Erich T. Wade

A couple of days ago, Jay Lake posted on his blog about deliberate practice, and the literary equivalent of doodling in a sketchpad. This is a topic near and dear to my heart; it’s something I’ve been trying to do off and on for some time now, in one way or another, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. It’s what I use 750words for, mostly; sometimes I just use it as a journal, but more and more often it’s where I throw up the first drafts of blog posts and scenes. That’s where I’m writing this, right now, as a matter of fact.

I find the practice of literary sketching to be very valuable. Sometimes I’m not sure what I want to say, or how I want to say it, or if I want to say it, or if saying what I think I mean will just end up making me look like a jackass. Often, I’ve let this prevent me entirely from blogging about something, because I never got myself to commit to writing it. The solution, of course, is to just write it out and see what happens. Scalzi talked about something similar last month when he was talking about being thankful for writing:

“This organizing and structuring that comes through writing comes in handy for me, because it means that I have an outlet to express thoughts I have that run deeper than “I have to take out the trash.” My wife understands this perfectly well; on more than one occasion, after I’ve completely fumbled expressing something to her, she’s said to me “you need to go write that out.” And I do and then I actually have a way to express that idea, so that the next time I try to verbalize it, I have a framework and a method that doesn’t involve increasingly wild hand gestures and the use of the phrase “you know?” every five or six words. Writing makes me a better verbal communicator, funny as that sounds.”

I work the same way. I’m very text-oriented: I’m the sort of person who gets irritated when someone tries to read me the text off a Magic card aloud, because I can’t make heads or tails of it until I actually read it. Apparently it works the same way with stuff in my head; I never thought about it that way before, but there you go. And really, what excuse do I have for not realizing this sooner? Since it springs immediately to mind, I apparently know about the E. M. Forster quote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Another example of the benefits of textual doodling: when Kat and I were first dating – the first, oh, six months or so I’d guess – I had a document entitled Notes To Me, which I’d basically pop open and scribble in whenever my mind was wandering*. Later, I’d hand it to Kat so she could read my random mind wanderings, which she would annotate and we would discuss. Sometimes these discussions would be verbal, but very often they took the form of what we called “Quiet Clicky Conversations,” where we’d pass our (er, well, my) laptop back and forth and type at each other. This had the advantages not only of being more private**, but also made it easier for us to discuss a lot of things – we were both fairly socially awkward, and I don’t know how we ever would have gotten to the point of being able to talk verbally about everything if it hadn’t been for that intermediate step. Also, as previously noted, sometimes writing your thoughts out really helps you notice when you’re being a jackass, a state of being which I know I was guilty of many times but which I cannot recall Kat ever having occupied.

I think of this sort of thing as disposable writing. I write with the knowledge that what I’m writing isn’t going out in public, so I’m free to just write it out and not worry about anything. Then, if I accidentally write something I really like, I can salvage it. This is good practice for novel revision, which is often a long process of taking lots and lots and lots of work and dumping it in the bin. It’s valuable to have written it, but throwing it out still stings. Sometimes, though, you don’t know if something will work until you try it; it’s better to try it, because it might work really well, but you shouldn’t get too attached because if you adhere to the policy of trying all the stuff you’ll find that most of it doesn’t work out. That’s been my experience, anyway.

Using 750words.com helps with this because it forces me (well, encourages me to force myself), every day, to write three pages of just . . . whatever. And since I’m going to be writing a bunch of unfiltered stuff anyway, if I want to screw around with something that might not work, it’s not really wasted writing – the alternative was something even less useful. So, even in the slightly-less-than-a-month with breaks I’ve been using it, I’ve already got several things I started and scrapped, and at least a couple that were just random musings that I then turned into blog posts. Yay for that.

On an unrelated closing note, I’ve noticed a trend in my blog posts lately; whenever I remember to categorize them, if they fall into writing or life, they usually fall into both. So, apparently writing is a big part of my life. Duh, right? Part of this is likely sample bias because I’ve been working on NaNoWriMo, but I doubt all of it is.

*This would be the document in which I verified that Wordpad does, in fact, handle stupidly large documents fairly gracefully. Of course, my laptop at the time had only 512 megs of RAM, so there were some fundamental limits that forced me to eventually start the New Notes to Me, but that’s beside the point.

**Most of these conversations took place in the hallways of ASMSA. If that sounds strange you probably never went there; the school was an old hospital so it had great big hallways, but virtually no coed lounges, so most people hung out in the hallways and eventually ended up with a stretch of hallway that was staked out as theirs.

Current music: Well, I wanted to listen to Simon and Garfunkel, so I queued up The Sound of Silence, but then I got distracted. So I listened to that, then a whole lot of nothing. Fitting?

I recently came to one of those realizations that can only be described as a “duh” moment. I’m a huge fan of software gadgets. I used to think that my obsession with finding and trying out new bits and pieces of writing-related software was a problem that was hindering me actually getting work done, but I no longer think that’s the case. I think that finding new and interesting pieces of writing software actually helps keep me creative. Plus, many of the tools I use constantly were – obviously – discovered by my tendency to tinker around with new software.

In some ways, I’m the software equivalent of that guy with a shop in his garage full of half-finished projects. I’m not an especially good programmer, mainly because I haven’t focused on it much in the past few years, but I really enjoy programming. And when I have something I want to work on I can find out how to do what I want pretty easily. I <3 the Internet.

Regardless of my actual programming skill, I like the process of putting something together myself. I endured merciless mocking when writing a quick program to generate random ASCII for a scene in my NaNo novel took me the better part of three hours*, because it was more fun to write it myself than to use online tools. By the same token, I have about a third of a bare-bones word processor sitting pitifully in the bottom of one of my source directories. Every once in a while I hear it pitifully mewing at me, like a kitten at the bottom of a well.

This feels like a good time to mention the software I’m using most right now. I’m just going to talk about the stuff I directly write in for now, because the rest is probably worth a post in and of itself.

When I’m writing my books, I use yWriter, which I’ve talked about before. I don’t use its built-in metadata handling any more: I don’t really want to track info about my characters, locations, etcetera in it. Instead, I use Wikidpad for that. I also use Wikidpad to organize everything from characters to session notes on campaigns I run.

When I’m working on Zosias, I use Google Docs: I don’t consider it to be an especially good word processor, but it’s unquestionably a fantastic piece of collaboration software. I often wish it had features like columns, redefining the formatting for styles, and handling large documents gracefully, and I suspect it has a gradual memory leak somewhere, but the ability to work together with other people on a document in real time is priceless.

I recently discovered 750 Words, which I daresay has revolutionized my daily writing schedule. I’ve been using it a whopping five days. The basic idea of it is that writing three unfiltered pages a day is nicely therapeutic and helps prime the writing pumps, and I have to say it works very well. It’s basically cloud-based journaling software that applies gamification to the process of daily writing – the point system rewards you for writing every day and finishing your 750 words without getting distracted, and it has tons of achievements (called “badges”) for things like long writing streaks and consistently finishing under 20 minutes. Instead of counting against the total amount of writing I can get done in a day, 750 Words actually seems to increase it; I get all the other stuff that’s on my mind written out, and then I’m good to go.

Finally, and perhaps oddly, I use Wordpad constantly. I prefer the older Windows XP version of it to the one with Win7 on my laptop, because I don’t like the spacing that the new one applies automatically; luckily, my desktop still runs XP, so it all works out. I’ve been laughed at for using Wordpad as recently as just the other day, and there’s no doubt that there are many superior word processors to Wordpad, but it has a few good things going for it:

• It’s stable. Very, very stable. I’ve used Wordpad constantly for about seven years, sometimes with hilariously large documents, and I’ve never had it crash on me. Never.
• It’s lightweight. Wordpad does what I need it to: it gives me a great big writing canvas and the ability to bold, italicize, underline, and occasionally change the font and size of my text. It doesn’t try to do much else. If I need to get a wordcount on something, it’s pretty easy to open it in OpenOffice or something, but for most of what I do in Wordpad I don’t need word counts.
• Because it is lightweight, it’s fast. When I have a quick idea I want to jot down, I do it in Wordpad, because I don’t want to wait for something else to load. I can run a dozen Wordpad documents at once with no performance hit.
• Its documents are portable. Wordpad saves in .rtf format, which isn’t perfect, but it’s supported by approximately every word processor ever.
• It’s familiar. I’ve been using Wordpad for various things since I got my first modern computer in 2004, right before going to ASMSA.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t consider switching. Things like word count and tabs would be nice, but it’s surprisingly hard to find minimalistic Wordpad-like word processors; most free word processors I run across prefer to try to emulate Word, even when they’re trying to be lightweight. The closest I’ve found is Jarte, which is very good and actually built on the WordPad engine; Jarte is to Wordpad as Notepad++ is to Notepad. And the truth is, I’ll probably switch to Jarte eventually. I had a bad initial experience with it a few years ago, when I was quite annoyed that it seemed to be trying to completely replace menu names with icons – I’ve since found that it’s possible to turn on a menu bar with actual words on it. But I haven’t switched yet, because it still fails the familiarity test. Kind of an odd reason after the point of this post, I know. Every once in a while I switch it to my default rtf editor to see if I can force myself to switch. I think I’ll do that now.

Current Music: A Pandora station based on The Offspring’s You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid. Right now it’s playing Re-Education (Through Labor) by Rise Against. Ooh, no, now it’s playing Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant. I love all of these songs.

*The actual code took about five minutes, but I ended up having to reinstall the JDK for reasons that are too lengthy for me to want to go into here. I didn’t have the latest version of Java installed, anyway. And then I had to figure out why the reinstalled JDK was still trying to use an older version that I had uninstalled a while back, which turned out to be because there were old java.exe’s in my system32 and SysWow64 folders, but I spent about an hour and a half trying to track down what I thought was a registry issue . . .

Today begins NaNoWriMo, which I have decided to participate in this year. Crazy, I know. I’ve been working a lot on Zosias lately, mainly with my friend Pip (more on that later). I’m also still working on Derelict, though I’ve moved it to the back burner for now; most of my daily writing has been on Zosias, with adjustments made for the fact that word count is a really bad way to track game design. Kat and I are also looking into buying a house, and we’ve collectively decided that I should look into a part-time/night-shift job for a while. So tentatively November looks like this:

• *Write about 1667 words per day on a new project. This conveniently takes care of my “write 1000 words/day” goal quite conveniently, as well as my daily task to write 500 words of prose, anywhere, on anything (which is strictly speaking part of the word goal anyway). I’ve got about four different ideas for this book, and will hopefully have settled on one by the time I start writing later today. Regardless of which one I pick, the working title is “This Novel Will Fail,” because it amuses me to attempt to employ reverse psychology. The reason I find reverse psychology so funny is probably because I learned about it from Bugs Bunny.
• Write about 500 words or one chunk of game design, story background, campaign notes/plans, or whatever. This is a complete non-issue. As far as I can tell, I don’t get writer’s block on game design. This is probably at least partially due to the fact that the Zosias design team consists of four people, we have several fantastic friends who regularly playtest, and I’m involved in about two and a half Zosias campaigns right now. (One I run for my wife, one my wife runs for me, and one I’m in the planning stages of.) It’s hard to sit through an entire gaming session without running across three or four parts of the rules that could do with addition, expansion, or change.
• Read a book every 2 days. I haven’t blogged about this goal, and it’s not a super-important one, but the reasoning goes something like this: I like to read. I set myself a goal, roughly via Shelfari, of reading a hundred books this year. I’m way behind. If I read a book every two days until the end of the year, I’ll be almost caught up*.
• Obtain a house. Or continue the process thereof.
• Look for/work at a job. We’ve decided that it would be a good idea for me to get at least a part-time job for a while, not least because we anticipate unexpected expenses once we have a house. Plus: We’re making it pretty well on Kat’s income, which means that whatever I bring in is pretty much extra. This will likely go toward frivolous expenses such as savings and paying off old medical debts. There are at least half a dozen ways the schedule could play out here, but one thing’s for sure: I’m probably going to have to adjust my sleep schedule again. Silly me.
• Continue being Summer’s dad. Obviously I won’t be an entirely stay-at-home dad any more, but I’ll still be the primary go-to parent. See, I can put some of my stuff aside for awhile if I need to. If I miss a week on the novel, well, it’s nothing  that hasn’t happened before. Kat’s going to school online right now, and I gather they’re a little less understanding about missing weeks.

Luckily, being Summer’s dad isn’t usually all that grueling. Sure, sometimes it involves convincing her to sleep when she’s convinced the bed is made of hot needles. But sometimes it only involves reading her one of her favorite books twenty-seven times over the course of an hour. And sometimes, we sit down and watch the 90s Spider-Man cartoons together. She loves those**.

*It’s a good thing this is a self-imposed goal, because I can define “book” however makes me happy, and sometimes when I’m busy it makes me happy to count each book of a manga or something. I’ve been meaning to read the Rozen Maiden manga, and I wouldn’t mind rereading the Megatokyo books and/or the Chrno Crusade manga.

**So do I.