How Learning New Tech Can Help a #Writer

No, I don't believe that computers make us more creative. In fact, I tend to agree with Annie Proulx who, like me, writes all her first drafts by hand. She's made statements to the effect that typing your words the first time through makes you think less carefully because the process becomes "facile."

Yet I cannot deny that technology has a huge impact on the act of writing for publication. The frustrating thing, though, is that we must wade through an ocean of tech and decide what really matters. It's something I think about a lot, especially when I get frustrated by yet another program or machine I have to learn about. Today I offer a few ways in which embracing change and actively learning new skills has benefitted my writing career:

• Income opportunities. I have picked up two regular freelance jobs (one as a website fact-checker and one as a social media manager) from writing colleagues because of tech skills I've acquired. This, in turn, helps me remain a freelancer rather than going back to the traditional working world.
• Promo opportunities. If you can run a blog, keep a website updated, and post regularly to social media, you certainly have a leg up the steep slope of Mount Marketing. These days, I'm amazed when writers don't have an active, organized Web presence. Not that I don't still have a ton to learn!
• Ease of editing. For some, it's novel-writing software like Scrivener that makes the difference, but even getting to know the ins and outs of Microsoft Word can change the editing and revising stages for a writer. And now there's Word for iPad, and a dedicate cloud service called OneDrive that gives you editorial access to all your documents on all your devices. Yay!
• Ease of submitting. Duotrope. Submission Grinder. Submittable. Query Tracker. Google Drive spreadsheets. There are many ways now to keep really detailed, sophisticated records of what we've submitted, to whom, and when. And often, we can find out how long to expect responses to take (based on real user data, not just what the magazine editor says). I always have at least twenty pieces out looking for homes, so programs like these truly help me stay sane.

Your turn: How does the digital world color your writing life?

Film vs Fiction: Paul Almond compares novel writing and screenwriting

Today's guest comes with a perspective unusual on this blog: Before turning to fiction-writing, he had a career in TV and film. I asked Canadian writer Paul Almond to discuss the differences between these two types of storytelling.

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Yes indeed, there is quite a difference between writing a screenplay and writing a novel.  After some forty years directing and producing television dramas and motion pictures, during which time I wrote quite a few, I realised that since screenplay writing was a very tight little craft, novel writing might well be that also.
    So when I had open heart surgery in 1990, and could no longer make movies, my wife, Joan, insisted I turn to my first love, writing.  So now what?
In a screenplay there were so many rules, so many points at which the plot had to turn — as Linda Seager so cleverly outlined in her modest, but essential, book, Making A Good Script Great, I thought that perhaps the same kind of skill might required in writing a novel.

So I enrolled for two or three years in the full curriculum of writing programs at UCLA extension.  Curiously enough, most of the students (of all ages) seemed to want to write screenplays to submit to the studios.  They believed (rightly, I’d say) that studio executives were such idiots, they didn’t know how to read a screenplay.  So they wanted to learn novel writing only to submit them to studios for screenplays.
The first thing that alarmed me was that in a novel you can't just say:
INT LIVING ROOM
and leave it to the art director and set decorator to do their job.
You had to write that description and find a way to do it in a few sentences. That was the first big difference.
The second big difference was that screenplays are written in the present tense.  Most novels are written in the past tense.  I found that out when I started to turn one of my screenplays into a novel.  My instructors soon showed me how wrong I was.

There is, of course, the question of literacy.  When George Lucas wrote “Star Wars”, it was apparently horribly illiterate.  I had the pleasure of employing several from his British production crew right after it, who told me.  It is of course hearsay.

For advice on the actual writing, there are as many different “experts” as there are novelists: whether to use adjectives or not, adverbs or not, and other adjuncts to simple good writing.  Writing schools with their own rules proliferate, the best being one (I hear) in, of all places, Iowa.  But two or three years away to study at a school was not possible, so I did my best with UCLA extensions.  And yes, I did learn a great deal.

But even so, I still wrote two full-length (unpublished) novels (one did come out in a French translation) before I sat down to The Deserter, the first book of The Alford Saga.  It went to practically every agent in Canada and several publishers, to no effect whatsoever.
I sat down and wrote the second book, and then the third, and so on.  After six or seven years, my wife again took me in hand and said, “Paul, just get them published.”  So by that time, I found a couple of publishers.  Indeed, the first five books of the Saga are now in print, and my new publisher, Red Deer Press, a subsidiary of Fitzhenry and Whiteside, has happily taken all eight books.  The next two, The Gunner (spring 2014), and The Hero (autumn 2014) are coming out next year, and The Inheritor in 2015.

The fact that a couple of them have become national bestsellers in Canada just shows what agents know.  As you can see, I'm not a big fan of agents.  Every publishing contact, I did myself.

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You can learn more about Paul Almond on his website.
You can buy The Chaplain (The Alford Saga, Volume 5) on Amazon.

A writer's review of "Seminar," on Broadway with Alan Rickman

Last week I saw Theresa Rebeck's play, Seminar, on Broadway. Yes, it stars Alan Rickman, and I put his name in the title to lure you here and offer a picture of him to please you. But this post is not about Alan Rickman, or about any performance in this particular production. It's about the characters in Rebeck's play.

The premise is that four young writers have pooled their money to hire a has-been best-selling novelist as a fiction coach. Rebeck carefully distinguishes the four students and the teacher into five types of writers:

1) The spoiled rich girl, stymied by lack of urgency, who just needs a push
2) The slick boy wonder, benefiting from nepotism and too smart for his own good
3) The sex-pot who steams up the page and sleeps her way to success
4) The recalcitrant snail of a genius, hidden in his shell
5) The mysterious, misunderstood pro, trying to protect his wounds with a prickly skin

Now, I know a lot of writers. I know journalists and novelists and scholars. Writers of picture books, YA, sci fi, and erotica. Teachers and students, young and old, male and female. Those with multi-book deals at Penguin and those who've never published anything.

But I don't know any of the five writers in Theresa Rebeck's play. I understand that, in fiction of all genres, it is useful to condense and stylize characters. But what Seminar glosses over is a sense of the individual work it takes to be a writer, the constant internal push a writer must give him/herself to keep going. I longed for an acknowledgment of how the creative engine is stoked by each writer in his or her individual (and often rather insane) way. Instead, all we see are stereotypes with their prose already on the page.


Seminar is a good play, but it could have been great (and a funnier comedy) if it had shown more truth about writing.

Welcome, gentle reader

My name is Anne E. Johnson, and I'm delighted that you're visiting me.

Over the years, I've written all kinds of non-fiction, from genealogical guides for children to scholarly articles on medieval musicology, but I'm brand new in the fiction world. I can already see that this journey will be quite an adventure. Please join me as I discover the joy and pain of making stuff up and convincing people to read and publish it!  I value your imput and advice, be it on writing, on marketing, or on the development of my blog. 

I must start, of course, with the news that gives me the confidence to announce my career to the world:  I have a publisher for my first novel, a mid-grade medieval mystery.  I'll be reporting on that process as it goes along.

Thanks for stopping by.  Won't you please become a follower of this blog?  Just click the button on the left.  See you soon.