Category: writing

The Show Bible

Writers of all sorts of fiction, from novels to screenplays and even television series, share a single concern; maintaining consistency throughout a given milleau. This is often accomplished by what is called the Show Bible in the television industry. This is the document where all the relevant details from each episode are kept so that they can be looked up when they become important in future episodes. The movie industry has a department devoted to this function. It’s called continuity in that domain. And novelist, especially authors of multivolume series, often have many notebooks filled with lore of the world that they have created.

I have had a programming project on the back burner for some time that amounts to an computerized Show Bible. I may still finish it eventually. I have some ideas for features that I haven’t found in any other product yet. But in the mean time, I think I’ve found a tool that will solve about 80% of the problem. It is the single page web application called TiddlyWiki that I wrote about here a while ago. Here is a brief list of it’s virtues:

  • It is small enough to fit on a thumb drive.
  • It works with any modern web browser.
  • It is easy to create hyperlinks between various entries in the document.
  • It is easily searchable.
  • It is easy to extend.
  • It is easy to format.
  • It is easy to add photographs, drawings, video clips, and all kinds of other multimedia to it. In fact, it can display anything that any other web page can.

I have decided that I like the world that Against the Cold of Deepest Space is set in. I intend to develop a Show Bible for it so that I can write multiple stories and perhaps even novels in that world. I am going to use TiddlyWiki to compile that document.

I am, however, going to go ahead and write the short story that I started in the blog post that I labeled (Part 1).

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

This Old Dog is Learning New Tricks

Not only can you teach an old dog new tricks, but it is vital for dogs, and everyone else for that matter, to constantly learn new skills. It keeps the brain agile and working at top efficiency. It isn’t always comfortable to constantly challenge yourself to try new things, go new places, and learn new skills, but the benefits are well worth it.

That is one of the motivations behind my daily blog posts. It allows me to practice the art of writing and pushes me beyond my comfort zone. I sometimes find myself scratching my head trying to think of something new to write about. That is when I sit down and start typing. Writing something is more likely to lead to a topic than sitting and staring at a blank page. Besides, if what I write turns out to be unfit for a blog post, I can either edit it until it is fit or throw it away and start over.

The biggest enemy of achievement is doing nothing. Doing nothing is rarely the result of laziness though. More often it is the result of fear. Fear of failure. The paradoxical truth is that in order to succeed at something we must try and when we try we often fail. If we then learn from our failure and try again, we will often succeed. The surest sign of a successful person is the perpetual attitude that they haven’t failed, they just haven’t succeeded yet.

I have been working on learning to write succinctly for my entire life. I have been actually writing on a daily basis for a little over five years. I am only beginning to actually succeed at writing an interesting piece every now and then. I intend to continue to practice.

I appreciate my long suffering readers and would appreciate any comments or suggestions that you might have. You can comment here on my blog site, on the cross posts to Facebook or Twitter, or you can email me at jkelliemiller at gmail.com.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Courting My Muse

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, gave a TED talk about genius in which she told us how the ancient Greeks and Romans believed the creative process worked. They believed that the artist was given their great ideas by spirits, the Greeks called them daemons, the Romans called them geniuses. Her point was that the burden of responsibility for creating outstanding works of art was perhaps too much for fragile human psyches.

I feel like my best work is done when I am able to step aside and allow the piece to just flow from somewhere outside of me through me and out to the world. It is perhaps tinged with something of myself but its source is outside of myself. I don’t know how to make this happen. I just know that I have to sit down and write. If my daemon or genius is with me, I may write something wonderful. But if it isn’t, I will still write. I will hone my craft so that when my daemon is there, I will be ready.

And this is something that I can apply to my music and my other creative endeavors. You can’t just sit around and wait for your muse. You have to court her. You have to give her the channel through which creativity can flow. You have to hone the craft with which the inspiration will become manifest.

And you also need to revel in the genius of other artists. It is through that inspiration that you can learn to summon your own muse. That is why as a writer, you must read as well as write. As a musician, you must listen to music as well as play music. And, as a programmer, you must read programs and run them to appreciate their unique qualities.

As an artist we risk so much. We put so much of ourselves on the line when we bring our art to the world. We should only have to do our best and hone our craft and be present when the masterpiece arrives. We shouldn’t have to suffer for our art. That is a misconception best laid to rest.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Ever Expanding Standards of Literacy

Once upon a time the definition of literacy involved both reading and writing, more specifically writing with a quill. To write with a quill, you had to know how to form the end into a fountain pen. This required some skill with what is still known as a pen knife. There were also pencils but writing in pencil was not as permanent as writing in ink.

Then typewriters were invented. Now writers could write faster and more legibly using this remarkable machine. The definition of literacy didn’t change so much as the expectations of your readers were raised such that you were expected to use a typewriter to submit your manuscripts. Thus, the definition of literacy expanded a little bit.

Next came the computer. With a computer you could have assistance with spelling and grammar. You could reach more people, thanks to the web. You could edit text without having to totally retype it. You could easily make multiple copies. It was important to make sure that you made mutiple backups of the files on your computer in multiple places. The definition of literacy expanded to the use of computers to read and write with.

We come to the most recent addition to the attributes of literacy. You must be able to create web sites. You can do that in several different ways. You can do it the old fashion way using HTML and CSS. Or, you can find one of the many web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or Django, or Grails, or many others. You might try one of the numerous different implementations of Wiki. Or, you might try a content management system like WordPress or Drupal. This has further expanded the expectations of the literate person.

I enjoy writing. I am thankful that I have a computer instead of having to write everything out longhand. I am relatively sure that I wouldn’t have gotten this far in my quest to master the craft of writing. I still have much to learn but I have much better tools with which to work.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important, be kind.

Monologue to My Muse

First comes the spark of imagination, a glimmer of an idea, a hint of what it might become. Next, comes the imagining of what it will be when it is finished. Then comes the deconstruction into parts that are small enough that they can be implemented. Then you pick one of the pieces, maybe the most challenging one, or maybe the one that you have the clearest idea of how to realize. You put words to paper and as quick as you begin, the plan begins to change.

The key to success, to finishing the project is to hold on to the vision of what it will become and measure each change against that vision. You write what you know. You imagine what you don’t know and then you  write that. You set it aside and move on to another piece. You see the project begin to take shape under your diligent hands. You revisit the parts that you  wrote earlier to convince yourself that they measure up to your standards. If they don’t you rewrite them.

And then one day, you are finished. You have put everything that you have got to give into it and you now have to send it out the door to be judged by those that you created it for, your readers. Your consumers. It doesn’t really matter what it is that you create, the process is much the same. You work hard. You do your best. You brook no compromise.

That’s how I imagine it goes. I’ll let you know when I finish. And I will finish. I’m stubborn that way. It may take longer than I expected but I will finish it. Just wait and see.

Learning to Think …

I read an interview with Charles Duhigg that helped me understand why I do some of the things that I do. To summarize what I gleaned from it, in order to be successful, we must challenge ourselves to think more about the things that we want to accomplish. We need to put ourselves in a position where we are outside of our comfort zone so that we will think about our goals in deeper and different ways.

When I started writing my seven hundred and fifty words every morning I wanted to learn how to transfer what I was thinking to the page effortlessly. I had discovered Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Her first suggestion is to sit down every morning and write three pages. I thought about this and decided that I wanted to write on a computer.

I poked around the internet and discovered Buster Benson‘s 750words.com. Buster had done the math and figured out that three hand written pages were approximately seven hundred and fifty words. I signed up and started writing. Buster had made things interesting by collecting statistics on your writing, like how many days in a row you had written your words, and how many times you were distracted for more than three minutes while writing your seven hundred and fifty words. Your words are kept private and you can choose to share as many or as few of your statistics as you like. He also came up with badges for achievements like 30 consecutive days writing, not being distracted for a certain number of days in a row, etc.

As weeks and months went by, I discovered that I was learning to write more fluently and with much less attention to the mechanical aspects of getting the words on the page. At first I had spent much of the posts talking about how many words I had written so far and how many words I had left to write. I soon graduated to describing what was going on in the room around me. The sounds that I heard out the window. The demands of the cat and dog. My wife’s phone conversations.

I kept at it and discovered that if I could listen to music that was instrumental or so familiar that I could ignore the lyrics, I could block out distractions. Of course when I was struggling with myself about what to write, I would often start talking about the music.

Then at the beginning of June I read a blog post by C.J Shivers that advocated blogging every day. I have had a much neglected blog for years. I had even made several attempts to blog daily. This lasted for several days or several weeks. I always got distracted and quit blogging. This time when I decided to commit to blogging daily I new I need to have a plan.

I had managed to make writing daily a habit with 750words.com so, I decided to use my morning words as a way to generate drafts for blog posts. That would allow me to use one good habit to help bootstrap another. I wrote a blog post committing to blog daily and I was off.

I haven’t been able to think of something blog worthy while writing my words every day so far. Some days, I have other things on my mind. Things that are either too private or too boring to make into a blog post. When that happens, I have to make more time to write my blog later in the day. But when I do manage to write a good blog post while I’m writing my morning words, it is particularly satisfying.

The thing that originally caught my attention to read the Duhigg interview was the pull quote that said that you were using your todo list all wrong. I have been a long time believer in the power of making lists. I’m not as much in the habit of making them as I’d like but when I do, I seem to accomplish the things on them.

Duhigg advocates that you use your todo list to prioritize and motivate. In particular, he says to write your stretch goal at the top of the list and periodically ask yourself if what you are doing right now is contributing to that stretch goal. This is yet another way to force yourself to think more and differently about your goals. I’m going to give it a try.

You Start at the End

I just watched a wonderful routine by Penn and Teller in which they teach us the seven principles of magic. They tell us what they are doing and yet the still manage to mystify and amaze us. In case you were wondering, the seven principles are, to palm, to ditch, to steal, to load, to simulate, to misdirect and to switch.

I can’t help but think the same principles are an integral part of writing a truly great mystery story. Or singing a good song, or painting a good painting. People love to be surprised. They love to find layer upon layer of meaning in just about anything that you show them. And now, I finally understand how you go about creating something of this sort. I’d like to say I figured it out myself but actually, people have been telling my this my whole life.

If you want to surprise people, you have to create the effect backwards, starting at the ending and working your way backwards to the beginning. It’s the way you write thrilling stories. It’s the way you make thrilling speeches. It’s the way you write compelling songs. And, it is the way you do magic tricks.

No Plan Survives…

Helmuth von Moltke, a nineteenth century German Field Marshall once said, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” His point being that the act of executing a plan has immediate and often profound effects upon the assumptions upon which the plan was founded. Hence, to achieve the originally intended results, the plan must be continuously amended to account for the shifting state of affairs.

That about sums up the last several weeks of my life. It seems that every carefully laid plan that I have undertaken in the past several weeks has blown up in my face in fairly short order. For instance, I thought I had made a good plan for writing my book. I had a rough outline down and a plan for when and how I was going to write it.

As for when, I planned to sit down each evening at nine o’clock and spend an hour or so working on the book. I figured that I would split the time approximately equally between developing the example code and actually writing the body of the text.

Then I started my exercise program. The plan there is to average 13,000 steps per day for six weeks. The carrot at the end of that stick is a $100 Amazon gift card from my employer if I manage to do it. So far, I have managed to do it. I have come close to not meeting my daily goal several times. I found myself walking around at 11:45 finishing up my steps on more than one occasion.

Usually, I get a walk in after work and the rest of my evening is free. The problem then is, that when I do sit down to write, I am often so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open. So, I end up going to bed without getting any writing done.

What is worse, when I do manage to work on the book, I realize that I am going about it wrong. I can’t spend a little bit of each session developing example code and a little bit writing about it. I’m going to have to dig in and write the example code first so that I will know what I’m talking about when I do write about it.

Furthermore, my outline is going to have to be severely truncated and I am going to have to adjust my tone to better suit my target audience. The good news here is that the schedule to which I am working is self imposed. I have the flexibility to make these decisions. That is part of what I enjoy about working on a project without a boss.

These examples may seem trivial but they represent only the tip of the iceberg. Every aspect of my life lately, from work to hobby, from interpersonal relationships to my social life, such as it is, is experiencing the same sort of upheaval. I feel like I’m living the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

If Writing Were Easy

If writing were easy, everybody would be writers. I suppose it’s true but it is frustrating when you have things that you want to say and you have trouble finding the right words to say them. That was the situation that I found myself in this morning.

After writing for most of an hour on a topic I feel strongly about, I looked back over what I’d written and realized that it wasn’t conveying what I wanted to say. I was going to have to spend some time researching and rewriting it before it would be ready to be a blog post.

This was frustrating for two reasons. The first and obvious one was that I would have to continue working on it another time. The other was that I would have to find another topic for my blog post. Little did I suspect at the time that the very situation causing my frustration would be the remedy for that second frustration.

I don’t like to write too much about the process of writing. It takes time away from actually writing about the things that motivate me to write in the first place. But, on the other hand, everything that I write helps me learn to write a little bit better. And, more to the point, this piece helps me keep my commitment to post to my blog daily. I’ll try to keep these “meta-posts” to a minimum though.

Turning Over Another New Leaf

I should be working on the book tonight but I’m procrastinating. I will put some time in on it after I write this post. I was inspired today to commit to blogging daily. I’ve even figured out a way that I can make it happen. I will spend some of the time in the morning when I’m writing my 1000 words to write a blog post. That will leave me some of my words for journal type stuff and the rest for a blog post. That means the blog posts will be around 500-750 words. That’s not a bad length for a blog post. See you tomorrow and good night.