Writers in the Storm

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about using Microsoft Excel efficiently. You learned some fun finesse tools for moving around the program and laying out data.

Today, we’re going to get to the nitty-gritty part of Excel. We’re basically going to “just skip to the good stuff.”

What is the most common use of Excel?

There are many people who use Excel just to keep lists. And that’s OK. A spreadsheet is a fine place to keep a list! You can sort this list, filter it, Subtotal it. All these list-y things are built into the program and they’re cooo-o-o-ool. But as cool as they are, a list can’t add up your numbers, unless you learn to really dial in Subtotals. You need formulas to add up numbers.

This bonus Wednesday post is going to cover Formulas in all their glory.

After 15 years of teaching, I’m convinced that Formulas and Functions are the most popular words in Excel. They’re like solar panels here in California – everybody wants them but no one quite knows how to set them up.

Some important things to know about Formulas:

1. If you know basic math, you can do a formula
2. Formulas and Functions are two different things
3. All Excel Formulas and Functions start with “=”
4. Just like your stories, you will usually catch errors if you read them out loud.

Formulas are made up of the following symbols (called operators):

There is a default order in which calculations occur (called the Order of Operations), but you can change this order by using parentheses.

The default order of operations is that you Multiply and Divide before you Add and Subtract. That means that 3+4*10 will equal 43, rather than the 70 that some of you hoped for. How do you get the result of 70 for the above numbers?

(3+4)*10 will equal 70. THIS is what that blue paragraph above means – you can control the order with your parentheses. In Excel this would read:

= ( B4 + C4 ) * D4

My final thoughts on the whole “order of operations” thing...

The Negation, Percent and Exponentiation are actually the highest in this order (meaning they come before everything else). But, in 15 years of formula writing I've never used it...so we're skipping it.

Focus on the following rule of Excel when you do formulas and you'll be fine:
Multiply (*)and Divide (/) BEFORE you Add (+) and Subtract (-)

Do you have to know math to be good at Excel?

I’m going to confess something here…I have a really weak math muscle.

I can put logical things together with the best of them but in school, when we wandered from Algebra Land into Geometry Land (or worse, Trigonometry Land *shudder*), it gave me the Learning Trots. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that. Things just stopped working correctly on the learning front and I was either spewing wrong answers or I was completely blocked up.

When I started using Excel, I was terrified of it, because I thought I had to know math.

Um, no.

Excel is there to do the math for you. You just have to know how.

If you always start a formula with "equal" ( = ) and use the parentheses to group your order of operations properly, all will be a piece of cake on the Excel formula front. That brings us to Functions…

Strap yourself in for the ride, people, we’re about to pass from Basic Arithmetic Land into Algebra Land…

(Stop whining – you don’t have to actually know algebra, but Functions share the look and some of the principles of algebra.)

A Function is a preset formula in Excel.

That's it...the big Function secret - it's built into the program so you don't have to make it up in your head like a formula.

Like formulas, functions begin with the equal sign ( = ) followed by the function's name and then some parentheses around the range of cells you choose. (If you want to get technical, what’s inside the parentheses are called “arguments” – since most of us are writers, we’re calling this the “range of cells.”)

The function name tells Excel what calculation to perform. For example, the most frequently used function in Excel is the SUM function, which is used to add together the data in selected cells (in the example below, cells D1 through D6).

The SUM function is written as:
= SUM ( D1 : D6 )

Other popular functions are:

• Averaging a group of numbers, called a range:  = AVERAGE ( D1 : D6 )
• Getting the lowest number in a range:  = MIN ( D1 : D6 )
• Getting the highest number in a range:  = MAX ( D1 : D6 )

You remember the Name Box from Part 1, right? Well to the right of the Name Box, up on Excel’s formula bar is the Insert Function key, which looks like “fx” (see below):

If you click the Insert Function key button, and “=” sign shows up in the Formula bar, a check mark and an "X" appear to the left of the "fx" key and the Insert Function dialog box appears:

There’s enough functions available in the Insert Function box to keep you busy for weeks if you catch the Excel bug - just click the drop-down arrow next to Most Recently Used and you'll see tons of 'em.

When I first found this place, I wanted to shoot my old Trigonometry teachers for wasting my time – all that sine and cosine business is right here. (My apologies to all you architects who actually use all that dreaded trigonometry the rest of us don't need.)

Can you type your own Functions in Excel?

Sure you can…start typing right inside a cell as show below or up in that Formula Bar to the right of the Fx button. I find it easier to type directly into the cell.

If I were to break the function above into stages, it would read as follows:

1. Go to the cell where you want the total number of books sold.
2. Type “=”
3. Type “SUM”
4. Type an open parenthesis “ ( “
5. Take your mouse and highlight the cells you want to add. A cell range will read as you see above “B4:D4”, which reads “B4 through D4”.
6. If you’re finished, you can just hit the Enter key and Excel will add the closing parenthesis. If you prefer to type the “ ) ” feel free to do so.

Presto, you’ve done your first Function! There’s certainly more, but we’ll cover it in Part 3 of this series. We'll get to those time savers I’ve been hinting at, but I wanted you to feel comfortable with the basics first.

What do you think? Do you think you can find a use for this program that some of you have been avoiding? Part 1's readers asked tons of questions and I hope you do too. Are there some Functions you’ve been dreaming about using? It’s OK, we won’t laugh at you for geeking out…you can tell us what they are down in the comments. :-)

Jenny

About Jenny Hansen

Jenny fills her nights with humor: writing memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, short stories (and chasing after her toddler Baby Girl). By day, she provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. After 15 years as a corporate software trainer, she’s digging this sit down and write thing.

When she’s not at her blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at JennyHansenCA and here at Writers In The Storm. Jenny also writes the Risky Baby Business posts at More Cowbell, a series that focuses on babies, new parents and high-risk pregnancy.

Writers in the Storm welcomes Shannon Donnelly back, as this month, she makes an excellent argument for writing what you know-and better yet-tells us how.

by Shannon Donnelly

Writing advice can often seem mysterious. The phrase “write what you know” at first left me shaking my head. It’s often seemed to me that when you know too much about something that knowledge can make you the worst person to write about it—you end up assuming too much. On the other hand, when you know nothing about a subject, you don’t even know the mistakes you’re making. But I eventually had an “ah ha” moment about this.

This “ah ha” came when I was looking for a story idea. I’d contracted to do a couple of novellas (about 100 pages each, so a long short story). In the search for ideas, something happened in real life—something I’d confided to a friend got back to another friend. It was a small case of betrayal—both on my part for saying something in the first place and the friend’s for repeating a confidence—and it stung. It was, in fact, perfect material for a writer. Ah ha!

Writing what you know means taking out either your experiences—or those of your closest friends—and putting them to use. Meaning giving them to characters and seeing what they do. It means taking things you have experienced—such as this betrayal—and writing about it. Everything else you can research, but if you don’t have the emotional background, it’s going to be hard to fake it.

I think this is why Somerset Maugham advised writers to go out and live first—you need to know a few things about life before you can write about it. And I see this mistake cropping up in manuscripts.

Recently I trained as an EMT First Responder—we live in a rural area and we need all the local help we can train. That training has changed how I look at accidents and illness—I could write better now about any scene with trauma or trouble. And I read differently too—when folks have EMTs staff doing dumb things like hauling someone out of a car without a long spinebord, I cringe. That’s writing what you know—if you don’t know it, you have to find someone who does and pick their brains. Make their knowledge yours. And if you can't find the right person, time to do the research.

You can know something very well from books. Mary Stewart did all of her traveling before she wrote via book. And Nora Robert’s fantastic descriptions of a glass blower in Born in Fire all came from her research instead of hands-on knowing.

Now all this may seem obvious, but the advice had to hit me upside the head before it took. From the manuscripts I’ve seen in contests, other folks need to learn this as well. Get some knowing under your belt before you start into that writing—and if you don’t know, go and find out. Live a little more. Then write about it. Or change your characters into someone you do know.

You either write about yourself—or you write about those around you whom you know. But you’ve got to know the truth of your characters deep in your soul.

Whether you came down on the side of Laura Drake or Fae Rowen in the Write What You Know WITS Throwdown, Shannon has offered compelling arguments for writing what you know. What experience do you have with writing what you know? Or writing something you know nothing about?

BIO
Shannon Donnelly’s latest book Burn Baby Burn, an Urban Fantasy, has just come out from Cool Gus Publishing.

Her writing has won numerous awards, including a RITA nomination for Best Regency, the Grand Prize in the "Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer" contest, judged by Nora Roberts, RWA's Golden Heart, and others. Her writing has repeatedly earned 4½ Star Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times magazine, as well as praise from Booklist and other reviewers, who note: "simply superb"..."wonderfully uplifting"....and "beautifully written."

Her work has been on the top seller list of Amazon.com and she recently published Paths of Desire, a Historical Regency romance, of which Romantic Historical Lovers notes: “a story where in an actress meets an adventurer wouldn’t normally be at the top of my TBR pile; but I’ve read and enjoyed other books by this author and so I thought I’d give this one a go. I’m glad I did. I was hooked and pulled right into the world of the story from the very beginning…Highly recommended.” Paths of Desire and her other Regency romances can be found as ebooks with on all ebook formats, and with Cool Gus Publishing.

She has had novellas published in several anthologies, has had young adult horror stories published and is the author of several computer games. She lives in New Mexico with two horses, two donkeys, two dogs, and only one love of her life. Shannon can be found online at sd-writer.com, facebook.com/sdwriter, and twitter/sdwriter.

Burn Baby Burn
Can a demon hunter raise a little hell?
When a half-demon baby puts Mackenzie Solomon’s life—and her job as a demon hunter—on the line, she can’t turn her back on the half-pint of evil. But ‘Junior’ is actually part of a trap to turn Mackenzie’s partner, Josh, and his extraordinary charming skills to the dark uses of the ancient, fallen Grigori, the angels once assigned to be Watchers over humanity. Is she going to have to make a choice about the men in her life?

Can a charmer talk his way out of his destiny?

Josh learned months ago that the bad blood in his demon hunting partner brings out a part of he can’t control—including his desire for her. With a prophecy out on him, he’s more than a little worried some of those bad things should stay burried. But is Mackenzie really the start of something bad—or could she be everyone’s salvation?

Can a couple of humans move Heaven to save Earth? 

Mackenzie’s bosses at The Endowment—the place responsible for keeping the peace between heaven and hell—want her to bring in the baby demon and not for anything good. With the Endowment after her and demons to stop, Mackenzie knows she’s on her own.

 But she’s going to have to learn to trust Josh—and to use what’s sparking between them. Because it's going to take the kind of love that bonds souls forever to keep the world from ending.

Writers in the Storm is pleased to introduce you to Sherry Thomas. We were lucky to hear Sherry speak at an OCC RWA monthly meeting this fall and even luckier when she agreed to share her writing acumen  with us.

by Sherry Thomas

A detail for me isn’t the color of the wall, the precise shape of a button, or the precise combination of spices in a particular dish.  Or rather, it is.  But I will only work with a detail when I can connect it to the larger emotional theme of a story.

From Not Quite a Husband, which will always be a personal favorite among my own books.

"From time to time she would be at the most incidental activity—lacing her boots or reading an article on the adhesion of the intestine to the stump after an ovariotomy— and a physical memory would barrel out of nowhere and mow her down like a runaway carriage.

The boutonnière he'd worn the evening he first kissed her, a single stephanotis blossom, pure white, as tiny and lovely as a snowflake.

 The sensation of raindrops on warm wool as she placed her hand on his sleeve— he'd come personally to the curb to see her into her carriage—and the wonderful stillness of her world as he said, smiling, through the still­open carriage door, “Well, why not? It should be no hardship to be married to you.”

The almost prismatic glint of sunlight on the fob of his enameled watch—which she'd given to him as an engagement present. He held it suspended in midair, staring at its pendulum swing, while she asked for his cooperation in obtaining an annulment.

But mostly those upsurges of memory were nothing but ghost pains, nervous misfires from limbs that had been long since amputated."

Each detail she remembers—the shape and color of the boutonnière, the sensation of rain on his sleeve, the sunlight reflecting off his watch—is connected to a central event in this couple’s history.

I chose such details rather than come right out and say, Their first kiss.  The day he agreed to marry her.  The day she asked for an annulment.  Words such as “their first kiss” definitely have power, but I like to enhance that inherent power with specificity and exactitude.  What makes that first kiss completely unique to these two characters?  What makes their story different from the story of the couple next door?  That’s what I look for when I search for details.

How do I locate such details?  Well, I pluck them out of thin air.  No exaggeration.  The point is not the details themselves, but what you do with them.

I gave a workshop not long ago on evoking emotions and decided two days before to revamp the section I had on using details.  That particular morning, when I checked the mail box, there was a holiday catalog from the Container Store, full of fun little stocking stuffers.

We don’t do stocking stuffers at our house, but I went through the catalog because it was full of CUTE.  My attention was caught by this particular bit of cute.

Our teenage son is on his fourth cell phone, so you can bet something that will help folks return his phone to him—or us—is of interest to me.

Then I thought, hey, that would be an interesting detail to use in my workshop.  But as I was trying to figure out how exact to use that detail without getting bogged down with too much explanation of how the QR decal works , my attention was caught by the cute on the exact next page—you can verify that it is indeed the next page by checking the page number.

Well, well, what do we have here?  And just about everyone knows how a USB thumb drive works.

So here is one of the thumb drives in action.

“That’s cute,” said the passenger in the seat next to hers.

He pointed at her flash drive that was in the shape of a dragon, a green dragon with yellow eyelids, yellow spine plates, and a white belly. 

“It’s my husband’s.  He loves dragons.”  It’s.  Loves.  Twenty months after Tim’s passing, whenever she wasn’t careful, she still spoke of him in the present.  “He even took me to a geekfest called DragonCon once.

The last good year.  Before his diagnosis.  Before three years in and out of the hospital. He was buried with his very first set of Dungeons and Dragons rule books and the Lego Millenium Falcon he’d put together when he was thirteen. 

She’d almost put in the green dragon flash drive, loaded full of all their pictures through the years, into the casket.  But in the end she’d kept it, a memento of her wonderful geek, of all their happy years together, even though she never did make it through the first book of the Lord of the Rings, not even a hundred pages.

That was the example I gave in my workshop.  But suppose I’d never come across that page of fun, silly thumb drives, suppose all I had were the QR code decals.

No, problem.  It’s not about the details.  It’s what you do with them.

Her cell phone is old, its technology ancient, by current standards.  It has no GPS, no MP3 player, and only a most rudimentary camera.  The battery never lasts more than twenty-four hours no matter how diligent she charges it.  And the screen is cracked at the corner, from when it slipped out of her purse a few months ago. 

Her mother has been asking her to get a new phone for ages.  But she keeps delaying.  She is used to the feel of the squat old phone in her hand.  She likes its gentle, friendly beeps. Whenever she waits at a red light, she turns the phone over and rubs her thumb against a peeling-off corner of the decal on the back. 

Tim had put the decal in place long ago, her Tim who loved gadgetry and cool new things.  She was always forgetting her phone in restaurants and movie theaters—the QR code on the decal made it easy for the good people who found the phone to give it back to her.

But Tim wasn’t all digital.  He was pretty good in the analog world too--always bringing her keys and her purse from odd places in the house back to her nightstand so she’d be able to find them in the morning before she headed out for work. 

She learned to do it for herself, eventually.  That’s how long he has been gone, long enough for her to finally become more like him.  Which would have astonished him, if he only knew.

So seriously, you can pick just about anything and make it a striking detail that evokes emotions.  To repeat, it’s not the details.  It’s the world, the history, the character you build around it.  And you enter it via the exactitude and specificity of details.

Do you have examples of how you've used details to evoke emotion in your story? Do you have any "how-to" questions?

Announcement:

One of our favorite WITS friends, Janice Hardy, just put this up at her amazing blog, The Other Side of the Story.

"Every year, Writer's Digest puts out its 101 Top Websites for Writers. Considering how many fantastic blogs and sites are out there, it must be hard to choose just 101.

Right now you can nominate your favorite blog. Just email writersdigest@fwmedia.com and put "101 Websites" in the subject line. Then tell them why you think that blog deserves to be part of next year's list.

Give a blogger a thrill. Nominate today!"
(And yes, we'd be thrilled beyond measure if you threw our name in the ring.)

About Sherry

Sherry Thomas is one of the most acclaimed romance authors working today.  Her books regularly receive starred reviews from trade publications and are frequently found on best-of-the-year lists.  She is also a two-time winner of Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA® Award.

English is Sherry's second language—she has come a long way from the days when she made her laborious way through Rosemary Roger's SWEET SAVAGE LOVE with an English-Chinese dictionary. She enjoys digging down to the emotional core of stories. And when she is not writing, she thinks about the zen and zaniness of her profession, plays computer games with her sons, and reads as many fabulous books as she can find.

Sherry’s next book, The Burning Sky, volume one of her young adult fantasy trilogy, will be available fall 2013.

Website: http://www.sherrythomas.com