Writers in the Storm

by Tasha Seegmiller

I’m in A LOT of Facebook writing groups. I suspect I’m not alone in this. It’s actually one of my favorite things about social media. 

One of the perks of being in so many groups is I get to see what people are wondering about. And the thing that has been showing up the most, lately, are questions like: 

• If I’m writing YA, should it be in past or present tense? 
• Do agents like first or third person more? 
• Will editors like my book if I switch POVs every chapter? 
• How many words are in a chapter? 

I get it. And I’m guessing if you are reading this, you have wondered or asked the same things before as well. You might be wondering now.

And in the kindest way possible, I want to say to each of you (yes, this includes me), these things don’t matter.

Really. 

Yes, there are suggested word lengths for certain kinds of books. And in the same breath that someone shares what they are, you will hear of an example of a wildly successful book that broke that guideline (even besides Harry Potter). 

But chances are something is going on in your story that you can’t quite figure out, something about character development or plot or pacing or setting or any number of other things that are missing their mark, and so, in order to find something resembling direction, we start asking quantitative questions. 

Friend? The answers to those questions aren’t going to fix the heart of the problem. 

Feel free to play around with past and present. Write a scene in first and then in third. Maybe it will unlock something. 

But, more likely, you will need to answer these questions: 

Who is your Character? 

Not what is their name or favorite color. I mean, when was the last time your character learned something new? Who does your character have to care for and who cares for your character? Do they know what love is? Have they experienced sorrow? Are they the kind of person always looking for a new adventure or does hanging out at home with tea and a book sound luxurious? There are all kinds of charts and forms and questionnaires to help people develop a character, and they likely help a lot of people. Use them, don’t use them. But please make sure you are leaning into the elements of character that elevate them from a stick figure to a person.

What does your Character Want? 

Sure, it’s fun for a character to have a favorite drink. They might have an imaginary friend no one accepts as real. Maybe they are a grown-up adult with kids and jobs and significant others and they want a nap. But remember, the thing that they want isn’t actually the thing they want. The person who wants the drink might want to sit back, let go, enjoy themselves for a minute (and really, that could go for everything from coffee to water to scotch). Is the kid with the imaginary friend creative or lonely? And how about that nap? 

Where would your Character Like to Be? 

Employed? Retired? At school? At home? In Italy? Remember, where can be both a physical place anda state of being. Maybe your character would like to be in a place where they are no longer triggered. Maybe they’d like to be on the most popular list. But of course, we know that where a character wants to be isn’t necessarily where they really want to be. Dive deep. Explore that. 

Once you have some answers for those questions, answer these: 

• Who do people think your character is? 
• What is preventing your character from getting what they want? 
• Why can’t your character be where they’d like to be? 

Got some side characters? Take some time to figure out their stories. An antagonist or two? Same thing (remember, often an antagonist is a protagonist to someone…). 

Then create your outline or get writing. Let the characters tell their stories. Get that all out in the world. And then, when you really know what is going on in your story, explore what format might work best for you, for them, for the story. And if it doesn’t work? Try something else. You aren’t etching these lines on stone, and no one needs to know how long it took you to get to where the story is working. And they don’t need to know how many times it took you to get it right. o

Do you have any other questions you ask yourself when you are stuck on a story? 

Tasha Seegmiller believes in the magic of love and hope, which she weaves into every story she creates. She is the president of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and studying in the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University, and teaches composition courses at Southern Utah University. Tasha married a guy she’s known since she was seven, is the mom of three teens, and co-owner of a cotton candy company. She is represented by Annelise Robey of Jane Rotrosen Agency.

by Tiffany Yates Martin

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about mental states—especially for writers. 

I don’t just mean in the current divisive, angry atmosphere that seems to have taken over so much of our world events, politics, even snarky neighbor exchanges on NextDoor—although that’s certainly corrosive and omnipresent enough. But life often offers a stream of traumas great and small that threaten to derail our creative impulses—family concerns, money worries, health matters, crises of confidence. The result, often, is that creative work suffers: we get writer’s block, or succumb to crippling self-criticism and doubt, or backburner our work-in-progress as a luxury there’s no time for.

Writers, I think, are more than usually sensitive to such things—do a search on existential depression (as I in fact recently did) and what repeatedly pops up near the top of the results are articles that link it to those who are “deep thinkers” or highly sensitive—two common traits of writers and other creatives.

So what do you do with all that angst that you, as a creative, as an extra-sensitive, deep-thinking, hyperaware artist, may be roiling with at various times of your life?

You use it.

Believe it or not, these powerful, uncomfortable emotions can make your writing even more impactful. As an editor, I’ve noticed a slew of art coming out recently that “leans in” to this unrest many of us may be feeling in the current environment, from books like Amulya Malladi’s roar against sexism

Many of us are wrestling with how to cope in the world—whether that’s a result of our current increasingly poisonous sociopolitical, ecological, and too often deeply personal environment, or life’s everyday speed bumps—financial, health, personal struggles that can derail even our strongest creative desires. 

The power in letting these struggles inform your work is that they are universal. Whether or not all your readers may be feeling all the same things now, chances are good they have wrestled with similar demons in the past: rage, betrayal, loss, regret...and forgiveness, acceptance, love…peace.

Bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch recently wrote a post for Writer Unboxed about how the current state of the world was affecting her as a writer—essentially shutting down her creative font for two years, until she looked straight into the face of the monsters tormenting her and channeled all that into her work, finding a new inspiration from that very unrest. She wrote her novel—which will be released next year—in six weeks.

The marvelous thing about spinning struggle into art is that, counterintuitively, it can make your struggles a bit easier. Letting your characters wrangle with a problem you’re wrangling with not only lets you channel all those difficult emotions into your work, thus infusing it with intimate, visceral feeling and passion; frequently it helps you work through it yourself at the “safe” remove of helping/watching your protagonists do the same. Their battle will help you understand and work through yours—and, in a truly beautiful perfect circle, they often will also help readers recognize and transform their own challenges.

How do you deal with life’s challenges, setbacks, and sorrows relative to your writing? I’d love to hear your tips—and let me know if I can share them (with or without attribution—let me know) to offer some practical strategies for authors. 

In more than 25 years as an editor, with major publishing houses as well as through her own FoxPrint Editorial, Tiffany Yates Martin has been privileged to help authors, from bestsellers to beginners, tell their stories as effectively, compellingly, and truthfully as possible. She presents editing and writing workshops for writers’ groups, organizations, and conferences and writes for numerous writers’ sites and publications. Get her free 13-page guide on how to find, vet, and hire a reputable professional editor here.

Lainey Cameron

You know what breaks my heart as a fellow writer? When I read tweets like these in the morning, I want to sob into my cereal:

“I just discovered that I lost my 1st draft manuscript of 50k words... because my backup went weird and it wiped all my writing.”

“LOST. THE. OPENING. TO. A. MANUSCRIPT. Why do I not have a backup? Why don’t I save things in the correct places? Whyyyyyyy?!?!?”

The above are real tweets with names removed to protect the traumatized.

The question is why, with so many backup technologies available, does this still happen? It can be overwhelming to figure out the right backup strategy. There are too many choices: backup drives and cloud backup, Scrivener backups, Google Drive and Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, and Dropbox, to name just a few. 

As an ex-techie (before I became a digital nomad writer), I’d like to share a framework for how to approach protecting your own work and sanity.

1. Online Backup

The number one solution I recommend to my writer friends is to use an online service. Not to be confused with placing individual files in a cloud location like Dropbox or OneDrive, online backup offers an automated backup of every file on your computer to a secure cloud location. 

Provided as a service to which you subscribe annually, it costs $5-6 a month or around $70 a year for a well-known service like Backblaze or Carbonite. 

Pro Tip: Invest in online backup of all your files.

The biggest benefit of this service is automation. You need not remember to back up. In fact, once set-up, you do nothing. Whenever you are connected to the internet, all of your updated files are automatically backed up to the cloud.

In my opinion, online backup is a better solution than a physical drive. The unfortunate reality is if your house or apartment is flooded or on fire (this has happened to several writer friends), everything will probably be damaged or warped, including the backup drive you “securely” placed in a drawer. 

Although the best advice is to store your backup drive off-site (i.e., not in the same location as you and your laptop), how many of us actually do that? I know for me, as a constant traveler, it would be impossible.

The only downside to online backup is when you first start, it takes significant time to create a copy of your entire hard drive (several days or weeks in the background while you continue to work). 

A view of my Backblaze backup working in the background:

2. A physical ‘recovery’ drive

It is also worthwhile to have a physical backup drive, paired with software that backs up your entire computer, such as Time Machine (for Mac).

If your cat knocks your laptop off the table into the bathtub, a full restore will be easier and faster on a new laptop with a Time Machine-style backup, which saves not only your files, but your configuration and application settings. With a PC, I’m not sure there is an equivalent built-in software yet, but some external drives come with utilities to enable a rapid full restore.

Pro Tip: All hardware eventually fails. Don’t let any physical device be the one place holding your precious files. 

Pro Tip: If you need to plug your hard drive into your computer to back up, schedule this twice a week on your calendar to remind yourself.

 3. Application Level Auto-Saves and Backups 

Within your writing application, saves and backups are different.  Gwen Hernandez does a nice job of explaining the difference in this article: Protect Your Writing with Scrivener Backups.

a. Auto Saves

With Scrivener, your saves are automatic; because the words are saved as you type. Google Docs behaves similarly.

However, with Microsoft Word, it’s up to you to configure your auto-save correctly. You’ll find this setting under Word/Preferences/Save.

Pro Tip: Configure your Word application to auto save at least every five minutes.

Word Auto Save Settings

b. Application File Backups

Both Word and Scrivener will automatically back up your work in progress writing file. For Word, make sure you have “Always create backup copy” checked on the save settings screen. 

For Scrivener, see Gwen’s article above (I strongly support her recommendation to place your backup copy on a cloud drive).

Pro Tip: Saving files to the cloud is great (especially for working on multiple devices). But not the same as having a backup.

It’s now possible to save your working versions of files (Scrivener, Word, Pages) directly to a cloud drive (like Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive). This is a great option if you work from multiple devices and want to access the same file from each.

However, just remember that saving a single copy in the cloud is similar to having a single copy on your desktop. If that copy is corrupted, overwritten or deleted, you may be in trouble. 

Pro tip: Every important file needs, at minimum, one additional backup copy (even if you are saving to the cloud). 

c. Versioning Features

Thankfully, the most common version of losing our work isn’t our laptop going for a swim or a house fire. In my experience, the common way to lose progress is when I accidentally overwrite my own words.

Luckily, some writing software can find what was written in prior versions, without ever leaving your document.

Pro Tip: Versioning features are your friend; it’s worth the time to learn them.

I avidly use Scrivener snapshots. Sometimes, I’ll even click into prior revisions of a scene when I’m stuck for words, just to mine for inspiration. 

A view of my Scrivener snapshots, within a single scene

If you write using Google docs, their version history feature is similar, because it lets you see the full text (and compare) to prior versions.

Where to find Google version history

Within Microsoft Word, this versioning function is not yet as capable. It’s only available if you are saving to Microsoft’s cloud storage, and not as sophisticated, but still worth a peek if you use OneDrive.

What is your backup strategy? What other tips would you give writer colleagues for safe-guarding their work?  

About Lainey

Lainey Cameron is a digital nomad and author of women’s fiction. A tech industry dropout, her first book was inspired by a decade of being the only woman in the corporate board room. The novel won 2^ndplace in the Rising Star Award for unpublished Women’s Fiction and tells the story of a Silicon Valley investor who, when faced with her husband’s mistress across the negotiating table, must learn to work with her or jeopardize both their careers.

An avid travel instagrammer, Lainey finds inspiration everywhere. She is currently working on her second novel, a tale of an instagrammer who witnesses a murder and is pursued around the world.

She’s an active volunteer with Women’s Fiction Writers Association and is on a mission to obliterate the term aspiring writer, which she believes saps writers’ ownership and creative confidence.

Find her online at www.laineycameron.com where she posts progress of her books and tech tips for writers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.