Writers in the Storm

Our new Writer in the Storm, Orly Konig-Lopez, is taking on Jenny Hansen in our latest throwdown: Introverted vs Extroverted Writer. Next Monday, Jenny will offer arguments, er... uh, gentle persuasion on the Extroverted Writer.

by Orly Konig-Lopez

Loyal followers (and you’re all loyal followers, right? Right!) know that Writers in the Storm has a fun tradition of  taking a topic and ripping it in half. And since we all have opinions -- some louder than others -- there’s always the opportunity for a fun Throwdown over which half is the right half.

Well, my “hello world, it’s me the troll” blog led to a Throwdown idea—and I’ll give everyone a wild hairy guess which half of the Introvert vs. Extrovert debate I grabbed and ran to the cave with.

First, I have a confession. Two weekends ago, I came out of the cave for a workshop—the fabulous Margie Lawson gave her Empowering Characters Emotions workshop at my local chapter meeting. And … shhhh … it was fun interacting with other writers.

But before anyone gets the crazy idea that I’m ready to convert, I’m happy to report that I’m safely back in my troll cave! AAhhhhh … it’s so much nicer in here.

Okay, okay, I’ll admit that sharing ideas with other writers and soaking up the creative mojo that flows in a room of wonderfully talented people can be stimulating. But as an introvert, I find it equally exhausting. I mean seriously, all those people talking. And talking. A troll can get whiplash trying to keep up.

I’m most comfortable when I have control of my environment. I prefer to observe and absorb. I crave the solitude of working with my (mostly) silent writing buddies. And yes, I sometimes need the safety of hiding behind the keyboard.

I’ve tried writing in coffee shops. Noisy. I’ve tried editing while tracking email and Twitter. Distracting. I’ve even tried brainstorming during writing workshops. Intimidating.

When I write (or edit), I prefer to retreat into my own little world.

Depending on what I’m working on or the weather or just the mood du jour, I’ll pick a spot in the house—some days it’s the sunroom, others my office; or maybe the kitchen table or the couch by the fireplace in cold weather; or if it’s nice outside the front porch.

I always have my favorite giant mug next to me (coffee, thank you). I’ll close out email and shut down my browser. The only “people” I want to chit chat with are my characters.

I can easily go an entire day with only a few words to the cats (no, it’s not time to eat yet; no you can not have my coffee; did you really think flopping on my keyboard was the best idea?) and only a handful of emails or tweets or text messages sent. Those are my rejuvenate days, my find-the-peace-within days, my I’m-so-going-to-kick-this-manuscript-in-the-butt days.

What about research, you’re asking? Sure, I could make phone calls, talk to an expert, visit a facility similar to one I’m writing about. But why? Those require interaction.

A few well-chosen search words and I have all the information I need (okay, maybe not ALL, but a lot). Hey people, Google was created for a reason (just remember to be thorough and not believe everything G tells you). Not to mention the fact that I lot of those experts you thought I should talk to wrote books on the subject. And we love books!

Once in a while you have to come out of the cave. Even the most introverted troll gets that. But at the first opportunity, it’s back in. Hello happy writing place!

What about you—do you prefer to snuggle inside the cave or play with everyone else?

Don’t forget to check back next Monday when Jenny talks about the life of the extrovert writer. *waving as I back into my cave*

WITS is happy to welcome back James Preston, author of the award-winning Surf City Mysteries series.

James’ wife, Nancy, encouraged Fae Rowen to write her first book.  James encouraged Fae to go to the San Diego Writers Conference to learn how to write that first book.

Today he shares his insight on why we write and why we read. 

by James R. Preston

The wooden dock swayed under the weight of a hundred anxious people as the sailing ship coasted toward it.  The ship had news, news of someone they cared about.  As it neared the dock the crowd began to shout, “Does she live?  Does she live?”  The sailors, who had read the newspaper in England, called back, “Little Nell is Dead!”

Talk about a spoiler!  The crowd rioted, but here’s the catch: Nell Trent is not flesh-and-blood.  She is a character that Charles Dickens made up for The Old Curiosity Shop.

I want to talk about something different—not plot points or the pitfalls of ping-pong dialog or snappy endings that leave the reader wanting your next book.  I want to talk about Little Nell.

I want to talk about why we do it, the value in our work, regardless of our sales figures or the size of our audience.

Why do we do it? 

I mean, think about the hours you spend learning the craft and the times when you go, "Uh, what happens next?"  Face it, if you play the piano at the very least you can bang out carols at the company Christmas party.  If you sketch you can draw flyers for your daughter's soccer team.  You get the idea.  Hold that thought.

First, a question.

Ever ride a toboggan?

When I was very young my best friends were my cousins, some of whom lived in San Diego.  We're talking single digits here, for all of us, age-wise.  After wearing ourselves out with  near-death experiences on their Flexi Flyer they always wanted me to tell them stories and I loved to oblige.

One of their favorites was The Snow Kings.  The Snow Kings were three kids who had this flying toboggan they used to fight crime and space monsters.  The problem was they had to have a steep hill or a rooftop to launch the thing and there was never one around when they needed it.

My cousins loved those stories because they were about kids like us, except they had adventures, (not to mention a flying toboggan).  We all knew that I was not going to end a story with, “They fell off the toboggan and plummeted screaming to their deaths.”  But they liked the stories anyway.  The kids were what was important.

I think what you and I do—tell stories about people—is important. And that’s why you should keep doing it.

Made-up or not, Little Nell caused a sensation when she went to her reward.  There are stories that Thackeray was found in his office, sobbing.  Another writer threw the book out of the window of the train he was in.  People cared.

Spoiler Alert!

I remember the first time I was invited to talk to a book club, and the very first thing they wanted to know was what my protagonist T. R. Macdonald would have done if his wife had been available when he met and fell in love with the curvaceous Kandi.

The ladies in the club were talking about Mac and Kandi as if they were real people.  I almost said, "Ladies, how should I know?  They're constructs!"  but I didn't, for a variety of reasons.  First they were paying and deserved a thoughtful answer and second, well, I'll get to that.

The “takeaway” from the story above is this:

It’s the characters.  That why we do it, that’s what your readers care about.  That’s why there are a million readers counting the days until November 20, when Notorious Nineteen comes out and we get to see what Stephanie Plum is up to now.  I am pretty sure that she will not plummet to her death from a flying toboggan, but I want to read it anyway.  I care about Stephanie, Grandma Mazur, and all the others.

The book club ladies deserved an answer and I realized that Mac and Kandi are not the constructs that I thought they were.  They have taken on a life of their own.

It’s the people who are important.  That’s why we do it.  If we are lucky our characters come to life, leap off the page, and tell us their story.  Listen to 14-year-old Kaylee Miraflores, a character in Pennies For Her Eyes:

“I’m adopted, of course.  Oh, I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.  I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  She looked at me uncertainly, then looked down at her plate again.  “My, um, my biologic father ran away when I was three and my mother fell in love and when I was five she got remarried and my new father is this wonderful man and I love him so much.  So one day—I was seven—we were moving down to Huntington and I asked him if I could tell the kids at school my name was Miraflores instead of Keene and he started crying and said he wanted to adopt me but he didn’t know how to ask me so now I’m Kaylee Miraflores.”  She stopped for breath, looked up, then quickly looked back down at her burger.

Kaylee is revealing part of herself, sharing with the other characters and with the reader.  I didn’t exactly plan it, the words never appeared on a plot card or in my notes.  I didn’t know this part of it until she started talking and explained it to me.  Kaylee is important to me, and I hope to the people who will read about her.

The importance of story, of the people we write about, has not diminished since Little Nell.

A hundred and fifty years after her unfortunate demise, I witnessed young readers exit a bookstore on Maui, and sit down on the cement so they could open and start reading the newest Harry Potter.

What you do—your writing—is important.  It’s the people.  If you care about your characters it will show and they will speak to you and to your readers.

So don’t feel bad that you won’t be entertaining at the company party.  Just keep talking to those people in your head.  They’ll talk back.

Somewhere The Snow Kings are dragging that toboggan around, looking for a place to launch it so they can save the world.  And as far as how Mac would have worked it out if Diana had been available when he met Kandi, I don’t know.

But he does.

Thanks for asking me back.  This is a great blog, one that I'm proud to contribute to.  It offers excellent advice on the process of writing.  I learn something from every essay I read.

Speaking of learning something—do you have a character you have connected with at a visceral level?  If I were a betting man (and I am) I would say, “Yes.”  Are you willing to share?  I’d like to hear about them and so would the other WITS readers.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, let’s talk.  (Do I see Hannibal Lecter grinning from a prison cell?)

Next time, back to technical stuff—point of view.  There will be a quiz.  And if you take what I have said today to heart, there will be a next time.

About James

James R. Preston writes the Surf City Mysteries, the most recent of which is Pennies For Her Eyes.  His most recent signing was at Men of Mystery, where he appeared on the same bill as New York times bestselling, awesome writer James Rollins.  (That sound in the background is Preston’s own horn tooting.)  Check out www.jamesrpreston.com for more information.  And if your book club wants a live one, send an email.

by Jenny Hansen

Should writers (or anyone else) use Microsoft Excel? In a word, YES!

Laura Drake did a post last week about how she keeps track of her plot in Excel and I started hearing rumbling from the Spreadsheet-Phobics in the WITS crowd.

What sort of tasks might one do in this spooky financial-y program we call Excel? Royalty statements, tax expense summaries, submission tracking, Agent/Editor querying… All of these are pretty important, and Excel makes them easier, believe it or not.

However, before you do any of that, you need to know how to save your document and move around a spreadsheet. This was originally a single blog post, but when I got to 1o  pages, I realized this topic needed several posts, so this is Part 1 of at least a 3-part series.

Today: We’ll familiarize ourselves  with some Excel shortcuts. More can be found here.

Part 2: Strap in for some useful formulas and functions.

Part 3: More time-saving tricks like Quick Formulas, Data tools like Filters and Subtotals, and Saving a Workspace.

Note: For those of you already familiar with the program, I encourage you to at least skim through this post so you can learn all the quick tips you don’t know. :-)

Saving your Document - the most important thing

• Ctrl + S (you don’t type the “+”), or Command + S on a Mac, will allow you to save any changes you’ve made to the file. There is a little picture of a blue disk on the left side of one of Excel’s toolbars – this is the Save icon.
• The F12 key (all over Microsoft Office) is Save As… This key allows you to save a document as a new name. Very useful if you’re making edits to a manuscript. If you hit Save/Ctrl + S, you will lose the original document by overwriting it.
• I usually hit F12 before I do almost anything else in both Word and Excel because I’ve lost my work sooo many times when I wasn’t paying attention. You will thank me for this F12 gift, I promise.

Moving Around Your Spreadsheet

Excel spreadsheets are made up of columns and rows. Where the columns and rows meet is called a Cell. These cells actually have names so that you can reference them in calculations or Formulas (covered tomorrow).

Columns and rows are listed in an orderly fashion:

• Columns go across the page, left to right, as the letters in the alphabet
• Rows go down the page, top to bottom, numerically.
• Cells are labeled as A1, A2, A3, etc.

While you can absolutely use the arrow keys on your keyboard, the best way to move around your spreadsheet is by doing this:

• Right: Hit the Tab key
• Left: Hit the Shift and Tab keys at the same time
• Down: Hit the Enter key
• Up: Hit the Shift and Enter keys at the same time

There are people reading this right now who are hissing at me for making things “too hard” with this Shift key business. Simmer down, all you hissers...I’d like everyone to do a little test:

1. Open Excel (any version is fine) - go to Google Spreadsheets if you don't have Excel.
2. There will be a dark outline around cell A1 because that is the active cell.
3. Use your arrow keys to move around – you will see the active cell border move and you can also see the cell name change in the name box (located up above Column A). A1, D4, G10. Go ahead, move all around. It’s kind of mesmerizing to watch that name box change.
   

   
   

   

   
   

   
   

   See that A1 in the box up there? That's called your Name Box. You can click on it and type to move too. Go on...type in D10 and hit Enter...you know you want to!

4. When you’re done, hit the CTRL key on your keyboard (Command key for a Mac) and the Home key at the same time. You will now be back at A1. This happens every time you type Ctrl + Home. (To all of you who usually use the arrow key a bazillion times to get to the top of Excel, you’re welcome!)
5. Next, take your mouse and highlight an area (try to get at least 3-4 cells in either direction).
6. Start hitting your Tab key. Try Shift + Tab. Then the Enter/Shift+Enter combos I mentioned above. You'll notice you stay within the highlighted area. Fun, huh?
7. Hit any arrow key. Whoops! You just de-selected your highlighted cells, which is usually extremely annoying.

So, now that we can all sail around our spreadsheets and get back to cell A1, let’s look around a little more.

What if you want to "play with" your royalty statements?

Whether your statements come from a traditional publisher or from Amazon, you want to know how to manipulate your data in Excel.

• You can enter data into each cell manually. (Not recommended for large amounts of data.)
• You can copy and paste your data in.

Copy and paste works slightly different in Excel.

• First of all, you only need to click on a single cell before you paste. It actually gums up the works if you highlight an area because you must be EXACT.
• Second of all, Excel has an unfriendly relationship with the Clipboard (which is where your data is held when you choose “Cut” or “Copy” in any program). The Clipboard will only hold Excel's data temporarily.When you Cut or Copy a cell in your spreadsheet, you will see big waving “disco lines” around that cell. It’s like Saturday Night Fever in your spreadsheet.
• If you choose Ctrl + V or right-click Paste, the disco lines remain active until you hit the Esc button on your keyboard.
• The shortcut around this is that you want to hit the Enter key to Paste in Excel. This pushes the data from the Clipboard to Excel and everything is happy. Remember, this means that if you want to paste something into four different cells, you’ll choose Paste, Paste, Paste, ENTER.

OMG, I need separate months!

What about if you want to keep your monthly records separate, but you want to have the entire year or quarter together? I’ve seen people save a file for each month, making me shake my head in pity. If this is you, listen up...

I am giving you the Golden Gift of Tabs.

Yep, the way to keep separate data in the same file is to use what are called Sheet Tabs. They’re at the bottom of the screen on the left (see below).

Here’s some fun Sheet Facts:

1. Sheet Tabs can be renamed by Double-clicking on the word “Sheet #” and typing over it (there’s a limit of 31 characters in some versions of Excel). You can also Right-click and choose Rename.
2. You can have tons of sheets but it gets hard to navigate between them UNLESS you right-click on the arrows to the far left side of the tabs. A right-click here brings up a list of sheet names, which allows you to easily navigate between sheets.
3. If you hold down the Ctrl button while dragging a sheet, you will copy the entire sheet (which you should then rename). This is AWESOME if you’ve done a lot of formatting and would like to duplicate it for the next sheet.
4. The Ctrl button is also great if you want to format two (or more) different sheets at the same time. Yeah, you heard me…you can group these suckers and work on several at the same time. Be sure to Ungroup (the right-click menu will help) before you enter in data or you will overwrite the data on the other sheets in the Group.
5. You know when sheets are Grouped because at the top of Excel in the Title Bar, you will see [Group] spelled just like I did it with square brackets.

OK, that should be enough to get you started if you’re new to the program. If you don’t have Excel on your computer, go to Google Spreadsheets – Google Docs will basically work the same and will allow you to practice.

I hope you'll come back next week for more Writerly Uses For Excel. We're going to dig in to the really fun stuff. In case you’re new here, I’m a software trainer by day so you can ask me questions in the comments. I don't mind. :-)

Are you using Excel? If so, what do you use it for and what is giving you trouble? If you aren’t using Excel, why not and is there something you’d like to learn?

See you next week for Part 2!

~Jenny

Note: Need MORE writing magic for the day? Jenny posted 10 Tips To Help You Finish Your Novel and/or ‘Win’ NaNoWriMo at More Cowbell today!

About Jenny Hansen

Jenny fills her nights with humor: writing memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, short stories (and chasing after the newly walking 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.