Writing? What Constitutes Work for You?

Time and again, we hear wails from writers complaining that writing is such hard work. They moan

about how difficult it all is, so that one is forced to wonder why they do it. Coal mining is hard work, labouring is hard work, working a 70 hour shift as a junior doctor in a hospital is hard work. Writing isn’t, or shouldn’t be, hard work.

No one is forced to write: it’s a personal choice, a selection of a lifestyle. Anyone who becomes a writer in the expectation of making easy money is a fool. Writing fiction is not a way to guarantee a worthwhile income. The average English novel makes around £2000.00 for the writer: that’s for an investment of maybe two years work (and, included in that average is the income made by authors such as JK Rowling. Do the math, as they say). Anyone entering the field without awareness of the realities is either naive or stupid. Few freelancers, writing articles, make a very good living, though some make a reasonable amount. Probably the only way to be sure of a constant income from writing is to become a journalist working on a regularly published journal. Everything else is speculation.

For me, writing is not work. It’s a joy, a journey through my imagination to lands and lives I invent. This isn’t work, this is delight. Editing isn’t work; not for me. I love the chase for the perfect word or phrase. I love the discovery of new vocabulary to replace repetitions, I love the search for new ways to say things. Research isn’t work: it’s an adventure, a trip to new experiences and knowledge.

So, what is work for me, when it comes to the world of writing fiction? Selling. Marketing. Building a platform. I’ve worked as a salesman more than once during my varied career and it was never a role that sat easily with me. We look at life through our own eyes, and tend to expect that people are pretty much like us. I’m that guy who never wants to be advised on what to buy, who doesn’t want to be approached by a shop assistant handing out advice. If I want something, I do some research and buy what appears to be best for my needs. I expect others to be similar, so the idea of actively selling seems either a waste of time or a con trick. Surely people know what they want and where they can obtain it? Marketing is similar, in that it’s a means to persuade people to be interested in something they may otherwise not consider.

I hear the screams of protest. I hear the denials. Yes, I know that the world of books is a tough one with competition that’s often far from fair. I understand that, if I want to sell my books, I have to somehow get them to the attention of readers. In so doing, I have to compete and become involved in league tables, press releases, advertising, promotion, engagement with potential readers, and a slough of other activities all designed to take me away from what I think I do best; writing.

So, I have a choice. I can spend most of my time and effort engaged in activity designed to bring my work to the attention of others; something I’ve been doing with minimal success for the past year or more. Or I can write, publish books, and hope that readers will appreciate those works, spread the word and allow me to build a readership that enables my books to be read by more and more people. My choice should depend on what I do best and what I most love. Writing. So, that is what, from now, I will be doing. If I sell few books as a result of taking this approach, so be it: it’ll be no change from the current situation. Except that I’ll be actively enjoying my time writing instead of finding the task of marketing and selling a drudgery I can barely abide.

I’ve spent the last three days in doing the final editing of book one of a fantasy trilogy. Much of that time has been a re-reading of the book, following the editing, so that I have it fresh in my mind. I’ll spend the next few days in doing the same for book two, already written and edited. Then I can start to write book three, which has been slowly bubbling away in the back of my mind during the last few months. This is what I love to do. Write.

This means I won’t always be free to do these spots, which were once regular. I’ll certainly try to produce a post each week, simply because this is a form of writing I enjoy and find relatively easy to do. It’s also a necessary break from the more imaginative creative writing involved in making up a story. But it isn’t work. Not for me. It’s pleasure, enjoyment, fulfilment.

So. When it comes to the world of writing, what constitutes work for you and why do you do it? Let us all know. Just place a comment here and share your thoughts. You might help some other poor beleaguered writer along the way.

 Here are a few quotes on work from well know writers:

Work is the curse of the drinking classes. Oscar Wilde.

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided. Mark Twain.

Nothing is work unless you’d rather be doing something else. George Halas.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. Mark Twain.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. Stephen King.

I put my heart and soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process. Vincent Van Gogh.

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time. Pablo Picasso.

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. Richard Bach.

If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work. Khalil Gibran.

I think you’ll spot those with which I agree. More than anything else, I hope you’ll find ways to enjoy this wonderful craft we call writing.

Related articles

• J. K. Rowling's Top 10: Good Tips for Writing a Book
• Why I Love Writing But Still Hate English Class (Part 2)
• Mark Twain on Writing a Novel.
• Best Seller or Mockery?
• How Sharon Short Became a Writer

ProWritingAid, a Review.

When a member of my writers group suggests a writing tool might be useful, I sit up and take notice. When April Taylor sent the group an email about ProWritingAid, I decided to explore. We’re an odd bunch, but all professional published writers with varied experience and we tend to filter out the dross for each other.

ProWritingAid is a text editing suite. A trial version allows a writer to paste text into the program and obtain an analysis. It’s a useful introduction to the application, but doesn’t give a comprehensive understanding of the wide variety of tools on offer.

I rarely write articles, other than the posts I place here or as a guest on other blogs, so some of the features are of less use to me. Fiction doesn’t require the rigid guidelines that often apply to reports and corporate writing. However, if you write such matter, you’ll find you can set house rules and the analysis will show where these have been broken.

For my fiction, I’ve used a number of methods for editing my text to produce a level of competence that I can present to readers with confidence. I still use that multi-layered system but I now employ ProWritingAid as the penultimate tool. My wife, hawk-eyed, reliable and honest, makes the final check. Since I’ve employed this editing tool, she’s found very little, and that’s been mostly opinion rather than grammatical or syntactical queries.

So, how does the tool work? You paste a copy of your text into the box on screen, press ‘Analyse’ and wait a few moments for the program to scrutinise it. This can take three or four minutes for a piece 5000 words long, depending on the complexity of the language (for this post, it took 17 seconds). Once complete, the result is a series of reports, which detail the findings and suggest changes where necessary. One aspect I enjoy is the praise for being right. Along with the errors, the notes show where the writer has avoided them and gives a brief note of approval.

The following list of reports shows the depth of analysis:

Summary – just that; a listing of all errors found.

Overused words – frequency of commonly overused words.

Sentence variation – gives a visual representation of sentence lengths and highlights long sentences.

Grammar – a check on grammatical accuracy.

Writing style – checks for passive and hidden verbs.

Sticky sentences – finds those sentences that contain any of the 200 most used words: these sentences can slow the reader down.

Clichés & redundancies – highlights clichés and expressions that say the same thing twice.

Repeated words & phrases – highlights repetition of words and 2, 3 and 4 word phrases within short stretches of writing to give an opportunity to introduce variety.

Corporate wording – shows ‘jargon’ usage, which you may or may not wish to avoid.

NLP Predicates – I had to look this up – Neurolinguistic Programming relates to how we express ourselves and use language to express feeling, amongst other things. For more info, try this website: http://www.renewal.ca/index.html 

Pronouns – highlights repeated use of pronouns to start sentences.

Diction – shows possible diction problems and suggests alternatives.

Vague & abstract words – shows those words that lack strength or that might lack specificity.

Complex words – indicates word length by number of syllables – suggests simplification where appropriate.

Alliteration analysis – shows phrases where alliteration may have crept in inadvertently.

Pacing – identifies places where the pace is slowed by introspection, backstory, etc.

Consistency – points out inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation and capitalisation.

Sentiment – shows where sentiment might vary suddenly from positive to negative, etc.

House style – allows the user to develop a house style and ensure it remains consistent through the piece.

Time – allows the user to check for consistency in the usage of time references.

Dialogue – finds those rogue dialogue tags that you might want to avoid.

Homonyms – checks for those words that sound alike and therefore may have slipped through your spell check.

I’ve avoided giving examples in the list above, as it would have made the post too long. I hope most serious writers will be sufficiently aware of the content to understand the context. I’d advise those who aren’t to invest in a couple of good grammar books, as an understanding of language is an essential prerequisite for a professional writer. In the same way that you’d be unlikely to employ a plumber who lacks a knowledge of his trade, you shouldn’t expect a reader to struggle through work that displays no understanding of the tools of the trade: words.

Using this program as my penultimate editing tool has helped me enormously. I can’t honestly say it’s speeded up the process, because it hasn’t! But it’s made it much more thorough and I feel far more confident about sending my words out there into the reading world.

There are a few niggles, which you need to know. If you use a PC with MS Word, you can download an application that will allow you to make changes within Word. But if you use a Mac, like me, you can’t yet do that (they are, apparently, working on a fix.) I haven’t found a way of preserving the formatting of my text. I paste it in the form of a normal fiction template, which has no line spacing between paragraphs and uses indents. But the copied text, when corrected, is returned as line-spaced paragraphs without indents, and the font is changed. This is easily corrected, of course, but it would be helpful if such changes didn’t occur!

Having discovered that I can email the reports to myself as a .pdf document, I now use this and place the MS document on the left of the screen and the .pdf reports on the right and make the changes that way. Works a treat, if a little laboriously. 

There is also a visual aid, producing a word cloud, as in the illustration, that gives a graphic impression of the weight of the words you’ve used. Useful in the way that it really draws attention to word usages you might otherwise overlook.

Do I recommend the software? Absolutely. It’s relatively inexpensive at £22.70 ($35.00) per year and it certainly does all I need. If you decide to try it, here’s the link: http://prowritingaid.com/

Related articles

• Coherent Writing: Diction
• Seven Tips for Writing Concisely
• The Dangers of Writing In Passive When an Active Voice Is Demanded.
• A week of resources and inspiration for the Writer - Day 2

Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, by Dwight Spivey, Reviewed.

Not a general book, of course, but a one for those interested in and learning to use the software with the hardware and operating system.

I thought I knew Word, in particular, very well, but there were many lessons for me here. I’ve learnt things that will hopefully increase my productivity and allow me more freedom to express myself more fully. The ability to work with programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint more effectively will certainly improve my speed of work. But, as familiarity increases, I also expect that my confidence in use will allow me to take advantage of many of the aspects of the programs of which I was previously ignorant or uncertain. It solved a problem or me involving Excel and charts; for that alone, it saved me much time that would otherwise have been wasted.

Laid out in a logical manner, which aids both learning and actual use, it’s a ‘Dummies’ guide in all but name. Of course, there are many aspects that are merely alluded to and many others that aren’t covered at all, but that’s to be expected with a subject so complex and multi-layered.

Illustrated copiously with screen shots, the text gives excellent examples of the solutions to many of the problems we deal with daily in our computer lives. The tone is friendly and light, but the content is serious and fairly comprehensive. I’m by no means a techie, but I found it easy to follow. I’m very new to the Mac, and previously used Office 2010, so I had more than one set of changes to deal with. The book led me easily through the maze of technical jargon, helping me understand much that had previously been a mystery to me.

Organised into chapters dealing with various aspects of each program, I found the whole course easy to follow. I ignored the section on Outlook as I’ve tried this program in three of its previous manifestations and always suffered major problems with it. There are other programs available that do everything outlook does, and are easier to deal with, so I’ll stick to those. My knowledge of PowerPoint is very small, but as an author, I can think of ways in which it could be very useful, especially for marketing, so I was glad of the help on that.

If, like me, you’ve recently purchased either a Mac and/or the newer Office software, and you’re having difficulty using either or both, then this is the book for you. Of its type, it’s one of the better examples and I recommend it.

Related articles

• Office 2011 update includes more Office 365 features
• How do you transfer a powerpoint on microsoft to a mac presentation?
• Microsoft's Office 2011 For Mac Gets New Update, Office 365 Compatibility
• Microsoft will give away Office on smaller Windows 8 tablets

Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym, Reviewed.

I read the Folio Society edition of this novel, illustrated rather charmingly and with considerable insight, by Debra McFarlane. There’s something essentially apt about reading a book from the early 50s in the form of a hardback with appropriate plates. Set in the period just following World War II, and written in the first person by one of the ‘excellent women’ of the title, it should really be entirely of its time. The simple brilliance of the writing, the wonderful characterisation and the gently comic surface of a story bursting with subterranean passion, angst, desperation and injustice elevates the novel to the status of a minor classic.

There’s no violence, no sex, no foul language; yet all of humanity is here amongst the weary, caring, superficial, flirting, thoughtless, considerate, courageous, resigned and loving people that inhabit the pages. Church, though neither spirituality nor real faith, plays a significant part in the lives of the protagonists who attend the edifice but appear devoid of any passion for their religion, frequently gently mocking their membership of the club.

Miss Mildred Lathbury, who describes herself in the fourth paragraph of the first chapter as an unmarried clergyman’s daughter just over thirty and living alone without apparent ties, is far from the dull spinster we might expect. The gentle humour that suffuses the whole book often hides a deep pathos as the excellent women of the title go about their daily lives without hope of fulfilment in marriage, career or society in general. Being busy, showing and dealing with concern for their fellow human beings, whilst living grey, unnoticed lives, these are the women who make life easier, sometimes even possible, for those surrounding them.

The unexpressed intelligence, the unacknowledged charity, the unspoken desire, the unrecognised hopes and dreams of these single women is so exquisitely drawn that the reader feels every nuance of the subtle insults that surround them. Taken for granted, patronised, ignored, relied upon and rejected without thought, these women take on all those tasks that others find either boring or irrelevant until the jobs are neglected; only then are the quiet duties seen for the social glue they truly are, but not for very long, of course.

The society in which this novel takes place has largely disappeared, but the people and the circumstances remain. I laughed out loud many times whilst reading the book but always, under the surface, was a recognition that the humour sprang from deep inequalities of both gender and income. I was reminded of the best of British sitcoms where humour is mingled with pathos, each quality emphasising the other in a balance that works so well to entertain whilst putting across a message.

This is a story in which nothing of any significance to anyone outside the narrow confines of the small neighbourhood takes place. There are no earth-shattering events, no crime, nothing crude, nothing erotic. But it depicts lives lived in quiet, courageous desperation and does so with a deep affection for those described. I enjoyed it, and I suspect Mildred will live with me for a long time. Those who enjoy action and adventure will find this hard to read, but I thoroughly recommend it to all those who love romance in its best form, those who enjoy books with real characters, and those who find enjoyment in gentle humour.

Related articles

• Review: Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
• A Few Good Tidbits from Barbara Pym
• Marvelous Spinster Barbara Pym At 100
• Barbara Pym