Article from Bookbaby by Jessica Millis

Images from clipartheaven and clipartpal

There’s no getting around the fact that as a writer you must produce your craft either on paper or on a digital device of some kind. Even if you subscribe to voice recognition software where your dictation becomes your written work, there is time and commitment involved in creating all forms of writing. How, then, does the serious writer stay on task?

In this world where we can click away and change our minds instantly, be distracted by cellular devices, multitask and attend to a wide variety of our needs almost simultaneously, how do we stay on the path of quality writing and be proud of our accomplishments, our creations, and inspire others through our words?

These tips are in no particular order, except the first one, which is absolutely essential! And along the way, here are a few online tools that can aid in your process.

1. Write, write, write

…and then write some more. Nike said it best with “just do it!” There is so much self-doubt and procrastination out there that the best mantra has to be to just write! It takes moments to criticize, but hours to create. Stick those words on a post it … and believe it.

2. Time and place

If you were fortunate enough to have parents that forced you to do homework away from the TV or radio, in a quiet place after having a snack, or after clearing up other tasks, you were on your way to knowing that distraction is a big culprit in preventing your writing from moving along.

Find that perfect place, treat it as your sacred ground, and dedicate yourself while working there. Keep it physically distraction-free, but seasonally, let the space change. If a local coffee shop works in the dead of winter but a lawn chair is better for summer, just use what works. Dealing with a creative process in a busy environment is the topic of https://www.coffitivity.com/.

3. Turn off and tune in

Manually turn off your Internet and electronic devices, and don’t allow yourself interruption. If you can’t do this, take action through software help such as http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom and www.getcoldturkey.com for help.

Take some control…especially over emails. But at the same time, be inspired at the coffee shop by the conversations around you or the animals in the woods near your lawn chair. If you need a physical motivator to start, or at any time during your process, try doing nothing for two whole minutes! Brains need rest too. http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/

4. Use an outline

Every job can be divided up into manageable tasks. A Table of Contents or Chapter Outline will help with fiction, non-fiction and ebooks, as well as article writing. Try alternating writing tasks with research or fact-checking work. Once you are writing, if you want to save time and don’t like using a mouse, www.writemonkey.com has tips to help you use your keyboard more efficiently.

5. Don’t edit as you go

Writers may disagree about this, but the process of editing in itself is a negative force. Its nature is to look for errors, omissions, and inaccuracies. It can wait! Let the process flow. Sometimes a dictation device is perfect for this, which is a two-step process; one gets the words down as you think them, and the other is the refining of what you said. Take a break between the two as well…it gives perspective. There are online tools to help with editing progress such as www.diffchecker.com.

If you would like to learn more about the quality of your work, one of the best sites out there to try for free is www.gingersoftware.com. To get a better idea of the reading level of your work, www.readability-score.com can do this for your samples.

6. Set Goals

Many famous writers talk about their daily rituals of writing and many involve having goals. Keep it manageable and doable. For fiction, try just writing one page a day. Many days you will likely surpass this … and feel good about it. Give yourself suitable rewards for the goals. A great tool to help you with goal setting and rewards is found at www.writeordie.com. It’s designed for the procrastinator! The discipline of recording your time is invaluable too. Look at www.yast.com for help with record keeping.

7. Record your progress

If you have a large project such as a novel, break it up into chunks. As you work through each chunk, recognize where you are with that portion. Make the editing a separate process where you will also record your progress.

If you can SEE your progress, you will feel you are “making” progress. Progress over time really adds up. It’s like working out, or dieting; get on the scale from time to time and you will see the results. You will stay the course when you SEE the results.

8. Get up!

Physically, writing can commit you to hours at a time over a keyboard or notepad. Your body needs to get out of that physical condition to keep itself supple and to free up your brain. Most professional writers do not commit more than two hours to the task. Take necessary breaks: go for a walk, talk to someone, make something in the kitchen, read a book, do other unrelated tasks… just don’t edit on your breaks.

Need a more disciplined approach? Try an online stopwatch at www.online-stopwatch.com.

9. Read

One great way to give your brain a break is to absorb the ideas and thoughts of others on your topic. Read other sources about what you are writing, or about the process of writing. Experts have a wealth of knowledge they want to share. Inspiration can come from the tiniest spark to a full-on rethink of a topic. Attend a lecture or workshop about your craft and share when you can. Let yourself feel supported. Sometimes a writing buddy could be just the solution for you.

10. Be a writing entrepreneur!

No one can sell half a manuscript or produce a film with no ending.  Once you decide your work is complete, start the next one! Publishers often comment that the best thing an author can do when they have finished writing a book is start the next one.

Bonus tip: Look for inspiration. It’s everywhere… in a song on the radio, in a movie, in people and stories around you. When ideas come to you, write them down. Be a vessel for “what ifs” and use them in your stories, articles and blogs. Some research has shown that creativity can come from distraction. See what they say about this at www.noisli.com.

Mix things up … and go beyond the ordinary. Imagine ordinary things that become extraordinary. In a restaurant… what if an old flame stops to say hello? At the doctor’s… what if the files get mixed up…? Cleaning a closet? What if you find something from the previous owner of your home?

Author bio: Jessica Millis works at James Madison University and is also a freelance writer and editor. 

10 things I do to write Shaa Wasmund

By Shaa Wasmund

People often ask me “How do you write?! I’d love to write, but when I sit down, the screen just looks blank!” I feel your pain!   Now, I’m not going to lie, it’s not always easy to write, but these are the things I do to help with the creative process. These work for me whether I’m writing a book, a blog or a presentation, so even if you have no desire to become a New York Times Bestseller, you can still apply these tips to help the flow!

1. Write early. From 5am until 7am. I love writing when the sun’s rising.   Something about the light and the energy. 
2. Put all my ideas, notes and blogs in Evernote. Every idea I ever have, every great image, note, quote, or piece of research goes in there – now nothing can be lost. 
3. Drink coffee. Probably too much, but the good stuff. 
4. Write about subjects I care about, not what’s ‘current’ – unless the two combine. 
5.  I ‘batch’ creating content. If I leave to the night before, it never happens. 
6. Switch everything else off. No emails, no Facebook, no Twitter. That’s why writing at 5 am is good – not too many other people are up! 
7. Use images, but I don’t use them gratuitously. 
8. Subscribe to blogs and podcasts from people that inspire me. One idea sparks another. 
9. Make sure the space around me is clutter free. Clear space, clear mind. 
10. Think, Write, Edit, Polish … Repeat. 

Please share your top tips here! 

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The Rules of Writing According to 20 Famous Writers by Adrienne Crezo

Few professions are as solitary yet as full of advice as writing. You do it alone, usually, but everyone you . . .

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rule . . .

To kick things off, let’s use this shiny gem of good advice from Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay:
 “Ignore all of this as you see fit.”

1. Elmore Leonard for The New York Times:
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
And:
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

2. R. L. Stine at ThrillerFest 2014:
I write for kids, and I think there are definitely rules for when you write for kids. People are always asking me, “How do you know how not to go too far?” And I have one rule that I always follow seriously, and that rule is that the kid has to know it’s not real. I keep the real world out. The kid has to know that it’s a creepy fantasy and it isn’t something that can happen. And then I feel like I can do the story, because the kid knows that it’s just a story and they’re safe in their rooms reading it.

3. Margaret Atwood for The Guardian:
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

4. William Faulkner to an American fiction class:
I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical.

5. Zadie Smith via Brain Pickings:
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

6. Scott Turow at ThrillerFest 2014:
I think that you must be aware of the existing conventions. … That does not mean that you cannot reinvent them in your own way.

7. Jonathan Franzen for The Guardian:
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

8. Anne Rice at ThrillerFest 2014:
I don’t think there are any universal rules. I really don’t. We each make our own rules, and we stick to our rules and we abide by them, but you know rules are made to be broken. … [If] any rule you hear from one writer doesn’t work for you, disregard it completely. Break it. Do what you want to do. I have my own rules that I follow, but they’re not necessarily going to work for other writers. … The only universal rule is to write. Get it done, and do what works for you. There’s nothing sadder than someone sitting there and trying to apply a lot of rules that are not turning that person on and are not stimulating and are not making a novel.

9. Kurt Vonnegut, from his short story “Bagumbo Snuff Box”:
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

10. Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats via io9:
Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

11. Neil Gaiman via Brain Pickings:
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

12. Alice Walker in an interview with Writer’s Digest:
You have a right to express what you see and what you feel and what you think. To be bold. To be as bold with your vision as you can possibly be. Our salvation, to the extent that we have one, will come out of people realizing the crisis of our species and of the planet and offering their deepest dream of what’s possible.

13. Ernest Hemingway for Esquire, 1935:
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. … I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

14. Dave Barry in an interview:
Don’t be boring. Nothing else that we try to do in journalism will work, if people don’t read it. … What readers know is that they could also watch television, or go outside, or just put the paper down. So it’s really important to keep them reading you. And I think that should be the most important rule.

15. Eudora Welty, from “Place in Fiction“:
One can no more say, “To write stay home,” than one can say, “To write leave home.” It is the writing that makes its own rules and conditions for each person.

16. John Steinbeck for The Paris Review, 1975:
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

17. From Henry Miller’s stringent daily routine:
Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

18. Rainbow Rowell for novelicious:
Don’t worry even a little bit whether your book is on trend. All the trends will be trending differently by the time you get published, so it’s pointless to overthink it while you’re writing.

19. Annie Dillard, from her book The Writing Life:
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

20. Joyce Carol Oates via Twitter:
Best tip for writers: not to listen to any silly tips for writers.

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The Role of a Proofreader

What is proofreading?

After material has been copy-edited (see FAQs: Copy-editing), the publisher sends it to a designer or typesetter. Their work is then displayed or printed, and that is the proof – proof that it is ready for publication. Proofreading is the quality check and tidy up. However, some clients expect more than that.

Many proofreaders find they spot more errors on paper than on screen, but proofs may be read and marked in either medium. Proofreading is now often 'blind' – the proof is read on its own merits, without seeing the edited version.

A proofreader looks for consistency in usage and presentation, and accuracy in text, images and layout, but cannot be responsible for the author's or copy-editor's work. The proofreader's terms of reference should be agreed before work starts.

What is proof-editing?

Many organisations publish: local councils, businesses, charities, schools. If their staff have no editorial expertise, they cannot specify what they need, nor exactly what they want. The text may be a team effort, so no one has looked at the whole, or it may be the chairman's and Not To Be Altered. It may not have reached the proof stage, or it may be so heavily designed that few changes are possible.

Such clients need and expect more than proofreading, but do not yet realise what a difference a copy-editor can make. This is the world of 'proof-editing'. The proofreader has to explore what is required and negotiate a budget and schedule that allow for more editorial decisions and intervention.

What do proofreaders do?

Page proofs or draft web pages are usually the last chance to see everything – words, footnotes, images, graphs, tables – integrated with the design before going public. Now the work is largely fixed and changes have to be limited.

The proofreader uses care, judgement, skill, knowledge and experience in checking that the work of author, editor and designer/typesetter is satisfactory, marking amendments and advising the client of problems, all with the aim of optimising the result while minimising cost and delay.

Professional proofreaders will:

·         Compare the proofs to the edited copy line by line or read 'blind'.

·         Check page numbers and page headings.

·         Check the table of contents against chapter titles, page numbers and end-matter – appendices, index, etc.

·         Ensure consistent styles – of spellings and hyphenation particularly – by following a style guide, if supplied, or compiling their own.

·         Watch out for omissions and inconsistencies in typography, layout and content.

·         Judge the need for changes in view of the budget and schedule. Changing just one word can have drastic knock-on effects.

·         Identify necessary changes and mark the proof (on paper or screen) using British Standards Institution (BSI) marks or another agreed method.

·         Check or insert cross-references where feasible.

·         Eliminate inelegant or confusing word, column and page breaks including 'widows' and 'orphans' – short last or first lines of a paragraph at the top or the bottom of a page, respectively.

·         Ensure that illustrations, captions and labels correspond with each other and with the text.

·         Check that content looks right and is logically arranged.

·         Liaise with the author(s) to resolve queries or advise the client.

·         Collate the author's changes with others, including their own, rationalising or querying conflicting instructions.

Part of the job is light editing within tight limits, but professional proofreaders do not re-edit the material. They intervene only with good reason.

What do proofreaders not do?

·         Copy-editing. Changes on proof are costly. If extensive changes are needed, the proofreader will first discuss the situation with the client.

·         Indexing – the Society of Indexers can refer you to qualified indexers.

·         Page layout/design. This too is a specialist skill.

·         Seeking permission(s). Permissions to use copyright quotations or images should be obtained before typesetting.

Many professional proofreaders have the skills to perform these services, but they require separate negotiation and briefing.

This article was obtained from The Society of Editors and Proofreaders. To find out more click here.

The Role of a Copy-editor

What does a copy-editor do?

Professional copy-editors correct errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, style and usage. However, copy-editing is not just about dotting Is and crossing Ts. Editors also tackle the following:

·         Suitability of text for intended audience  Has the language been pitched at the right level? Do any terms or abbreviations need explanation?

·         Extent  Is the work too long/short? If it hasn't already been done by the publisher, the copy-editor, knowing the approximate number of words that the publisher wants per page in the finished book or journal, will calculate how many pages the text will make. Illustrations, if any, shouldn't be forgotten. All preliminary pages (title page, table of contents, etc.) should be included, as well as such things as footnotes, glossary, appendices and index. If the work is too long or too short, a solution will be sought with the publisher.

·         Content and structure  Is anything missing or redundant? Is the order logical? Headings break up text and make it more readable: are there enough of them? If there are more than four levels of sub-headings, the structure probably needs to be rethought. Are footnotes essential? Could 'supporting material' go into an appendix? Is a bibliography necessary? Should there be a glossary?

·         Sentence and paragraph length  This is dependent on the readership, the type of copy and how the copy is going to be read (e.g. in a book or on a computer screen). In general, however, sentences should be kept short or at least uncomplicated, and new paragraphs should introduce new ideas and help break up a page. Typesetting may change line length, and the copy-editor will know what to do to compensate for this.

·         Consistency  A list of decisions about alternative spellings and hyphenation has to be kept. Illustrations and tables should agree with the text and captions, as should chapter headings and running heads with the table of contents.

·         Illustrations and tables  Illustrations should support the text and have appropriate captions. Text referring to tables should comment on the data, not simply repeat it. The location of each illustration and table should be roughly indicated in the manuscript (to guide the typesetter when laying out the pages). The copy-editor will also need to ensure that all artwork is suitable for printing or (if appropriate) for reproduction on the web.

·         Style George Orwell's six rules for authors – contained in his Politics and the English Language (1946) – are a good starting point:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
•  Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Common mistakes – which an experienced copy-editor will be able to deal with efficiently – include:

o    – the overuse of exclamation marks and emphasis, in italic, bold or capitals

o    – very long sentences with little punctuation

o    – very long paragraphs

o    – changing between the first and the third person for no good reason.

·         Accuracy  All spellings of names of people and things should be checked. The extent to which facts, dates, quotations, etc. are to be checked will be agreed with the publisher/client.

·         Legal issues  All identifiable instances of the following should be flagged up during copy-editing, even though responsibility for them remains with the author/publisher:

o    – breaches of copyright

o    – libel

o    – obscenity

o    – incitement to racial hatred.

·         Technical matters  The copy-editor needs to know enough about the technical side of publishing (printing, web design, etc.) to be able to discuss various issues with designer, typesetter or printer, to minimize costs and maintain schedules.

What does a copy-editor not do?

·         Rewriting and restructuring text in depth – often known as developmental or substantive editing

·         Ghost writing

·         Proofreading, which has a different purpose (see FAQs: proofreading)

·         Text or cover design

·         Indexing – the Society of Indexers can refer you to qualified indexers.

·         Research, beyond basic fact-checking

·         Seeking permission to use copyright material.

Many professional editors have the skills to perform these services, if requested, but they require separate negotiation and briefing.

This article is from The Society of Editors and Proofreaders, click here to find out more.