In the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot of housekeeping on my site, blog, and email list. I’m using new vendors, and have been exploring different ways to present my blogs.

One new thing I’m trying is affiliate marketing, which means that if you buy (or sometimes even just click on) one of the products I’ve linked, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I figured: Most of my posts have between 3 and 7 links to books and products I personally recommend. I might as well leverage a few of them to cover the not insignificant costs of maintaining my blog and website. This translates to more free, valuable posts for you!

And I can’t think of anything better than writing about how to get published…

Writing myself out of a rut

Like you, I have times when I simply don’t feel like writing – or even getting out of bed. How much more fun to curl up under the covers with a book and a cup of tea!

Speaking of reading in bed, I recently finished Kingdom of the Blind, part of the Inspector Armand Gamache series by Louise Penny. She is one of my very favorite contemporary authors. She is brilliant. I highly recommend her books.

During this same time period, I hadn’t felt like writing at all. In fact, I don’t feel like writing today, either. (Sound familiar?) However, Louise Penny has given me beautiful inspiration, and I thought I’d share it with you.

It starts with 2 words

A few years ago, Ms. Penny lost her husband. She didn’t feel like writing ever again. Yet after taking some time off, she continued writing her Armand Gamache series, to the delight (and relief) of her millions of fans. The following is what she wrote as an afterword to Kingdom of the Blind. I hope her exceptionally personal and inspirational words will help both me and you sit down and write every single day.

A funny thing happened on my way to not writing this book.

I started writing.

The truth is, I’ve known since I began writing [the first book in the series] that if [my husband] died, I couldn’t continue with the series….

How could I go on when half of me was missing? I could barely get out of bed.

I told my agent and publishers that I was taking a year off. That might have been a lie. In my heart I knew I could never write [the series] again….

But then, a few months later, I found myself sitting at the long pine dining table, where I always wrote. Laptop open.

And I wrote two words: Armand Gamache

Then the next day I wrote: slowed his car to a crawl

And the next day: then stopped on the snow-covered secondary road.

Kingdom of the Blind was begun…. I wrote…with relief. That I get to keep doing this.

Louise Penny on getting published

Here are some highlights from Ms. Penny’s fantastic piece on what to do once you finish your manuscript. (You can read the entire piece here.)

• [Get] a reference book called The Writer’s Guide to Editors and Agents. It…often has very helpful chapters on getting published, writing synopsis etc.
• Make sure your book isn’t just written, but polished. You won’t get a second chance with these people.
• Spend time trying to find an agent first – an agent will get you a better deal, find a good fit for your book with the right publisher, get foreign rights sold.
• Give yourself every chance to succeed. Edit, polish, do your homework, prepare – plan as though the rest of your life depend on it…. Now is a time to remember who you are, and this magnificent thing you’ve done for yourself. And not ever sell it short.
• Finish the book. Most people who start books never finish them. Don’t be one of those. You sure don’t want to be lying on your death bed regretting you didn’t finish the book.
• Read a lot.
• Read books on writing and getting published…. If this is your first time writing a book why would you assume you know what you’re doing?
• I suffered from writer’s block for many years…. What cured me was a sudden realization I was taking myself way too seriously. And that I was trying to write the best book ever published in the history of the world. And if I didn’t, I was a failure.
• I decided instead to…write what I loved to read. And to people the book with characters I’d want as friends…. They don’t have to be attractive, kind, thoughtful. But they do need to be compelling.
• Be true to yourself. Write what you want even if friends and relatives think you’re nuts.
• Be very careful who you show the first draft to…. You need supportive, encouraging, thoughtful readers. People who’ll offer critiques in a kind and constructive way and who understand the difference between truth and opinion.

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My next post will be about writing general statements, such as “One should…” and “If one’s tie is caught in a vacuum cleaner….” Special thanks to my dear subscriber UC for the idea. If you’d like to suggest a topic for one of my posts, please do so! I’m all ears. Email me at Deena@BulletproofWriting.com.

Thanks for reading; it’s great to be back!! And in the meantime, remember what Louise Penny said, and…

I’m starting today not wanting to write at all, but I’m pushing myself and sticking to my schedule just as I tell you to do! It’s not always easy.

I got a lot of positive feedback from my last post, “Grammarly, Stepford Wives, and Mediocrity.” I still owe some of you replies to your wonderful emails. Don’t despair; you’ll get them soon.

Let me know what other subjects you’d like me to cover in future posts; this blog is for you!

Too much trash

I’ve been reading a mix of modern classics, novels, and trash this past month, but I’m getting tired of the trash. What a waste of time. I was given a set of six ebooks (cozy mystery series) in order to write a review, but they’re so bad that the only way to describe them is inedible. I mean, I’ll usually read anything, but this is just too painful. Here are the books’ main sins:

• Shallow, undeveloped, and inconsistent characters
• Canned dialogue and situations
• Poor, confusing, unrealistic plots lacking essential information
• Embarrassing spelling, grammar, and editing mistakes

These issues seem to be rampant in self-published ebooks. Granted, quality is uneven, so it’s best to get a free sample from Kindle before purchasing. (Sometimes, the first book in a series is free, so there’s no monetary investment if you end up hating it.)

I suspect that many of these books are the fruit of members of book clubs and writers’ groups. I think both book clubs and writers’ groups are great, but I wish people would take more time to “sharpen the ax” before they start cutting down the tree.

This month’s good novels

I’ve also read some really great books this past month. The first was The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. She won a Pulitzer for this one. I’ve read other books of hers, and she is an outstanding writer. It is a total pleasure to read her. I generally don’t care for short story collections, but The Interpreter of Maladies is a happy exception. I strongly encourage you to get your hands on any of Lahiri’s books.

The biggest surprise this month was Anybody Out There, by Marian Keyes. Apparently, it’s the 4^th book in a series, but the author does such a good job of weaving things together that I had no idea. I wasn’t confused for a minute, and none of the background information felt like a non sequitur. Some series can be confusing if you haven’t read them in order.

I was convinced the book would be just a fun romp, but I was happily mistaken. It’s very well-written, and it had me both on-the-floor laughing and tearing up. It’s both a sad and a hopeful book, and well worth your time if you are in the mood for a novel. I was blown away by how Keyes crafted each character and kept them consistent. The plot was realistic, and Keyes added just the right amount of caricature to some of the personalities to keep things hopping.

I don’t think men would enjoy this book.

I also finally read my first Ken Follett novel, Eye of the Needle. I’m a fan of spy thrillers, and enjoyed it on this level. The historical aspect of the novel (World War II, and the allied attempt to fool the Germans with regard to the D-Day landings) was fascinating, but I didn’t like many of the main characters.

Valuable writing advice from Ken Follett

As I was tooling around the internet for information on Ken Follett, I found a fascinating Masterclass on his website. It’s full of information about writing and publishing a novel. I don’t agree with everything he says about how to write a book, but there were some gems, which I will enumerate below.

One must keep in mind that even though Follett is a bestselling author, he’s no Jane Austen (who is, surprisingly, his favorite dead author; his favorite living authors are Stephen King, Richard North Patterson, and Lee Child, which has to tell you something). Nevertheless, here’s some great advice, especially for novelists:

The basics

• The basic challenge for the writer can be very simply explained – it is to create an imaginary world and then draw the reader into that imaginary world.
• I want to entertain you. I want you to be thrilled or moved to tears or scared and I definitely want you to be on the edge of your seat all the time, wondering what is going to happen next.
• I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.
• You can almost always find a way to improve just about every sentence that you’ve written.

Sharpening the ax

• As an aspiring writer, you should certainly start by writing an outline…. The outline says chapter by chapter what happens in the book and it contains potted biographies of each of the characters.
• It is far easier to correct your mistakes if you write an outline than if you sat down and wrote, ‘Chapter One’ at the top of a piece of paper and started writing.
• Writing an outline also concentrates your mind. It is good to carry on reading a lot at this stage…. When you are reading other books, you will see how other writers have handled [your topic] and you’ll see the problem from different angles.
• You should also show your outline to other people…it will be bruising if it’s going to be any use to you.

Writing the outline

• A basic idea [i.e., what the book is about] is something that can be said in one sentence.
• I write down my one sentence on a piece of paper and I try and make it two. I elaborate more and more…before too long I’ve got three paragraphs, a page, two pages and so on as I constantly rewrite and tease out the story.
• I begin to imagine the people in the story, where they came from and what their motivations are. I think about how they will approach [a] problem.
• [C]reate interesting characters and show how their lives are devastated by a series of events, how they fight against adversity and how they triumph.
• [A]sk yourself questions all the time about these people that you have created and the problems they are confronted with…you must always ask…what are they afraid of?
• [A]lways be aware of raising the stakes.
• I finish up at the end of the [outline] process with between 25-40 typed pages [because he keeps elaborating on it]…. Typically there will be a first draft outline, a second draft outline and a final outline, so it would twice go through the process of being shown to a number of people.

The first draft

• The toughest part of the whole process is going from the outline to the first draft…. Putting flesh on the bones is the hardest imaginative work in the whole process.
• There is a rule which says that the story should turn about every four to six pages. A story turn is anything that changes the basic dramatic situation. It can change it in a little way or change it in a big way.
• If you’ve got two story turns in four pages, you are going too fast and are not drawing the full drama and emotion out of each scene.

The second draft

• When the first draft is complete, I show it once again to [other people]. I get them all to make notes.
• I don’t edit my first draft. I don’t put the first draft on the screen at all…. I key every word in again because that forces me to reconsider every sentence.

Notice how the section entitled Writing the outline has the most nuggets, with The basics and Sharpening the ax tying for second. This is not a coincidence, and should tell you something about where you should be putting your energies before you type “Chapter One.”

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In my next blog I’m going to revisit brackets. I’m currently working on a project that is bracket-challenged, and thought the issue begged reviewing.

And remember to let me know what else you’d like me to cover in future posts!

Until then,

Happy writing!

Deena

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

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I’ve been wanting to review Grammarly.com for accuracy, helpfulness, and ease of use. How can it be so popular when almost every business blog I read is full of embarrassing writing mistakes and typos that reflect the writer’s apathy? In fact, so many blog owners actually come right out and say that writing mistakes don’t matter!

Nothing can take the place of a live human being writing raw and editing hard. However, Grammarly might be a worthwhile crutch aid when you’re just starting out and want to discover what Artificial Intelligence has to say about language and grammar.

With this in mind, I wrote the first draft of this post on the Grammarly app. Let’s see how I (and it) measure up.

User-friendliness

The Grammarly app itself is easy to use. For people with a free account, the app checks only spelling and critical grammar issues. Those with a Premium account ($12 per month if you pay yearly, $30 per month if you pay monthly) get a whole lot more, including the following:

• advanced grammar check
• insulting language check (LOVE this)
• parallelism alerts
• vocabulary enhancement suggestions
• plagiarism detector
• word choice suggestions according to genre
• awkward words and sentences
• checking for unnatural phrasing

The Grammarly app lets you set four categories: audience, writing style, emotion, and intent. I’ve set this post as being geared toward a general audience, with an informal writing style, and containing “mild” emotion. The intent of the post is to describe (as opposed to “inform,” “convince,” or “tell a story”).

How’m I doing?

Up to this point, my first draft scored between 91 and 98 percent (it changes frequently). This means that it was better than 91 to 98 percent of all other Grammarly users’ writing. On the Flesch reading scale, however, it scored only a 56, meaning it could be read by someone with at least a 9th-grade education. For a general audience/informal writing style/mild emotion/intent to describe-type article, the app says to aim for a Flesch score of between 60 and 70 – which gears it to the average 8th grader.

The additional writing issues Grammarly found in my first draft were word choice (3 violations) and wordy sentences (2). The only problem is that I have to get Premium in order to find out which words they want me to replace, and which sentences are too wordy! The app also suggested very politely to “consider adding a comma” after “Flesch reading scale” (see previous paragraph). Thanks, guys.

Stilted writing

I found that I was writing a bit unnaturally on the Grammarly app, as if I were looking over my shoulder, worried I’d write something Grammarly didn’t like. Obviously, that is no way to write; your piece won’t come out sounding normal, and your own unique voice won’t shine through.

One way to prevent this while you’re using the Grammarly app is to hide the Assistant function until you finish the entire piece. That way, you won’t constantly be checking your writing performance. You can enable it when you finish. Another way is to write your piece on a simple Word document, and copy and paste it into the Grammarly app after you’re done.

By the time I finished writing the first draft of this post, I was at 93 percent on the Grammarly text scale and 64 on the Flesch scale. I still had 2 unnaturally long sentences, but ended up with 5 word choice problems!

Grammarly also gave me 4 incorrect suggestions from the “alert” function, which I was able to flag as incorrect. Take that, O machine! Artificial Intelligence isn’t (yet) perfect, and honestly, I hope it never will be.

My final score

Everything you’ve read so far is the final draft of this post. I plugged it into the app, and I ended up with a score of 95 on the Grammarly scale and the same 69 on the Flesch reading scale. But I now have 8 “word choice” issues and was slapped this time with 3 wordy sentences.

Why Grammarly?

Grammarly could be a nice crosscheck for high school and college students, sort of like a sophisticated Spell Check. It might give a bit of reassurance before one’s essay or book report goes out into the big, wide world. It also might be a nice app for those who have a lot of business emails to write and are unsure of their spelling or grammar skills. Likewise, people for whom English is not their native tongue can get quick and dirty help. They might be able to save themselves embarrassment when trying to impress potential bosses or love interests.

But beware: All except one of the suggestions from the alert function turned out to be inappropriate (their word, not mine). For instance, “5 word choice problems” was flagged as needing a hyphen, as in: “5-word choice problems.” I might have word-choice problems, but I certainly don’t have choice problems that are 5 words long.

Another thing to think about is whether you want to engage with the original or the Cliff Notes. In today’s world, many if not most people would rather just barf anything out on the page and get the servant (i.e., Grammarly) to clean it all up. I despise this attitude, but acknowledge that it’s pretty prevalent and not worth the diatribe I was just about to deliver.

Worst case scenario

One of the fears I have with regard to Grammarly is that it will ultimately dumb down the youngest 2 or 3 generations even further than they’re already being dumbed down as we speak.

What’s more, I hate to think of Grammarly becoming the mandatory final station that everyone will stop at before their writing disembarks into the world. Will there eventually be a cessation of creativity, uniqueness, and choice? Would e.e. cummings score only 25 percent on the Grammarly scale? Is literature on track to becoming one gigantic Stepford wife?

For me, it’s also a moral issue. Like, why would someone want to stay mediocre? Doesn’t everybody want to master as many skills as possible – including excellent writing and perfect spelling and grammar? Wouldn’t you want to gear your diction to someone more sophisticated than the average 9th grader? It seems that the only skill some people want to master these days is how to be “good enough” with the least amount of exertion possible.

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The thing is, I’m preaching to the choir.

You wouldn’t be reading my blog if you weren’t interested in being a better-than-just-mediocre writer. And I love you for it. I support you and admire you. You are swimming upstream in a sea of smooth sailors.

Keep up your excellence!! And keep reading my blog. You are part of the small but mighty tribe of those who want to be the best version of themselves. And remember,

Happy writing!

Deena

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

I hope you’ve started the year off with a bang and not a whimper. My latest accomplishments: wrote a new weekly schedule with hubs and commissioned someone on Fiverr to create gorgeous slides for my course, “Wake Up Your Prose: Description Unpacked.” I’m really excited about launching the course, and I think you’ll be impressed with the professional design and the fabulous (if I do say so myself) content. And I promise great audio!

In the old beta course I had 60 slides, and in this new premium course I have over 160 slides, plus a lot of new material and expanded supplementary workbooks. If you take the course, I know you will see a marked improvement in your writing as a whole, and in your description skills specifically. You can get on the waiting list here (no obligation to buy). And watch out for launch details coming soon…

Tailor your schedule according to your needs

As far as my new schedule, I noticed that I haven’t been disciplined enough with my day. As a result, I’m not using my time as wisely as possible. Don’t get me wrong: I get A LOT accomplished, because I’m fast. But I need to work smarter, not harder – and certainly not faster.

As usual, hubs had to practically drag me to the couch and sit me down. First I wrote out everything I need to do in a week: freelance editing projects (including looking for more gigs), BulletproofWriting, exercise, emails, household stuff, spiritual stuff, finishing a course I’m taking, lunch, and leisure time.

One of the blogs I read and love suggests doing things in 90-minute time blocks. Since I need a lot of breaks as well (#undiagnosedADHD), my husband built them into my schedule. Basically, my day looks like this: work-break-work-lunch-work-break-work. On average, I’m working 6 hours a day. I’m finished every day by 4:00 pm, which means I have the entire late afternoon and evening to do whatever I want. I work Sunday through Thursday (Sunday is like Monday where I live), so if I’ve been “good,” I have Fridays off.

Photo by gjbell

For some of you, a schedule such as this will work; for others of the non-ADD variety, you will be fine with longer work periods and will need fewer, and shorter, breaks. You might even be able to finish your workday earlier than I.

The bottom line is that it’s worth considering creating some sort of schedule for yourself, based on your personality, your responsibilities, and ability to sit for either long or short periods. Your schedule will evolve and you will need to tweak it, but just having something all prettily typed up and right in front of your face will be both calming and motivating.

Help is on the way

I came across two fantastic spreadsheets you can download for free, from Primoz Bozic, of the blog I love and mentioned above. One is called the Lean Review Dashboard, and in a nutshell it consists of doing a 20-minute assessment of what you want to achieve this year, building 3 milestone levels for each achievement, and doing a 2-minute review every week. It looks like it will be a lot of fun to use. The other is the Writing Tracker, which, unbelievably, tracks your writing. It includes columns such as date, length of writing session, mood, word count, and more. Both spreadsheets look really good, and I can’t wait to fit them into my new schedule!

Books I read

Guess what? I actually stopped reading a book in the middle! How liberating is that?

There’s no law that says we have to finish every book we start; I think it’s a throwback to our childhood, when our parents told us to finish everything on our plate, or made us finish our current knitting project before we could start a new one.

What I didn’t finish

The book I didn’t finish was The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason. Basically, it’s about a piano tuner who goes to Burma in 1886 to…wait for it…tune a piano. I was almost halfway through the d— (it means darn, I promise) book, and the protagonist was still in transit.

But it’s really my own fault for even opening the book in the first place, as I have a rule: If, anywhere on the cover, the book is described as “luminous,” run away as fast as you can.

What I did finish

The biggest winner I read since my last post was Charms for the Easy Life, by Kaye Gibbons. What a brilliant writer! It wasn’t a comedy, but I found myself intermittently laughing out loud to the point where I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. Gibbons is so incredibly real. I’m almost positive I read and loved a couple of her other books about 20 years ago, and I’m definitely planning to get ahold of them at the used bookstore; they’ll be worth (re)reading.

The rest of my reading list these past 2 weeks has been pretty much a balance between good and good trash. The interesting thing is that I read 2 books by authors I love, but didn’t like the books. One was Welcome to Hard Times, by E. L. Doctorow (“good”) and the other was Surprise Me, by Sophie Kinsella (“good trash”). I found Welcome to Hard Times too cruel for my taste – I don’t deny that I’m in denial about how horrible the Wild West was; and I thought the plot of Surprise Me was kind of stupid. So many of these “lite” books revolve around a misunderstanding which threatens to destroy a relationship, but disaster is averted at the last minute and harmony reigns again. It’s a pity these authors can’t come up with a different conflict and denouement.

I also read The Snow Gypsy, a soon-to-be-released novel by Lindsay Jane Ashford. It wasn’t bad. The background of the book is the Spanish Civil War and its effects on those who lived through it. I’m fascinated by the Spanish Civil War, and now I’m eager to read more about it.

A book I read constantly

I was lucky enough to receive the latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style as a gift (the result of an Amazon screw-up); it’s an editor’s most valuable resource. I’m enjoying having a hard copy version of it on my desk, and refer to it frequently. Their online edition is terrific, and is often but not always a time-saver. You can get a 30-day trial subscription to the online version here. The yearly subscription is $39. I believe that all writers should have this publishing bible close at hand.

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Please let me know how setting your schedule went, and if you like to work in long or short blocks of time. Make sure you carve out a generous session for your daily writing!

Hey, it’s time for my break. I’d better get off the computer; hubs just got his whip out (not). Until next time,

Happy writing!
Deena

Deena Nataf
www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com