Scrivener: I Suspect Kind Pixies are Behind this Magical Writer's Helper

A wonderfully witty and clever Penguin turned me on to it.  Now that I have run Scrivener for a few days, I have to say, I feel that Pixies got inside my brain, took careful notes on everything I wanted in a writing software, traveled back in time, and got these GENIUSES to develop it.  If you haven't already had the pleasure of working on Scrivener, believe me, you WANT IT.  Why? Many, many reasons, but here are some of the Top Ten:

1) Attractive, User-Friendly Interface.  It's flexible too.  You want a cork-board to jot down your outlines and character profiles?  They've got that.  You want a blank page to write freely and let your muse flow?  They've got that too.  You want to see your work on full screen and obscure all the other nonsense on your desktop?  Consider it done.  You can switch back and forth between views on a whim, on the click of the mouse, and never lose sight of your work.

2) Really easy to learn.  I mean silly easy.  It is such an intuitive interface that, for the most part, you'll pick it up right away.  If not, they have a wonderfully simple tutorial.

3) It manages the Outline seamlessly.  Even if you are from the school of free-flowing prose (which I'll admit to being at times) it is helpful to have an interface that will keep the chapters at easy reach.  Word Processing programs just don't do that, and I, for one, find it extremely annoying, once I get past the 30K mark to scroll back and forth on that Word Processor screen, trying to find my last thought.


4) No More Lost Character Names.  For me this is really a problem, perhaps not so for others, but it is nice to have a Keywords feature that allows you to keep character lists handy, and place names as well.

5) Convenient Space for Notes and Clippings.  You can store all your notes on the fly, pictures and screenshots in a folder right within the WIP file, so you can click and find them easily as you need them.  This saves so much time searching your computer for where you had that little 'picture of the church on the hill' that you are trying to describe.


6) Color Coding!  I can't help it.  I had to use that exclamation point.  I'm very visual, color coding my notes and files by classification is a very exciting ingredient and only increases the pleasure of working on this software ten-fold.

7.  Instant Word Count and Stats - Give your Left-Brain what it's longing for immediately.  Scrivener is there to help you massage both sides of your brain.  It keeps your Inner Child happy, letting it run around and do it's thing, while keeping your Inner Manager at ease, with an abundance of details.

8.  Great Support - Not only are the developers of Scrivener lovely down-to-earth people with a genuine interest in providing an excellent product, but they also provide a convenient on-line forum on their website to address the needs of the user, and they actually take that feedback from the user and apply it improve the software, as they do their new releases.  Very few Word Processing Software Makers can say the same. 

9.  It AUTOMATICALLY prepares the final document for submission in a standard format required by most publishers, editors and agents.  You literally only have to supply your name and address, and such it does the rest.  And it prints it that way without need to re-format.

10.  It also manages Scripts!  (Again with the exclamation point.)  But really, dream big.  Publish that novel AND be ready to write your own Hollywood Script for it in a flash.  If you've been interested in writing television scripts, movie scripts, or stage-plays, this software will hold your hand and let you familiarize yourself with the requisite format, then print it all out nicely for you.  It's also interesting to sketch a concept for a Novel as a script, breaking it down into scenes, and working up to a long prose document from that skeleton. 

Bottom line, in one word, Scrivener = Flexibility.  Flexibility = Freedom to Create.  Am I gushing?  Yes, I'm gushing.  *blushes*  But give it a test-run and see for yourself.  It's a marvel. 

If you've participated in NaNoWriMo this year, then they even have a nice discount for new users who are NaNoWriMo Winners.  Heck, it's not terribly expensive software to begin with, at $39.95 (plus tax) it's a bargain.  But pennies need to be pinched, and the discount is a nice touch, and a welcome reward for anyone who put in the effort to cross the finish line on NaNoWriMo.

Downsides?

I suppose everything has one, but this has surprisingly few.  One of the major ones is that it is only available for the Mac right now.  But Keith and his crew are working on that, and may soon surprise the rest of us.  I can say that I took a damaged Mac I had labeled as "out of commission," and restored it just for the pleasure of working with this program, and I consider it time well spent.   Frankly, for a professional writer, who has the luxury of the budget to do so, it might be worth switching platforms just to be able to work on this program everyday.  The time saved and ease of use, pays for the investment in equipment.

Have any of you used Scrivener?  Have you looked into it but decided not to?  Let me know your thoughts and opinions on this software.  What do love about it?  What have you found that's not so hot?  

In the interest of full disclosure, I reviewed this software because [at]PenguinRuler was raving about it, and I have to admit that she's right.  I have not been compensated for my opinions or for preparing this review, except that using the software has MASSIVELY enriched the writing experience for me, and that is more than enough.

Check Mate: Behind the Scenes or ‘Pass the Midol'

If you read my previous post, you heard me tooting my horn and tipping my hat (yes I wear them occasionally) to NaNoWriMo for their excellent November contest that finally got me to the finish line on my novel Check Mate.  If you didn't, then you missed a pretty good blog post about the joys of writing under pressure, if I do say so myself.  It was "Check Mate: Behind the scenes or 'What else did I have to do this November?'"  Now, forever to be known as: the prequel.  You may want to read it before you read this post, or bookmark it to come back to later.

As I mentioned in my last post, doing NaNoWriMo was not all a walk in the park.  There were demons to be conquered, there were perilous perils, there were days lost in a maze, and there were MIGRAINES.  Plenty of them.  Therefore, the subtitle to this post: 'Pass the Midol.'  Because there are many times when only Midol will do. (They aren't paying me for these 'commercials', I'm just having a bit of fun with SEO Optimization or some such I read about recently; but they should be paying me, dontcha think?)

The reality of participating in NaNoWriMo, and all of you who did participate will know this, is that it is G-R-U-E-L-I-N-G work.  It may be for dreamers, but it is certainly NOT for the faint of heart.  In honor of those dreamers, a couple of minutes of light entertainment from one of my favorite dreamers and one of my favorite singers, before we get down to the ugly truth.

Kermit the Frog & Debbie Harry



Wasn't that pleasant?  Isn't that dreamy?  That's what leads us to write, to paint, to sing, to create.  But let's face it, reality is a cruel mistress.

So, what were the hurdles and how did I manage to jump them without tripping (much)?  I'm going to share the top three hurdles here.  (You don't want to read about PMS, right?)

1) Definition of Scope:  This one I had managed fairly well.  Thanks to Hubby, I must say, who planted the seed to a simple idea in my mind.  I only permitted that idea to bloom into Check Mate.  All the same, as a great and respected critic on my on-line office Writing.com, said to me about a different piece I am finishing entitled Twinkle, "all ideas are potentially good..Nobody publishes ideas, they publish stories."  No matter how reigned-in I thought I had Check Mate, it wanted to bloom like a cauliflower.  Part of my problem was the "round the world" structure I selected.  I was inspired by some of my favorite authors' and movie directors' techniques.  I built a story by showing related snapshots of interconnected events from interconnected people.  Only the omniscient and the reader are directly aware of their connections, and that makes Check Mate fun and different.  A lofty goal indeed.  It was extremely appropriate to the theme of the novel, but what a challenge!  Just trying to decide who should speak next was a chore.  Sometimes, I'd get lost on where in the world I was and who was supposed to be speaking next.  It was writer-lag.  It made me ill.  So.  What would I do differently next year?  

• Outline - do something like a screen description for the events that will follow and then go back and fill in the gaps.
  
• Timeline - I did this to begin with, when I knew my novel was taking place in November, but even so, a cheat-sheet to accompany would have helped me.
  
• List all characters descriptions on a cheat sheet and then fill in names as they are appropriate.  (On this point: I found a clever tech-savvy friend on Writing.com who strings his characters as: Blond-Killer-Female-character-name-to-be-filled-in-here in his first draft, and if I ever get clever enough to figure out how to do that, I'll do it.)
• List all place names on a cheat sheet and avoid getting Renton, Washington, confused with Boise, Idaho.
• Take more time planning.  On my next novel I'm spending a week on planning for every four weeks I plan to write.  Not just planning the novel's flow, but planning all the working mile-stones that will have to be accomplished in the novel before it gets to the finish-line.  By finish-line I mean on a bookshelf somewhere.  

I intend to use my experience from Check Mate to develop these tools in an easy to follow template, so I can use them over and over again in future.  I've been referred to a number of sites that offer writing software promising to do what I need, but like the Prince on his quest for Cinderella, I can't make the shoe fit.  Any suggestions?  Please comment.  I'd like to test.

2. Writer's Block: I mentioned in my last post, that Tumblemoose a.k.a. George Angus gave some great advice: grit your teeth and push through.  It is very good advice indeed, my teeth are no better for writing Check Mate, but my writing is.   But I also believe that if I had accomplished hurdle 1 better, I might not have been as distracted or discouraged at times. 

3. Inner Critic & Inner Child:  I said it already in my previous post, that lady  is quite persistent.  Let's face it.  She's a bitch.  There.  I said it.  I feel better now.  I love her for it.  Without her, I'd be likely to write something I wouldn't want to read.  And if I wouldn't want to read it, then why bother writing it in the first place?  I learned something new about her during NaNoWriMo, she's not only a pain in the rear, she's crafty.  She rallies forces with my Inner Child and comes up with creative devices to get me off what I am working on and onto something else.  "Stop that nonsense," they whisper, "We've got something really worth writing."  Well, lo and behold, they actually did.  It's called Hunger and after persistent pestering, I decided to purge my brain from the demon Eve (whom you'll ultimately get to know and love, or she'll bite you.)   I struggled for several days against this impulse to give Hunger a bit of my time, but I learned that, occassionally, there is no better way to deal with those inner voices, than to give them a bit of a chance to speak their minds.  And then tell them to shut up so you can get back to work.  Keeping a notebook of ideas and scenes, works wonders on a wandering mind.


I do feel that I have to say here that Midol did not get me through NaNoWriMo.  Here's what did:

• The love and support of a super-man, to whom I'm lucky enough to be married, who doesn't mind doing the cooking, the cleaning and the sleeping alone while his wife writes like a mad cow.
• The love and support of a wonderful network of fellow writers on-line both in the Writing.com community and on Twitter.
• Unadulterated Stubborness, which I am grateful to Nana for giving me as my most priced inheritance.
  

My journey from idea to novel, from eager NaNoWriMo contestant to relieved and grateful NaNoWriMo Winner was full of bumps and bruises.  I am not alone. According to NaNoWriMo's own site a total of 166,700 people signed up to compete in 2009 of which approximately 32,000 had crossed the finish line and won the 50K race to the novel by Midnight Pacific Time on the 30th of November.

Everyone who started the race to write a novel at the beginning of November started with a dream, a hope and an aspiration.  All of us, without fail, had similar experiences of discouragement, distraction, and disappointment.  At the end of the month, there was a 19% win rate, which is a record for NaNoWriMo winners, and an important and powerful number.

There is something in business called the 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle to studious types) which states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.  If nearly 20% of the participants in NaNoWriMo managed to cross the finish line without getting discouraged by the things I describe in my blog today, then Agents, Publishers and Others take note: NaNoWriMo is building impetus.  It is becoming a force.  It is accomplishing its core mission of promoting a dedication to writing, even under pressure, and we will all benefit from that dynamic. 

Why is that?  Well, simply put, if a considerable mass of writer-wanna-bees and good worker-bees demonstrate the enthusiasm, devotion, and commitment it takes to cross the finish line successfully, then there may be a plethora of available new writing coming up soon, and this trend should perpetuate.  Will all of it be brilliant?  Who cares?  Especially, if much of it is at least worth reading, if it fills a market niche, and if it frees up creative talent to be dispersed on demand (and I have a feeling that there is large demand building out there if certain books are selling like hotcakes to a hungry crowd, regardless of 'intrinsic literary value.')  The question that should be posed next is whether the publishing infrastructure is prepared to manage that sort of demand.  I don't consider myself qualified to answer that question.  I'm just getting started myself.  But I am interested to know your thoughts, and I invite your comments to that question here.  I'd love to forward any updates I receive from those in the know here so that the writing and publishing community as a whole can benefit from your insight.  So tell me how do you view NaNoWriMo?  Do you find it benefits the writing profession?  Does it benefit the available supply of talent?  What do you feel?

I will follow this post with a new post crediting all the constructive and insightful comments I receive, and will credit and provide a permanent link to your own blog or web-site on the right column of this blog in perpetuity.

Check Mate: Behind the Scenes or ‘What else did I have to do this November?'

It's finished!  Here's the proof:

Sure, lots of people won, and that's wonderful.  Lots of people played, poured their heart and soul into something, some are thrilled, others not so much, but with NaNoWriMo the real win is having played, and that's a nice for a change.

For me, this was serious business.  I have had a number of novels in process over the years, but never gave them the time or dedication to go anywhere because I was too busy doing everything else.  Now, I have nothing else to do, so I had no excuse.  Check Mate isn't the first novel I've written since checking-out of the rat race a couple of months ago, but it is the first novel I have finished, and I owe that entirely to the process of NaNoWriMo.

Why it worked for me:

1) It was a public commitment.  Once I put it out there that I was doing this, I had to either end up doing it, or looking silly (in my own eyes).  Planning professionals emphasize making a public commitment to your goals, because it generates that dynamic in many people.  I am one of them.  That said, the purpose of NaNoWriMo is to encourage creativity, so there is no way to lose.  If you are wired a particular way, though, it can be the impetus that gets you through the finish line.

2) It was time sensitive.  Because it had to be finished on or before November 30, 2009, I had no luxury of time to lapse into repose and pondering.  I've explained that already in my previous post: Why I NaNo.  I had no leisure for that self-indungence.  I had to write.  This was very helpful.  In the past, I have allowed my Inner-Critic to get involved in the writing process prematurely and her shrill voice has stifled some good pieces which have languished in the Pending Pile.  During this month, I learned how to put that chick in check.  I plan on reviving many of these paused works over the coming months, by the way.  Thanks to NaNoWriMo, I now have the confidence to do that, and a good sense of how to get it done.  With the time pressures involved, I couldn't allow for this Inner-Critic to dominate.  I had to shut her up.  I followed the NaNoWriMo mantra of writing it all out, pushing through those moments of doubt, and just getting it done.  I made a deal with the Inner-Critic that she could have the entire month of December to go tear the thing apart.  December and no longer, by the way.  No point in letting her get greedy.  And I've made arrangements so that her critical time coincides with that of other objective third parties.  This keeps things running on schedule and prevents the work from getting mired in self-doubt.

3) It required structure.  One of the criticisms I've read of NaNoWriMo from a respected, and certainly far more talented published author, was that it ingrained false expectations of instant fame and recognition, thereby generally leading to a bunch of junk flowing onto the page.  Possibly.  For some.  The argument was that novel writing inherently takes a long time, planning and extensive revision.   I believe this is true.  But I believe the established author was missing the point.  It is easy to know to do it, once you've done it, but writing, like many things, is something you have to do to understand.  What better way to do it, than to have some device free you to write, just write, for thirty days.  What better way than to make a deal with yourself to set goals and get the piece finished so it can be edited, critiqued and submitted later?  Goal setting is important practice for any professional.  Deadlines are inherent to any profession.  NaNoWriMo does an excellent job of setting those deadlines, and forcing those individuals who may have the potential for publishable writing, to do the most critical thing of all, the number one thing that generally keeps a writer from publishing: finishing the novel.  In my case, doing this first novel as a NaNoWriMo project, forced me to think the project through and ensure that the work could be divided and conquered in time.  That necessitated structure and planning, which is the very backbone of the work.  I'm not saying I got it all right.  Quite the opposite, I got many things wrong.  What I got wrong led to some of my plateaus during the month of November.  I don't know if those of you who did NaNoWriMo, checked out the neat graphs provided.  I did.  My Inner-Vulcan loved the precision of figures and the revelation of patterns.   See this screen shot for an illustration of the plateaus, I have analyzed and disected, while preparing to write even more:

I learned a lot from those graphs that will help me in preparing future novels.  I will mention some of the failure points in my preparation, as well as the random events that interupt writing in daily life which led to those plateaus during my next post.  I've been following some very talented fellow NaNoWriMo-ers, and I think that those who have done this before, who are NaNoWriMo-ing to win, are aware of these patterns.  I believe these clever people ensure they have put in the planning and structure, to get the job done in time.  So, ney-sayers, be advised that this process, this wonderful non-for-profit organization, does an excellent job of re-enforcing good practices, rather than discouraging them.

4) You've gotta have a dream.  Going for the low-lying fruit is plain boring.  Half the fun of life is conquering those things that appear to be impossible to do.  Not every NaNoWriMo novel written this month may end up on the best-seller list.  Most of them wont.  Again, that isn't what the contest is encouraging, it's encouraging creativity, and providing tools and support to push the writers on the edge over the cliff and onto the shelf.  For those of us on a quest to become a published author, why not dream big?  Why not expect to write a piece under pressure, get it done right, get it finished.  Our end-customer may be the reader, but in reality we can never reach that reader without an intermediary and a distributor.  Unless you are going the self-publishing route, that intermediary and distributor are the Agent and the Publisher.  Don't those intermediaries and distributors prefer to work with people who can be relied upon to have good practices, focus, set deadlines and meet them?  I suspect so.  Even if you are going the self-publishing route, you have to finish something to self-publish, and it has to be a quality read to get sold.  You have to do it often enough to make a living out of it, so you need the habits of writing frequently, promptly and well.  NaNoWriMo is improving the process, ingraining good practices for the profession.   It deserves our thanks and our support.  That's just my two-cents.  The time pressure has forced me to be committed, not only to finish, but also to set deadlines for the subsequent editing and tidying-up, that it will take to get Check Mate the novel published.  I will not be convinced by anyone at any time that I should lower expectations.  I may need to raise performance levels to meet those expectations, but I am willing to put in the work to do that.  Starting with the mind-set that I shouldn't do something just because 'it's pointless anyway' or that 'it's impossible to do' is nihilistic.  To me, nihilism is a bad thing.  It is toxic.  It is the antithesis of all creativity.  It is death to a writer.  So, if you have been a NaNoWriMo-er, or if you are merely a person with a dream to one day publish a novel, then, I say, go for it.  Write it.  Finish it.  Love the process.  Love the pain, even.  Love the hard work.  The Universe belongs to the dreamers. 

5.  What else did I have to do this November?  Well actually, lots.  And I did it.  NaNoWriMo's setting of the 50K mark makes it a bite-sized, manageable project in the end, at least for me.  Of course, I picked Check Mate among my other ideas in the little novel corner of my mind, because it could be written in that amount of words.  It was just right for this challenge; manageable, and do-able in the time frame provided.  I have other pieces that will require more time, but I have learned from NaNoWriMo how to break those up into chunks and get those novels finished too.  Again, this goes back to the importance of a little planning.  I don't want to give you the wrong impression.  I didn't sit down and outline and flow-chart this thing.  I just felt that I could say everything I had to say on the subject of Check Mate in around fifty-thousand words.  I will tell you that it was almost less, and boy, was I re-reading that thing at the end of the race to find where I'd dropped those missing words!  But it worked, in a timely manner.  I completed the Apocalyptic-Satiric-Reality-TV-Revolutionary-Saga Check Mate in 28 days (isn't that an Apocalyptic movie -- ooooh spooky.)   I had planned to finish it for Thanksgiving, and I did.  The challenge for me this November was to go from being an individual who said, "I'd like to be a writer," to being proud to tell people when I meet them: "I am a writer."  Ta-Da! Done.

The greatest asset of all, for me, has been the community involvement.  I've met some wonderful fellow NaNoWriMo'ers and some wonderful writers who are actively writing every day, even if they didn't do the contest.  I owe most of that connection to Twitter, which is by far my preferred method of Social Networking.  Short, sweet and to the point, Twitter rocks my world.  If you are on Twitter, and want to follow my Tweets, you can at @bluearthredshoe for general Tweet-Tweets or follow @pennybloom for hard-core woman-hood and writing-hood Tweets.   Everyone is welcome, I'm very open to a diversity of opinion, but H8ters and Sp@mm3rs, watch out.  I have no space for this kind of nonsense in my little Twitter world.  You will be evicted. 

I also have to give due recognition to my on-line office Writing.com, which is a wonderful site for writers to store and share their work.   If you haven't had the benefit of using their vast variety of tools and resources, I encourage you to visit.  It is possible to participate even if you cannot afford a membership, and you get a lot of value for your penny, if you do sign up.

I must also give due acknowledgement to a special colleague who is an amazing writer and writing coach.  His suggestion to shoot out the novel at razor speed by doing a 10K race to start, was UTTER BRILLIANCE.  His suggestion to fight writer's block by facing the monster and biting its nose off, pushing through writing despite it, was INVALUABLE.  If you have not had the pleasure of knowing or reading Tumblemoose then I suggest you get to know George Angus: the man, the legend, the writing super-hero.

 

So, all that said, you know that it couldn't all have been perfect, right?  Correct.  There were hard parts.  There were downers.  There were moments of despair.  As my Twitter followers know, there were MIGRAINES.  I will cover the source of those, what I did about them, and what I learned from them, in my next post entitled Check Mate: Behind the Scenes or 'Pass the Midol.'

Why I NaNo

I had heard about NaNoWriMo last year, when I was still not ready to take my journey and thought, what a nice idea to have the luxury of time to do such a thing.  At the time, I didn't think I could afford the luxury. 

This year, when NaNoWriMo came around, I knew I couldn't resist the urge to take the plunge off the edge.  What the heck, Providence has been sending me signs to jump, why not jump into NaNo while I'm at it, I thought.

You too can NaNoWriMo

I've read a lot about NaNo both for and against.  There are some fine authors who make the argument that the exercise of NaNoWriMo is a bit of a joke, that it sets the expectation that simply writing for 30 days will lead us all to a big publishing deal and that in fact what most of the many hundreds of thousands of people doing NaNo world-wide will accomplish is putting down a bunch of junk.

Well, that may be true.  Certainly, the objective of having written the next great novel is unlikely to be the end result of NaNoWriMo, but for me, the excercise has been healthy and cathartic.

Here are some of the benefits I've found:

1) No excuses - It is too easy to put off writing a larger piece for years and have millions of valid reasons why we don't have the time to exercise the writing voice at length.  NaNoWriMo forces us to pretend there are no excuses, forces us to simply write, and for the life of me, I cannot see anything bad about that.

2) Community - When I started my writer's journey I thought I'd be setting off into a solitary, isolated life, writing my thoughts and creating my worlds with no connection to the outside world.  Key to this false perception was my engrained habit, after many decades of working in Marketing and Public Relations, to consider only Market-Related activities, and business activities as connections.  Joining NaNoWriMo, and following the other #NaNoWriMo'ers on Twitter has been eye-opening, and marvelously liberating.  It has taught me that there are some fine people out there writing as a craft every single day, and that there are, by and large some fine writers to follow.  NaNoWriMo has taken my writing life from an isolated hermetic experience, to a community enriching experience, and that has made the entire process much more pleasurable.

3) Discipline - Nothing will ever beat the deadline (whatever generates it) for getting us writers to get it done.  I can't speak for everyone, but in my own experience, pressure generates diamonds.  Having to meet my self-imposed goals, or make up for gaps in reaching those goals has gotten me to focus and get it done, and as a result I do believe my writing has benefited from this.  Often the image of the writer is of a person in repose, pondering, dreaming, looking something like this:

Lord Byron in Repose

Well, let's face it, that is sometimes how we feel, but NaNoWriMo gets our backs of the dais, our minds out of the daze and makes us just do it!  It's boot-camp for writers, and the pain and pressure is good for the muse.

4) Sense of Accomplishment - Perhaps no writer feels utterly accomplished until they can see their work in print, on sale, at a local bookstore's shelf.  Certainly, I feel that will be a hurdle to run towards and then jump over in my career.  The reality, though, is that any project, any goal, any career, does not consist of any one race or any one giant leap, but of many small sprints and jumps; each of which need to be accomplished before the final goal can be reached.  The easiest way to reach big goals is to build a habit of reaching small ones.  That daily sense of accomplishment over little things, makes reaching for larger goals less daunting.  NaNoWriMo may only be a small goal in the race to the finish line of my writing life, but it has given me a valuable sense of accomplishment.  Each day when I go to it, each day when I meet or exceed my daily writing goal, I find the courage and strength to carry on beyond NaNoWriMo.  For this last reason most of all, I love NaNoWriMo, and plan on doing it each year from now on.

So, if you're looking for something to put on your To-Do List next year, take the month of November and write NaNoWriMo in big red letters across the top.  If your goal is to be a writer, don't let the critical voices discourage you; do it for the right reasons, do it with the right expectations and let it help you to Write Right!

Enjoy!

Writing.com Community

Besides becoming a proficient blogger, I've been working on some Fiction projects that have been in queue in my mind for a while.  One of the tools I've been employing with much success, has been my membership at Writing.com.  This community is active and chock full of useful goodies, like forums, and chat sessions, and a personal portfolio where you can post your work in process and receive helpful reviews and suggestions from fellow writers and certain members who are published authors, publishers, editors, and agents.

The forum's interface is so full of goodies that sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming, but it is well worth the effort to learn how to use all of the neat features it provides.

If you want to see what a portfolio looks like, I'll use the shameless plug here and provide you a link to my own:  Clarisa's Portfolio@Writing.com

Whether or not you can afford to upgrade to a paid membership, you have the chance to earn Gift Point Credits for doing helpful reviews of other members of the community.  Even with a free account, you can get a lot of benefit from this site, and with your own Portfolio and email features, it is like an office environment for your writing profession.

I highly recommend that anyone seriously considering a writing career capitalize on this wonderful environment and join it.  When you're there send me a "Hi." by emailing clarisabrown@writing.com.

Enjoy and Write Right!

I Write Therefore I Am

I have been writing ever since I can remember, even before I could hold a pen.  All my life I have been making stories up in my mind, developing characters and personalities, coming up with quick quips to annoy adults.  This got me in a lot of trouble as a child, and now that I am an adult it gets me in more trouble.  I love trouble.  Conflict, generating dialogue, getting people to see things from another angle are integral to my writing style and my personality, but I am still getting my feet wet on making writing a profession.

That is because, like most people, I have to work to live, and for many years I allowed work to take precedent over my natural proclivity to write.  I may have been given the gift for gab, but I was afraid to take the risk, take the plunge and go writing full time.  But when you are given a gift, you are expected to use it, and even if you try to avoid it, Providence is always there to give you a gentle or not so gentle nudge.

My nudge was not particularly gentle, but then I am a particularly stubborn person at times, and I suppose it took a shove to get my attention.  So here I am off the cliff, writing for my life. 

I am dedicating this blog to the writer's journey, to my finds and stumbles along the way, to the many tools and tricks out there that can be a help for any, who like me, suffer from an unbearable urge to write, and who no longer wish to fight the urge.

Enjoy and Write Right!