Writers in the Storm

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.

by Fae Rowen

First of all, on this Veteran's Day week-end, a heartfelt THANK YOU to all those who serve our country in the Armed Forces. And to the families that support them. My father was in the Army, my husband served in the Coast Guard, and my godson is currently a pilot in the Navy. Won't it be wonderful if they all could be at home?

I've always been connected to music. Heck, I played the piano competitively. In fifth grade, the only thing I wanted for Christmas  was a recording of The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana – and the sheet music to Batman. I became that river with its sometimes dancing sometimes powerful current every time I heard it.  My soul sang when I listened to it.

In junior high I moved on to movie soundtracks–The Robe, Exodus, Cleopatra–remembering scenes from the movie as the tracks played.

It's no wonder that when I wrote my first novel, a fantasy medieval adventure romance (I never intended to try to sell it!), I listened to the same song over and over and over. Sting's Fields of Gold supplied scene after scene of ideas as well as the tone of the book. In fact, I named the hero's home after the title of the only song in my playlist.

My gothic medieval was born from St. Elmo's Fire, Man in Motion. More on that later.

The music you select doesn't have to relate to the setting of your book. But for me, the music supplies the tone, the background, and the through-line for my characters. When you're writing, you don't need to blast your speakers. For me, the music is soft. Not so soft that I wonder if it's there, but not so loud as to actively engage me in listening.

Movie soundtracks support all the emotions in the picture, so they are wonderful sources of "mood music" for scenes you may be having difficulty with. Think of Braveheart. From innocent love, to battles, to betrayal, to torture and death, you've got it all in the music.

The next movie you watch, let a section of your brain pay attention to the music. If you really enjoy a movie, consider listening to snippets of the soundtrack on iTunes to see if the music added to the richest of your experience. One of the first things I did after seeing Star Wars was buy the soundtrack. Darth Vader's theme is wonderful when writing a villain!

An interesting thing happened recently with my WIP, a YA science fiction tale. I was half a dozen chapters in, when I realized that the new must have additions to my iPOD were all related to the new book. I hadn't really listened to the lyrics-it's all about the rhythm and melody for me-so I downloaded the lyrics. Wow!

• The Foo Fighter's Learn to Fly is my hero's theme song.
• Alanis Morissette's Guardian could have been written for my heroine, a guide/bodyguard.
• The Offspring's  You're Gonna Go Far Kid is the refrain of the young man in love with my heroine. It mirrors his frustration as he watches the budding relationship between his love and her latest tourist.  (Explicit lyric warning--think frustrated young man!)
• And Pirates in the Caribbean (Part 3) is the "theme" of the book. Yeah, in outer space.

Little did I know when I downloaded this group of songs, they all related to my new book.  I just knew that I finally had time and remembered to buy the songs I'd liked enough to capture with SoundHound.

I tried an interesting experiment. When I wrote a scene in a character's POV, I played that person's song. It helped me settle right into their outlook on life, and their emotions about their situations. The writing was easier, my critique group had less complaints (okay, obviously last week I wrote without music!) I felt nourished and couldn't wait to get back in my chair for the next pages.

A secret, just between us. That gothic medieval? Well, the whole idea for the book came from the theme to St. Elmo's Fire. The song gave me the pivotal scene, the black moment when the hero confronts his stepfather's hate-filled ways. From that scene, it was not too difficult to backtrack and see how they got to that point. The whole book was about breaking the boy but not the man when he returned to his birthplace as a knight.

If you've been drawn to a particular song or kind of music recently, see if there's a parallel with your current project. You might be surprised.

I hope you enjoy the links to the music I've mentioned. I really enjoyed listening to them again.

Have you used music for writing inspiration? Has music guided you to write something differently than you'd originally envisioned? Let us know, while you listen to the music!

Susan Spann is back, with another amazing post that will help you create an Author Business Plan. If you missed her first two posts in the series, they are: Overview of an Author Business Plan, and 7 Steps to Writing Your Business Plan.

Here's Susan:

Welcome back to my WITS series on writing an author business plan. This month we’re taking a closer look at Section 2 of the business plan: Writing the Book Synopsis.

A Synopsis (Part 2 of the author’s business plan) is a 1-2 page summary of the novel or other work. The synopsis is not the same as a query (which doesn’t give away the ending) or a book proposal (which is a tool an author uses to sell a work “on spec”.) Book synopses follow a standard form and structure – for fiction, the synopsis is always written in third person present tense, regardless of the narrative form of the work.

Some authors write the synopsis before the manuscript. Others prefer to wait until the manuscript is complete. (The latter is more common in fiction, though by no means universal.)  I write my synopses “after the fact,” so my method requires a finished manuscript, but there are many good resources (online and off) for other methods – find the one that works for you!

Here’s how I write a synopsis for my novels:

The final synopsis begins with a one-paragraph blurb that describes the book as a whole, but I leave that for last. It’s easier once you’ve put the rest together.

Step 1: Open a copy of the manuscript and also create a new word processing document (this will become the synopsis.)

Step 2:  Read the first chapter of the manuscript. When you finish, summarize the chapter in one sentence. ONE SENTENCE. (Do not pass go, do not collect semicolons.) Continue this process through the entire manuscript, summarizing each chapter in one sentence. The sentences don’t have to connect or make sense as a whole at this point – this step is about distilling each chapter down to essential components. Many of your bells and whistles - supporting details and super-awesome-decorative-bits won’t make it into the synopsis. That’s okay. Take a deep breath and keep going.

Step 3: Close the original manuscript, and edit the summary you’ve created as if the synopsis was a manuscript in itself. This is the point where all those one-sentence summaries have to learn to play nicely together. Turn the summaries into a unified story. The sentences don’t have to remain in first-draft condition, and the number of sentences can (and will) change. Delete, reorganize, and edit until you have a coherent whole.

Step 4: Write the introductory paragraph. Remember that book-jacket style logline/summary paragraph that opens the synopsis? Write it now. Since you’ve just spent many hours reading and summarizing your manuscript, writing a killer introduction – one that entices a reader – is easier at this stage.

Step 5: Edit for length. After the synopsis reads smoothly (aloud as well as in your head,) it’s time to revise again – this time for length – until the synopsis is no more than two pages long. I typically write a “final” two-page version and then take it through a second round of editing until I have a one-page version as well.

Remember: the synopsis tells the entire story – including the ending. This isn’t a query, and it’s not a document you’ll ever post in public places. The synopsis is used by you – and also by agents, publishers, and even contest judges – to evaluate the work as a whole.

Your business plan homework between now and next month is to try your hand at writing a synopsis. If your work isn’t finished, try distilling a chapter or two from your work in progress into one-sentence summaries. Then tune in next month, when we move to Section 3: Effective Techniques for Author Marketing.

What method do you use to write a synopsis? Do you write it first or after the work is finished? And do you consider it a pleasure or a pain?

I’d love to hear how the process works for you!

Susan Spann is a publishing attorney and author from Sacramento, California. Her debut novel, CLAWS OF THE CAT (Minotaur Books, July 2013), is the first in the Shinobi Mystery series featuring ninja detective Hiro Hattori. Susan blogs about writing, publishing law and seahorses at http://www.SusanSpann.com. Find her on Twitter @SusanSpann or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanSpannAuthor