5 Things That Have Helped Me Become A More Productive Writer

Like many of you, I work a full-time job and manage a variety of other important commitments in addition to trying to write books and learn about publishing. Vacations come far and few between and so over time (a very long time) I've come across different things that help me to be more productive on a day-to-day basis. I was on vacation this past week and managed to get quite a lot done, which made me reflect on what's helped me get to this point. Maybe some of this will be helpful to you, too!

1. Figure out when you're at your creative best

At the top of my productivity goals is making sure I'm getting words on the page every day. That hasn't always been easy for me. For many years, I struggled to find the time to write. And not just the time to write - but time when I was at my creative best. 

For me, this turned out to be first thing in the morning. I've known for a while now that if I wait until the end of the day, I'm too exhausted to write and worse, my creative energy might not get used at all - since my job can sometimes be very administrative in nature. 

Certainly, your time might be different than mine. For example, I know some people who write better at night or who write even earlier than I do (such as those in the #5amwritersclub). The important thing is getting to know yourself and when/how/where things flow best. Try out different times and see what works for you. 

2. I Started Using A Smartphone

This is a small thing but worth mentioning because it really did change things for me. For nearly five years I carried a Blackberry as my work phone. Then I carried a separate pay-as-you-go phone for personal texts. At the time my work-life balance was probably 80 percent work and 20 percent life. Not a very good balance. When I finally moved on from that job, I changed phones. I chose a Samsung Galaxy because I liked that it was a larger device than the iPhone. It was great because I started using a lot more apps that I hadn't with my previous devices. Before the Galaxy, I hadn't been using Twitter very much (which is crazy because Twitter is now my favourite and number one place to go learn and interact with other writers). Once I had it, I also started using Instagram and Pinterest a little bit more. When the iPhone 6 came out with a slightly bigger screen I made the switch and have been so happy ever since. With the switch to the iPhone I started to use more of the productivity and image apps. My favourite productivity app is Evernote. I use it for so many things but primarily lists (character names, place names, book ideas, unique phrases) and scheduling reminders (writing/publishing goals and booking cover art designers/editors). My favourite image app is Enlight. 

Finally, I love having everything in one place. I can listen to music (I like brainstorming to music by Two Steps From Hell) or noises (I've recently started listening to thunderstorms while writing) while I work. 

Now certainly, not every writer needs a smartphone but I can definitely say I get a lot out of mine.  

3. I Started Reading More

Reading is at the top of most writer's "how to write lists" for a reason. It helps with everything. Ideas. Understanding what's possible. Being exposed to words. Being inspired by other people's creativity. Taking a break from the grind of writing and recharging your batteries   

I typically get through upwards of 25 books a year, not including the reading I do for school. It used to be 50 by I dialled things back a bit after I had my daughter and am in the process of dialling them back up again. 

I also read a lot of nonfiction books about publishing. I don't usually count those as part of my fiction 25 but they are definitely valuable reads. 

4. I Switched to Scrivener

Like I mentioned in this post, I've had Scrivener for a number of years but didn't use it right away because it crashed a lot when I first tried it and the idea of losing writing terrified me. 

A few weeks ago, I downloaded it again and watched a webinar with Joanna Penn and the Scrivener coach. Since then, my writing productivity has sky rocketed in a few different ways. 

For example, I was able to quickly outline all of the scenes I could already picture happening thanks to Scrivener's drag and drop function. Scenes that need more development, I can still make a record of and put under the Ideas tab. I've also been able to use the 'Research' tab to pull my research for into one place so that I could write and access it without having to close the Scrivener window and open my browser. This feature alone helped kickstart a nonfiction project I'd been struggling to outline for the last six months. 

Finally, while it didn't improve my productivity as a writer but certainly improved my productivity as an indie publisher - I learned how to use the compile function to make ebooks. 

Oh. And did I mention how great it is to have everything in one place? Amazing. 

5. The Monthly Twitter Writing Challenge

I haven't shouted out the monthly writing challenge in quite a while though I've talked about it in plenty of posts. The challenge is one of my favourite online communities and one I found it at exactly the right time. Two years ago I had finally managed to start writing upwards of 300 words every day for a few months. Then I had a baby in May 2014. I was a bit worried I would lose my writing momentum and was looking for a way to keep myself motivated. Then I stumbled on the challenge.  It had simple rules: write a minimum of 500 words a day or edit for 1 hour. Tweet your word counts with the monthly hashtag and enter the count in a Googledocs spreadsheet. Super simple and super effective. 

Since May 2014 I've logged over 300,000 words in the forms of novels, novellas and short stories. I've edited for over 100 hours and have 9 stories that will be published in the next 6-12 months. It typically takes me about 15-30 minutes to get 500-1,000 words. For example, I started a new project a little over a week ago and I'm already at 16,000 words. At the very least, by participating every day I log a minimum of 3500 words a week (this last week I logged 6,984 words) and can typically have a rough draft of a book done in 4 months (depending on what kind of book it is). 

Takeaways?

Writing is the thing that fuels everything else that I do. It's the thing that makes me the happiest and like Hugh Howey often writes, it's something I would gladly pay to do. Being productive only increases that happiness and actually finishing, formatting and putting together books has become my all time favourite thing to do. 

I'm super grateful for all of the things, big and small, that have helped me get to this point and I'm always on the look out for more. More tips. More tricks. Anything that will help me grow as a writer and/or manage my time that little bit better. What about you? Do you set goals for your writing? What's helping you achieve them?

Til next time, happy writing! 

S. 

I Formatted An Ebook With Scrivener

Yesterday was an incredible day. I wrote 1154 words for a new story, I watched a Scrivener webinar (which is an amazing piece of writing software I've just started using more), I researched for a non-fiction book I'm working on, AND—I formatted my very own ebook! 

This is a big deal for me. You see, a few months ago when I was getting ready to publish The Vampire Skeleton and my short story collection I decided I would like to try and format my own ebooks. I did some research and learned there was a free program called Calibre that could help you, which I promptly downloaded and tried to use. I didn't have much luck. Nor did I have much luck formatting ebooks using InDesign. And so, because I was in my first trimester, working full-time and doing my doctorate, I figured it might be best to find an ebook formatter and work with them. And so that's what I did.  

However, I've been writing a lot more the last two years and as a result I have three other books ready for publishing (their covers are being designed in March and May) and a host of smaller stories (around 6,000-10,000 words apiece) finished as well. And since I really liked some of those shorter stories, I decided to polish them up and hired an editor to help. 

Once they were edited, I realized I had to decide what I was going to do for cover art and formatting, which we all know is both important and potentially costly. But over the past few weeks I've been binge listening to The Creative Penn podcasts, as well as reading Joanna Penn's books. She uses Scrivener a lot and after hearing/reading about it on and off throughout her material, I decided to give it another try. (I bought it three years ago but didn't use it much as it was always crashing on me). I reloaded it on my writing laptop (I write on an 11-inch MacBook Air so I have the App Store version) and away I went. My timing was good, because she was just about to do a webinar with The Scrivener Coach, Joseph Michael. I was working last week so I only got the chance to watch the replay yesterday and I have to say, it was so awesome! I learned so much in that webinar, not the least of which was some basics about compiling an ebook. After watching the webinar I kept fiddling around with the settings for my ebook. 

A few hours later (and quite a few tests runs) I had produced both .mobi and .epub files that I can use for Kindle, Kobo and iBooks—the three platforms I'm using to distribute my ebooks. One of the best parts of the whole process was that I could easily fix things for myself when there was something off in the formatting (missing italics, for example). It was amazing—I'm still excited about it. I love that you can take time to fine-tune and make the file look really great. The whole process is incredibly empowering. 

All of this means I will be soon releasing an ebook of a novelette (10,000) words called, The Fall of Ithaca. I'm so looking forward to it! And I'm definitely looking forward to working more with Scrivener. I expect I'll have some hiccups as I learn, but so far, I'm so grateful I gave it another try and also very grateful there are so many resources available at Joseph Michael’s website to help me hone my skills. Exciting times! 

What about you? Do you have any favourite Scrivener tricks? 

Til next time, happy writing everyone! 

S

Spirit & Intent

For those of you who don't know, I recently launched a tiny, independent publishing company as well as published three books which can be found on my Books page. (They can also be found on the company website). 

My company is called Spirit & Intent and there are a lot of things we hope to do over next year in addition to publishing books. In the meantime, I'm so happy we can finally share things like our logo and website. We've honestly been working on them for over a year now! 

But even though we've launched and had this really wonderful article shared about us, there is still a lot of work to do. For the first time in my life, I'm essentially running a business and because of that there is a lot of planning I have to do to help the company grow in a positive manner. Right now, the company is only publishing books that I've written because those copyrights are already mine to work with. It will take quite a bit more work and additional resources to branch out and include other writers in the way I would like to and in a way that would create a great situation for them. Hopefully, this is something we can look at in the future. Until then, all of us writers are lucky that the tools to publish are available to us all. More and more, indie publishing seems like the best possible route, at least to me.  

Still, I have to say—though it's been a lot of work and even more work lies ahead, I have never been happier. Writing has always made me happy, but in the past few years it's brought me more joy than I could ever have imagined. I'm so excited about all of the upcoming projects we have planned and the various ways we're going to share them. There's a lot to learn and I'm loving learning it.

One of my big goals with starting a publishing company that I talked about way back in an earlier blog was to help myself learn the Cayuga language. There are a lot of really fantastic resources out there for learning Cayuga but what I know for sure helped me expand my ability to speak & write English—was reading. I hoped that connecting my love of reading with my desire to learn the language would result in some interesting projects & though we haven't shared those projects yet, I really think it will :). 

We've set up a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a newsletter. In one week, we're going to do a giveaway of a set of our books plus an art print to one of our lucky newsletter subscribers. Interested? Click here to subscribe!

This week I have been listening to the Joanna Penn's Creative Penn podcast pretty much non-stop. It's a super inspiring podcast that I'm very grateful exists and as it's a nice long weekend, I've revised my weekend to-do list to follow-up some of the topics that came up during my listening. This includes:

• Working on copywriting and sales descriptions for my books
• Trying Scrivener again and learning how to set Project Goals
• Contacting an editor to help me set a firm deadline for a project I want to publish in April 
• Creating a pre-order button for another book; and
• Revisiting my publishing schedule for the next year to set the word count targets I need to meet deadlines 

Basically, I'm looking forward to a weekend of reading, writing and editing—the best kind there is!  What about you? What are your plans for the weekend? 

Until next time, happy writing!

S.

Reflecting on My Writing Journey

This is a bit of a reflective blog. Now that my stories are available (YAY!), it made me look back on why I write and how my writing has changed and what I hope my writing will be in the future.  I've written about this before, but it occurred to me again what a powerful impact certain experiences have had on my life and how grateful I am for them.

A number of years ago, I became very sick. I went to several doctors but none of them could figure out what was wrong with me. Finally, at the suggestion of a friend, I decided to get a reading done. Almost instantly, the person doing the reading was able to tell me what was ailing and how I could fix it. A month later, I was feeling much better. It wasn't easy, but it started me on a long journey of healing that has transformed my life for the better. In many ways, it was like I had been given a clean slate. I definitely had a new respect and overwhelming appreciation for my people's ceremonies and I will be forever grateful to the language speakers and knowledge holders in my community.           

I also realized that our ceremonies and the stories behind them were real and important. It made me wonder what else in our culture was real and important that years of mainstream education had led me to doubt (or simply not know). Today I feel very lucky to be in a position to learn and grow my appreciation of how cool and wonderful my culture is. Not that the appreciation wasn't there before, but it's deepened the more I learn and the more experiences I have. And so, for the last seven years, I've been involved in this process of learning and listening and thinking. Of trying to live better - to live well. Reading story after story. Various accounts of history. 

Along the way, I've tried to attend more ceremonies and learn more language. The whole process makes me intensely happy though quite honestly, it's been a slow one. Being a writer makes it hard for me to surrender English completely (which would definitely help my Cayuga along) and I am hardly bursting with knowledge of anything. I know a tiny, fraction of a bit and I'm grateful for every time someone or something adds to that kernel, helps me to grow my thinking or helps me learn new words. 

My writing is very different from this learning process, although it's a part of it as well. The things I write about are entirely made up out of my head. They are in no way cultural canon. They are creative works, works of imagination. But in them - there are some things I choose to do. I love my people and my community so most of my main characters love their communities as well, but recognize the challenges their people face and have their own set of struggles they are working through. Because my people have had a delicate history with anthropologists/researchers and our knowledge being exploited at times, I try to be careful of sharing too much of what I know I shouldn't because it's sacred and important and real and a gift. I do that because to this very day, I am grateful that despite many efforts to the contrary - our knowledges and ceremonies and languages survived. I want to help them thrive. But I think I can do that in places other than my writing - by learning and participating and through my work in education. 

So most of my stories are just that. Stories I make up out of my head. A lot of the magic in my books works the way I wish it had as a child playing, as a video game player, as a reader. I loved movies like Labyrinth and The Never-Ending Story and the Last Unicorn and Harry Potter. I wished we had stories like that with characters from some of our oral histories, myths and legends. And so that's what I started writing. Will I always write like this? I don't know. Every once in a while I try to write something slightly more serious and  magic invariably enters the story in some way. And when it happens it feels right. Like my story. The story I want to be writing. The story I should be writing. And so I definitely let instinct and spirit guide me here. Or at least I try to.

What I know for sure is that I will always write. That I am thankful for the opportunity to write and that writing has helped me to bring the things I've learned to life in a creative way. I will definitely keep going and whatever the reasons are that you write, I hope you do too!

Happy Writing!

S

Books I Read in 2015 That Helped Me Along My Writing Journey

I read a lot of great books this year. I used to read around fifty books a year but once I became pregnant with my daughter, I realized it was highly unlikely I would make it through that many (though I have read a lot more board books), especially since I was also finishing my Masters at the time. So I decided to aim for at least twenty-five. For the last two years, I’ve managed to hit that number fairly easily. This year, I actually managed to read 30 books, as well as a whole lot of articles on educational leadership. I also read some great books that helped me with my writing. I’ve decided to list them here for you, in case you’re interested in reading some as well.

Publishing for Profit – Successful Bottom Line Management for Book Publishers, 5th Edition – Thomas Woll

Being someone who writes purely for the love of it, this title made me a little uncomfortable, but title aside—it was a great book. For the last two years I’ve contemplated taking the Certificate in Publishing program at Ryerson University as a way to keep myself learning about the publishing industry in some kind of structured way. But deciding to pursue my doctorate, working, writing and raising my daughter puts some severe limitations on my time. Plus, I’ve learned a lot from just jumping in and doing things. Once I realized it was highly unlikely I’d be able to take the program, I decided to check out which course materials they were using and found this book in their Intro/Foundational course, so I ordered it.

It was very informative and definitely gave me a glimpse into the publishing industry from a certain perspective and since I decided to start my own publishing company, a lot of the information helped me to see what I needed to do. There were a lot of tools in the book that I found useful for organizing my own company, like templates for contracts, profit and loss statements, editorial plans, marketing plans, and sample job descriptions. Reading this book helped me to write a business plan, an editorial plan, and a marketing plan (though I had to readjust them all later to make them simpler for my needs). One thing the book did not really address though was independent publishing. So for that, I turned to other sources—some of which shared similar information and in a far more relatable context.

Discoverability: A WMG Writer’s Guide – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I love Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog. I can’t even remember how I stumbled across her but I think it was from reading about Hugh Howey and then reading the Passive Guy’s website and seeing one of his comments about how he’d never read anyone with the unique long-term perspective that Kristine has about the publishing industry. Once I found her blog, I slowly read my way through all of her articles and because I appreciate how willing she is to share information with new writers, I began to buy her books as well. This was a great one that has to do with Discoverability. Definitely a book I would recommend for any independent writer. Also, her blog is awesome. This blog in particular, Writing By Committee, couldn’t have come at a better time for me—I was experiencing doubt and wanting validation, instead of writing out of love and sharing what I wrote with the world as a way of learning and improving. After I read this, I got back to work writing the stories I most wanted to tell.

Killing The Top Ten Sacred Cows of Traditional Publishing & Indie Publishing (Two Separate Books) – Dean Wesley Smith

Kristine’s husband is Dean Wesley Smith and his Sacred Cow books provide really unique insight into the publishing industry as a whole. The purpose of them is to address myths that plague writers and empower them to make more informed decisions about their writing and writing careers. There is a ton of practical wisdom shared in these books and multiple light bulbs went off in my head as I read them. When I talk about different books approaching the same cogs and wheels of the industry in a more straightforward and relatable way—I’m talking about books like this. Dean and Kristine both have a lot of knowledge about traditional, indie and hybrid publishing and it shows in how they’re able to break down publishing trends. I particularly enjoy when Dean talks about the historical aspects of publishing, how the industry evolved over time and how that evolution impacted everything from the price of books to the size of them. Compelling stuff. I’m hoping to take one of their online workshops in 2016.

Rivet Your Readers With Deep Point of View – Jill Elizabeth Nelson

I picked this book up on the advice of an editor I worked with in early 2015. It was a good read and provided some valuable exercises that helped me think about how to dig deeper to find unique and compelling ways of writing. I read this book every now and again to remind myself to do more showing than telling. Definitely recommended.

The Emotional Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression – Angela Ackerman, Becca Puglisi

One thing I did in 2015 was create an Evernote document where I listed various emotions and then listed various ways to show or describe a character feeling or expressing those emotions in unique ways. It became a super valuable note to me as I was doing rewrites. This book is similar to my Evernote (definitely more comprehensive than my Evernote is at this point) in that it aims to provide a list of physical signals, internal sensations and mental responses people experience from different emotions.

This is another one of those books that helps me dig deeper during a second draft if I’m stuck or need to find a way to show instead of tell. I can have a look at a particular emotion, check back through my Evernote for something I can modify and/or create something new. So in that way, it’s a bit like a prompt—just for description instead of story.

So that’s it! In 2016, I plan to read some more, including this one (recommended at the back of Rivet Your Reader With Deep Point of View), The Definitive Book of Body Language. I read a ton of other blogs and listened to podcasts that were really great and helpful as well, but perhaps I’ll talk about those in a different post.

What about you? Did you read any books this year that helped you with your writing? Do you have any lined up for 2016?

Please feel free to share and as always, happy writing!
S.