PurpleCar

Back in November of 2009, I attempted to write 50,000 words along with other crazy people around the world. National Novel Writing Month is every November and it’s a mad rush to the finish.

The people at Ravenshead Software sent me a full version of Write It Now 4 (WrIN4) to use during that crazy month. I didn’t get to 50,000 words this year, but I gave the software a thorough 10,000-word thrashing. The software held up well.

There are more than a few software packages out there for writers. One could spend hundreds of underpaid and overworked writer dollars on these applications. Before I delve into my review of WrIN4, just know that none of these programs will write your novel or short story for you. They can help with organization, though.

The WrIN4 application, available for Mac and Windows, is deceivingly simple. The menus and tabs are easy to understand and use, but behind these screens are added drag-and-drop features that make editing almost fun. The Tools menu has helpful things in it like “Create Random Character,” which will create a character for you based on typical story archetypes. For example, the software created the character “Alexandre” for me, and gave me this description:

“Created with the Archetypes personality data using the Character type ‘Trickster’.Alexandre needs to make people happy. He loves surprises. Recently Alexandre worked as an entertainer.

Bart in ‘The Simpsons’ is a typical example of this.

Alexandre is fairly tall. He has a cheap coat. He has smooth skin and is extremely presentable. His hair is expensively cut. Alexandre looks strong and is extremely wiry. ”

That’s probably enough to put you over the top of your writer’s block wall right there.

I could play with the Tools section all day. I particularly like the built-in Thesaurus and reading level assessment (under “Story Readability”).

I kept in close contact with Ravenshead services throughout the month of November. Here were some of the finer points that I’d like to see addressed in the software:

*Can’t add images into the text. We are now in a multi-media age. Writing software needs to catch up. There are times we writers will want to place an image, for example, a picture of a molecule, within the text. You can’t do this with WrIN4, and I don’t know if competing software can do this either.

*The + and – buttons at the bottom of the left-hand column are teeny tiny and their function was a bit confusing. What was I adding? What was I subtracting?

*The program makes you save again to exit. This is ok for most folks, but I find it annoying to have to click through another menu when I’ve already saved the document 2 seconds earlier.

Ravenshead said that they’d look into these complaints and see if they could tweak things before their update release.

One last note: I don’t think the pricing is great. It’s more expensive than Scrivener, another popular writing program (mac only, though). I think they can lower the price a bit to be a bit more competitive.

Download the demo and tell me what you think.

UPDATE: Jan 23, 2010: Rob from Ravenshead wrote this in an email to me:

Hi Christine
Thank you for the review of WriteItnow 4.

For the next release we’ve changed the expand/collapse tree icons so
they are less confusing.

For the release after that we’ll add an option to add photos to most tabs.

I’ll also look into smarter save options on exit. The program keeps a
constant checksum for the story which can be used to show if it has
changed (and a save is needed). We used to use this to optionally show
the ’save now?’ dialog on exit. It may be time to re-introduce this.

Regards

Rob

Tags: applications, cost, national novel writing month, novel, novel writing, programs, Right-in, software, what software should I use to write my novel, Write It Now, writer, writers

I recently received a comment about the lack of commas in my writing. This is just a quick post to say that my comma decisions are deliberately made. I choose a flowing style when I can; this means I forgo putting commas in common places.

In the 1700’s, commas were much more common.  Those writers dropped commas in places you didn’t realize existed.  Eventually, the pauses were dropped in favor of a smoother style.  We English writers will use fewer commas as time goes on.  My general rule is to first think of eliminating ambiguity, then concentrate on the flow of the piece (flow is a very close second, though).  Writing is meant to convey information and emotion.  If you’re sure you are impressing people with the unambiguous meaning of your words, then make sure the tone of the work leaves the right impression as well.  You want the reader to walk away with a feeling in their gut that comes from information in their head (and yes, I know I used “their” there, instead of “he” or “she.”  That’s another post topic I’ll approach someday).
Here are some different areas around the web I visited today that talk about comma usage.

Forum conversation

Blood Red Pencil articles on comma usage

Particularly helpful Blood Red Pencil article about Trask rules on commas

The New Yorker article looking into the book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Please weigh in with a comment about the comma controversy.  How, by chance, do you use commas?

Thanks!

(photo by graciesparkles on Flickr.com – buy her comma stickers on etsy!)

Tags: blog, blogging, book, commas, flow, grammar, new comma rules, new grammar rules about commas, not enough commas, novel, punctation rules, punctuation, Right-in, style, too many commas, write

***Wacko Wednesdays:  Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology, or perhaps talk about a specific type of research into personality.  I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***

Writers don’t write about mothers much.  I was at a writing conference where the speaker asked the audience to call out something they’d read that examined the mother-child relationship.   No-one spoke up.  The speaker had made her point.  The mother/child relationship is very complex and close to the heart.  Even Disney likes to kill off moms so they don’t have to deal with trying to navigate those murky-mommy-issues waters.  Fathers, on the other hand, abound in fiction. Father’s Day is this Sunday.  Because we know all psychosis comes from our parents (not!), for today’s Wacko Wednesdays, let’s talk about at writing about the father/child relationship, or writing a character as a father.

For decades, psych research focused on the mother’s parenting as pathology for mental illness in children.  More and more, researchers are looking at the father’s influence (especially with the area of girls and eating disorders). The father’s attitudes and behaviors toward parenting would influence your main character (MC).  The father’s raising of your MC will probably all be backstory that happens offstage (i.e. not in the novel), but it is perhaps the most important character detail that fuels your MC’s current motivations. Let’s take a look at how some psych research examines how a father’s behaviors influence his children.

In the book, “The Role of the Father in Child Development” (.pdf of intro here), Editor Michael E. Lamb outlines the 3 areas that many researchers concentrate on when researching the father/child relationship: Engagement, Accessibility, and Responsibility.

“Whether and how much time fathers spend with their children are questions at the heart of much research conducted over the past three decades. In the mid-1970s a number of investigators sought to describe—often by detailed observation and sometimes also through detailed maternal and paternal reports—the extent of paternal interactions with children (Pleck & Masciadrelli, this volume; Lamb & Lewis, this volume). Many of these researchers have framed their research around the three types of paternal involvement (engagement, accessibility, responsibility) described by Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, and Levine (1987). As Pleck and Masciadrelli note, researchers have consistently shown that fathers spend much less time with their children than do mothers. In two-parent families in which mothers are unemployed, fathers spend about one-fourth as much time as mothers in direct interaction or engagement with their children, and about a third as much time being accessible to their children. Many fathers assume essentially no responsibility (as defined by participation in key decisions, availability at short notice, involvement in the care of sick children, management and selection of alternative child care, etc.) for their children’s care or rearing, however, and the small subgroup of fathers who assume high degrees of responsibility has not been studied extensively. Average levels of paternal responsibility have increased over time, albeit slowly, and there appear to be small but continuing increases over time in average levels of all types of paternal involvement.”

Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility are the three things you can think about when forming your character.

Engagement:  How “hands-on” was your MC’s father when she was small?  Was he a good guy but had a job that took him away often?  Did he just seem like he was yelling everytime he spoke to his kids, but he was just trying to encourage them?

Accessibility:  Could your MC bring any question under the sun to her dad or was she relegated to communicating with him through his secretary?  Did he send the MC off to boarding school and say “See ya at Christmas?”  Was there always a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door, but he was very attentive at dinner time?

Responsibility:  Did your MC’s father support his family well?  Was he a good earner but a fierce disciplinarian?  Was he a drinker but loved his family with all his heart?  Was he a drifter that constantly told his kids to reach for the stars?

Look for ways you can build in contradictions in each of these areas, then think about how a kid would reconcile those inconsistencies.  How we judge people is a lot of our character.  A father’s personality greatly influences our sense of judgment. In flat characterizations, fathers are either no-good bums or unsung heroes, drinking louses or quiet loyalists.  Usually a main character (MC) comes to acknowledge the father’s cheating ways or learns to appreciate the constant wisdom that they couldn’t recognize before.  It’s all so cheesy and cheap.  Try to go for some more depth.  What kind of roles does the father character in your book play?  What kind of parent is he?  Is he a stand-offish, everyone-has-to-learn-for-themselves kind of guy or is he a soccer dad that is with his kids every step of the way? How can he be both?  What generation is he in?  Is he a 70-year-old but a modern diaper-changing/sling-wearing dad?  Was he raised to think he’d let the kids grow up before he had any kind of relationship with them, even though he’s just 20 years old?

Take those three aspects of measuring fatherhood, Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility, and mix and match good and bad characteristics of each.  Make the father character a conflicted, true-hearted, complicated being that marked your MC with distinctive world views. Happy Father’s Day, to all of those dads out there!

Tags: book, fathers, fiction, how to write a conflicted, how to write about fathers, Right-in, Wacko Wednesdays, write, writing character, Writing Exercises, writing father characters

Wacko Wednesdays: Happiness

***After a long hiatus, Wacko Wednesdays are back!  Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology.  I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  -United States Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 4th 1776.

Happiness research has taken the Psychology world by storm.  If you search any book site for the word “Happiness,” you will see a plethora of books written on the subject.  Lately I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.  It’s academic research and theory about attaining happiness and how our judgment about what will make us happy in the future is ridiculously skewed by our present thinking.

This book and the advent of other titles in the positive psychology area have inspired me to think about how we, as writers, paint the picture of our characters’ states of happiness.  By looking at your MC and her goals in terms of her motivations and methods of attaining happiness, you can paint a deeper picture of what drives us all.

I’m sure you are familiar with the basic story arc: Main character (MC) starts out with a status quo, then challenges galore are thrown at the MC, lots of roadblocks stand in the way of achieving the new happiness goal, MC overcomes, is a changed person.  The end.    Today for Wacko Wednesdays I’ll run down two phenomena that researchers, namely David Myers, have identified as influencing a person’s happiness, namely Relative Deprivation and Adaptation.

Phenomenon #1: Relative Deprivation

“when we compare ourselves with those less fortunate, we can, however, increase our satisfaction. As comparing ourselves with those better-off creates envy, so comparing ourselves with those less well-off boosts contentment.” -David Myers

Lately I’ve been reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a classic piece of American literature that portrays a devastatingly poor family and their survival struggles in 1900’s New York.  It’s actually making me feel quite good.

Yes I know that sounds bad.  But here it is:  My husband, my two kids and I live in the smallest house in our neighborhood.  We live on my husband’s salary as I’m a full-time mom, but we truly have more than enough.  Still, this suburban life and the American consumerism gets to everybody.  We are inundated with ads to buy more stuff, we read stories of neighbors’ huge home improvements, we hear kids describing their African safari vacations. It’s an affluent area and it seems, at times, that we aren’t keeping up with the Joneses.

The unfortunate Nolan family portrayed in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, truly has nothing.  When they mention clothes, they mean one pair of pants and one shirt for a man and one dress for a woman.  Can you imagine?  I look at my closet full of plain, solid-colored Old Navy t-shirts and feel loaded (wealthy, not drunk).  When the Nolan family mentions meals, they mean oatmeal with no milk or fruit.  I open the freezer each morning and lazily wonder which hunk of meat I have to make that night.  While they want for decent immune systems, we struggle to fight our ever-expanding waistlines.  This book makes me feel so fortunate that I may start it all over again once I’m finished! This is Relative Deprivation at work.  How rich you feel is totally dependent on who you are comparing yourself to. Compared to the Nolans (or many real people in this economy), my husband and I are doing great!  Compared to our friends the doctors, with their big house and insanely lavish vacations, we’re struggling.

What do most good ol’ Amurrricanz do when they feel like they are poorer than everyone else?  Apparently they buy lottery tickets.  Recent research has shown the Relative Deprivation phenomenon in full-swing in lottery ticket buyers.  If people are feeling deprived, they make the trip to the local bodega to pick up their Pick 6’s. If they feel better off than their neighbors, they don’t buy lottery tickets.

Here are the questions you can ask yourself about your MC’s Relative Deprivation feelings:  Is she better or worse off than her neighbors, peers, family members?  When does she feel better off and when does she feel worse?  What makes her feel superior?  What kinds of behaviors result from those feelings?  How does she make herself feel better in the short term? Does she eat?  Does she steal their watches? Does she retreat into her packed charity-ball schedule? How does her current state of feeling deprived influence her dreams for the future?  Does she coast when she feels affluent or better off in some other way?  Coasting is what most of us do once we achieve a certain goal or milestone.  That brings us to Adaptation.

Phenomenon #2.  Adaptation

“I’ll never get used to anything.  Anybody that does, they might as well be dead.” ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly

Adaptation is what happens when a person has hit a windfall, achieved a goal, or just plain got lucky when that Good Samaritan pulled him out of the path of that oncoming bus.  We adapt to having an inheritance, being a college graduate, or being alive to wander into the bus lane again.  The “new” becomes the “same old.”  Lottery winners, on average, aren’t significantly happier than the rest of us when they are surveyed 5 years later.  We dream about California living but apparently Californians register on the same levels in happiness scales as the rest of us.  (See Daniel Gilbert’s book).  We adapt to the new status quo.

When my husband and I moved from Center City to the house in the suburbs, we didn’t see it as the smallest one in the neighborhood.  We saw it as huge and wondered how we’d ever fill it with furniture.  We had just moved from a trinity on Naudain street, banging our heads each time we came down the skinny and treacherous spiral staircase.  The kitchen in that all-stacked-on-top-of-each-other house was tiny and there was no room for the baby I was carrying.  But that house on Naudain was a palace compared to our 3rd-floor walk-up at 18th and Pine. Now we are here in the suburbs for almost 10 years, we’ve lost our coveted and elusive guest bedroom to a second child, and we’d like to upgrade to a food processor and a breadmaker if we had the space in our now-tiny kitchen.  We’ve adapted.  I can read a thousand tragic poverty books (Angela’s Ashes is next), but try as I might, I can’t roll back my “want” clock to the days when we were two grad students living in a 1st-floor alley apartment.  Since that hole-in-the-wall had no light, I simply dreamed of having a view of the street.

Here are some questions about Adaptation that you can ask yourself about your MC: Has she had a windfall of luck lately (e.g., landed that dream job, attracted a super-hero boyfriend, or inherited large sums from an obscure aunt)?  What happens to her after?  Does she adapt and want more?  Does desire for more turn into a disease that will be her undoing?  When is the exact point where she takes her new life for granted?  Does she ever grow enough to notice?  Does she freak out, donate her lottery winnings to a bald-cat nursing home and flee to the Himalayas to live a life of solitude?  Or, like most of us, does she just treat herself to a 1-million-calorie Frappuccino that week?

In their very basic structure, all of the archetypes and character journeys center around some kind of resolution, some little bit of happiness.  Characters are going after a goal; the pursuit and the accomplishment will, they think, make them happy in some way.  The goal could be revenge, it could be love, it could be fifty-two cents.  They achieve the goal.  Everything is coming up roses and they are turning up noses. But then they adapt. Showing your character’s general state of happiness before, during and after the accomplishment of her main goal will help to give life to her and her story.  In daily life, we may overlook details, but in general we are conscious to our own state of happiness.  The pursuit of happiness drives us.  It will drive your character, too.  Show us her struggles to reach her personal happiness.  Be brave and show us what life looks like for her after she gets all she (thought she) wanted.  Be honest with yourself and your characters.  As writers, we are obligated to speak the unspoken truth, especially in our fiction.  Mix in a little rough Relative Deprivation and astonishing Adaptation, and your writing will come alive.

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And of course stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Please comment and let me know your thoughts.  -PC

Tags: book, Books, characters, david myers, degree, fiction, happiness research, hints, instruction, masters, measure happiness, novel, personality psychology, plot, positive psychology, psychology and writing, Right-in, story, Wacko Wednesdays, writing character, writing prompt

Right now I’m sitting in a cloud of old-book smell. I checked “Critic’s Choice” out of the library today. (No ISBN. Library of Congress Catalogue Card #55-10113)

This book contains the full texts of all the New York Critic’s Circle Prize winners for the years 1935 through 1955. There were no prizes granted for the seasons of 1938-39, 1941-42, 1943-44, and 1945-46. The Great Depression and World War II dominated those years, so I’m sure there is some interesting story behind those absences.

I checked the book out for its possession of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I am researching character for my own novel and I wanted to also study the dialog in this play (plays, for obvious reasons, are wonderful for examples of effective dialog).

Here are the plays and years that are in the book:

1935-36: Winterset by Maxwell Anderson
1936-37 High Tor by Maxwell Anderson
1937-38 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
1939-40 The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan
1940-41 Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman
1942-43 The Patriots by Sidney Kingsley
1944-45 The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
1946-47 All My Sons by Arthur Miller
1947-48 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
1948-49 Death of Salesman by Arthur Miller
1949-50 The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
1950-51 Darkness at Noon by Sidney Kingsley
1951-52 I Am a Camera by John van Druten
1952-53 Picnic by William Inge
1953-54 The Teahouse of the August Moon by John Patrick
1954-55 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

The book also contains a lengthy Introduction, titled “Twenty Years in the American Theatre” and an Appendix with the guilty parties, a.k.a. Roster of the New York Drama Critic’s Circle from 1954-55, Presidents of the Circle and the list of Pulitzer Prize plays from 1935-55. I won’t be reading through any of that because I’m not a historian or fan of the upper crust of NYC, and please don’t try to engage me in debate about any controversies that may have surrounded this seemingly incestuous prize awarding. I’m just here to pick up some tips from the dead white men who dominate the list. Next I’ll move on to some modern literature, because I feel quite disconnected from any authors in this book. Unfortunately or fortunately American literature classes are still dominated by these dusty classics, and I only know how/what to study the way I’ve been taught.

If you have any great modern examples (let’s say, after 1980) then I’d appreciate the suggestions greatly. Thanks.

Tags: 1935, 1955., dialog, new york, plays, prizes, Right-in, tennessee williams, theatre

Sitting around last night watching TV, I wrote up an entry for super-geek Chris Pirillo’s contest.

Tags: chris pirillo, contest, entry, geeks!, Right-in

Catch phrases are an efficient way to show a lot of inner information and motivation about a character with a few uttered words of dialog.

Tags: adage, catch phrase, character, fiction, Right-in

When I picked up the book, I recognized the ‘famous’ name. I was looking forward to absorbing some insights into social media and human behavior. Instead I was hit with self-indulgent prose filled with enough buzzwords to choke an elephant.

Tags: book review, Clay shirky, Here comes everybody, Media, non-fiction, Right-in

It’s only fair to have some shiny links about writing too. Daily Writing Tips is one of the best writing blogs out there. I RSS it. You should too.

The post on How to Write Every Day is a true gem. Here’s an excerpt:
Knowing that it’s a good idea to write every day, however, doesn’t make it easy to do so! Often, you’ll be busy and struggle to find a chance to write – and when you do have the time, you may not feel creative. Here’s how to write fiction, journal entries or blog posts every day.

Tags: daily, fiction, Right-in, tips

My husband Gary and I have a friend (who we haven’t seen in a while) named Dave. We met Dave in college. Dave was a very short and slight guy with a personality bigger than a house. Dave was bubbly and he loved everything and everybody. Besides the incredible penchant for enjoying life, Dave seemed like your typical college student. He hung out with us, drank beer, played pool (and lost miserably but never cared) and stressed over term papers. Everything was copacetic.

Until one day Dave announced that he was getting a part-time job at the McDonald’s on campus. That in itself didn’t seem so bad, but then Dave enthusiastically announced that he asked for the first shift. A cry of disbelief rose from the room of friends. “DUDE! That means you’ll have to get up at like, 4 AM in the MORNING!” Dave brushed off our warnings of sure failure and happily started his job at MickeyD’s, sometimes leaving the house before the sun rose. We all gave him a week.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: character, demographics, generation, meme, personality, Right-in, sociology