First Impression: 750 Words

Yesterday I found this fun website called 750 words. It's a free writing tool to help writers set and keep writing goals, and sharpen their skills by practicing them every day. It's got a function that keeps track of how many words you're typing as you type them, and saves your work every couple of seconds. After you're done you never have to look at your writing again, so lots of people use it to journal and get bad feelings out by writing them down.

I have a lot of trouble free writing. I never saw the point. To me, if you're going to write something, you should take a little time and think about what you want to say before getting it down. I like to edit as little as possible. I was the one always getting in trouble during English class because I'd glare at the clock during free writing instead of putting a pencil to the page. "I don't know what I want to write!" I'd protest to my frowning teacher. "Then write THAT!" she'd reply. My glare would grow deeper, because I knew in my heart that writing "I don't know what to write" is a HUGE WASTE OF TIME, and of my writing talent. If you're going to write, write something interesting.

Anyway.

What makes 750 Words even more fun is that when you're finished, it shows you all kinds of stats about your words: how long it took you to get them down, how many breaks you took during that time, and how many words you typed per minute. Then, it shoves eight or nine pie charts in your face, showing you the main feelings of your writing. Yesterday I wrote about a game I'm playing called Neko Atsume (Kitty Collector), and mostly whined about the money mechanics, so my stats for that day say that I was mostly "self-involved." Well, yeah, but it wasn't a bad thing. There was also a chart that informed me that I spent most of my words on the subject of money. I didn't need a colorful pie chart to tell me that, but it's pretty, and I like the font. There are a few bar charts near the bottom of the page that I'm not sure about yet, but since today I'm writing about something completely different, I'm hoping that I'll be able to puzzle them out when I look at my stats from THIS piece.

I had so much fun with the site yesterday that I told my very-busy-doing-National-Novel-Writing-Month writing partner about it so that she could check it out if she wanted to. I don't like to recommend things to people unless I know they're not going to come back to me and say "hey, this thing you told me to check out is crap; why did you tell me about it?"

So that's why I was so disappointed this morning, when I was poking around on the site and saw a teeeeeny tiny bar at the top that said something along the lines of "you're enjoying your 30 day free trial of 750 words!" And I was like... "Um, I'm WHAT?"

Usually when a site makes you pay to use it, they won't let you sign up for any kind of free trial without giving them the goods so that they can start charging you the second your month ticks over. But there was NOTHING about paying after a certain time, or paying at all, when I signed up. Just name, email address, password, make sure your password is right. No check box for a terms of service, making sure I knew what I was getting into, nothing.

I was really looking forward to using the website to get back into the habit of writing every day, since it was super easy for me to fall out of it. And based on some of the things that other users are saying, it's a really fun way to do it... and it gets addicting. "We hook you with the free Flamingo Badge, and you'll be paying us five bucks a month for the Super Squirrel Badge!"

I guess I'll stay... I mean, I do have 30 days. I really enjoyed taking days off of writing, though, and just relaxing on the weekends, back when I was posting every weekday on my blog. If I'm going to pay to write, I'd feel bad taking a day off to relax, even if I needed one.

Also, there's no italics. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT ITALICS. (Apparently caps lock will have to do.)

I mean, how fun is that?! (Answer: SUPER FUN!!!)

100 Word Story: Starry Night

[100 word story] is an online literary journal featuring, unsurprisingly, 100 word stories. Every month they post a photo prompt, and encourage visitors to contribute their own 100 word story in the comments; the best story is then featured the next month on the website. I discovered the journal and the prompt last month, and wrote a 100 word story of my own.

It was pretty hard! 100 words is not very many. (In fact, there are exactly 81 words before this one.) I started out by writing a very short story (very short for me, that is, since my short stories usually tend to be anywhere from 800 to 1500 words), then took out unnecessary bits, then shortened the dialogue, then reworked things that didn’t make sense, then added a word or two, and ended up with 100. Finally, I posted my contribution in the comments for last month’s prompt, and proceeded to forget about it completely.

Today, I was scrolling through facebook (which, as any writer will tell you, is absolutely essential to the creative process), and brushed past a post that made a reference to Vincent Van Gogh. “Oh, hey,” I thought to myself, “I wonder what happened with that 100 word prompt thing I wrote.” When I went to check, I found that, unsurprisingly, someone else’s story had been featured (and for good reason; it’s awesome), but now, I have the opportunity to feature my story myself.

Photo by Kris Williams

She spun in circles, giggling. Unwilling to make myself vomit, I stood watching at a safe distance, amused. “How will this help with our Art History project?”

“Seeing the world through Van Gogh’s eyes!” she insisted, and flopped down, breathless, onto the grass. I joined her, though less dizzy. The stars shone down, stationary as always. I wondered if they had looked different that night in 1889.

After a moment, she sighed in defeat. “It’s nothing like Starry Night. We’ll have to do something else for our project.”

“I don’t know,” I replied, gazing upward. “I’m pretty sure this helped.”

Best First Sentence

Today I was reading Gawker’s (NSFW) list of The 50 Best First Sentences in Fiction. A lot of great books made the list, and several that I have never read pulled me in and made me want to pick up the book to get the rest of the story.

Any list like that should come with a disclaimer that includes who it was that put the books on the list, the fact that all of the books are in English, and why they completely ignored Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. (I mean, come on. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”? That should have been at the top of the list.) Actually, there’s no way anybody could collect the 50 best... anything in fiction. It’s like when someone says something silly like, “I don’t like people,” and their friend responds, “well that’s not fair; have you met all of them?” Nobody could read everything in the world. This list is more like “the 50 best first sentences in the fiction written in English that will probably be considered classic literature in another 50 years or so.”

It was an interesting list to read, and interesting to think about what it would be like to have written a sentence that made the list. For a while, I thought about what it would be like to see my name on a list like that. Then, I thought about what my sentence might be. Then, I thought about what kind of book I would write that would get the kind of attention to make any kind of “best” list. Then, I thought about the best sentences I’ve written so far. So I decided to go back and make my own list, featuring myself (no bias allowed). So, without further ado, I present: “The 5 Best First Sentences in Fiction Written by Patricia Livermore in the Last Year or So (compiled by Patricia Livermore).”

“It was 1 AM and I was walking down the middle of the street lopsided.” from Pumpkin-Carriageless, March 10, 2015

“It was the oldest story in the world: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, for the sake of girl boy immediately dumps perfectly good girlfriend, perfectly good ex-girlfriend reveals her desire for revenge.” from Typical Love Story, November 18, 2014

“The strains of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s hit flowed from his back pocket as he knelt, looking up into her eyes, which had been slowly filling with happy tears.” from The Perfect Moment, October 7, 2014

“The Tower has always been here.” from The Changing of the Seasons, August 6, 2014

“A strange occurrence in downtown Lisbon last Friday had employees of a local electronics company assembling a human ladder to verify strange reports of a dragon in the area.” from Portuguese Dragons, January 15, 2014

This list was fun to put together! It’s always interesting to me to go back and read things I’ve written before, because I get to feel a fun mix of “wow, that’s ridiculous; why did I write that?” and “oh yeah, I forgot; I am hilarious!” After reading the first line, I would, of course, have to read the rest of the story, and then I would get to remember all the fun I had writing it: all the times I giggled to myself, made myself cry, or stayed up until the wee hours putting the finishing touches on it.

I love my job. I don’t get paid, but that’s okay. If none of my first sentences ever make it onto a “50 Best” list, I don’t care. Those things are usually rigged anyway, and it’s always easy to tell which ones are: the ones that leave out Jane Austen.

Wordweeds

One of the wonderful things about language is that it is constantly changing. The world changes; we invent new things that need names, so we make something up. We smash two existing words together, replace the first letter of a word with a different letter, or just completely pull something out of the air. Sometimes these brand new words don’t survive very long. They’re like little plants; some shrivel up, and some take root in the middle of the yard and just grow, no matter how much you try to stop them.

When the latter happens, there’s nothing we can do. We have to resign ourselves to our fate, dig in our heels, and add them to the dictionary. The following words have been added to Merriam Webster this year, and I thought a few of them required a little explanation, since not everyone sits around in the backyard (or on the internet) watching wordweeds grow.

:)  To anyone who grew up without a computer, this combination of a end parenthesis and a colon is just punctuation. But if you’re wondering why it’s used by people all over the world every day, tilt your head toward your left shoulder. It’s a smiley face! Someone sending an email to a friend might use it to convey their tone. Since they’re not talking on the phone, their friend can’t hear whether they’re sad, angry, or amused, and a phrase such as “Like that’s going to happen!” can leave them wondering how they should feel. Tossing a little smiley face on the end of a sentence lets the reader know that the writer was smiling while sharing their thought, and that they should smile, too. The term emoji is “borrowed from Japanese, literally, ‘pictograph.’”

This chart of emoji was included in an interesting article about art and psychology on wired.com.

I shadowed a copy writer at my local newspaper once for a high school class and learned that coming up with the right headline for an article is an art form. Some news articles speak for themselves; no one is going to turn away from a piece headed with the words “MAN WALKS ON MOON.” Others require a little... help: “Single Mom’s Simple Weight Loss Trick Shocks Scientists!!!” A headline like that makes the reader mildly interested; if they were holding a newspaper, they might turn to page A5, but on the internet, they click on it. Newspapers don’t make you sign up for their service before you can read an article, but some websites do, and most likely a headline like that would take you to one of these. You’d have to give up your email address, make up a password, and click a link in a verification email before you were able to read the article you clicked on, and at the end of the rigmarole, you might forget why you started down this rabbit hole in the first place. Headlines that make you so curious you don’t mind jumping through the loops of a website that’s going to constantly bombard you with advertisements are called clickbait. Beware.

This photo (which accompanied an article on clickbait) was found at baekdal.com.

Have you ever been looking through old vacation photos from 1993 and spotted someone you didn’t know milling around in the back of the photo? You and your family are standing there in front of a pretty rock at Garden of the Gods and there, in the edge of the picture, is some guy in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. He may have innocently wandered into the shot, but… what if he didn’t? There was no word for jumping into a picture for the purpose of mischevious amusement in 1993, because back then every single person did not have a camera/computer/telephone in their pocket. Today, there are a lot more pictures being taken, and a lot more opportunity to leap in front of your cousin while she is taking a picture of herself. We call it a photobomb.

There are so many more words growing in the world (and on the internet) today! Maybe they’ll eventually make their way into the “official” books, joining other gems such as jeggings, meme, and eggcorn, or they may die an early death. Either way, this is definitely an interesting time in the history of language.

Some wordweeds, sadly, die an early death. This Mean Girls gif is from a cool blog called Lord of the Nerds, at the end of a piece about why that movie is so awesome.

Adult

I’ve felt really lazy lately, and procrastination is fun. The last several days, I haven’t started writing anything until the very late afternoon, sometimes the evening. I’m pretty creative, so I can think of lots of excuses not to work, or reasons that I’m not working, but I haven’t wanted to put any effort in to even do that.

Earlier today I was talking to a couple of co-workers about a project that I’m working on. I’m not shirking my part, but I can’t do what I need to do unless I am contacted by others. “They’re adults,” I told them. “This is their job; if they don’t want to do it, I can’t make them. It just won’t get done until they actually put forth the effort.”

After this conversation, I came home and started dinking around on the internet. I found a writing prompt and got to work on it (sort of). But during my procrastination, I came across several different things: two tweets (from people I don’t follow, retweeted by two separate people I do follow) and a tumblr post via George Takei’s facebook page. (Yes. This is a lot of procrastinating.) All three seemed to be shouting at me: WHY ARE YOU NOT WORKING???

Tweets by Matthew Wrex and C. Spike Trotman; George Takei's facebook is always full of crazy stuff.

The universe was putting up a sign in the places I procrasti-loiter to tell me that I’m an adult, that writing is my job (one that I love), but if I don’t want to do it, the universe can’t force me to. I won’t write something brilliant (or even anything lame) until I actually put forth the effort to get it done.

Taste

One of the first writing reviews I ever received told me that my piece was not to the reviewer’s taste. “I don’t like this kind of thing,” the reviewer stated, then proceeded to use other words, like “insipid,” “boring,” and “shallow.” It wasn’t a good review. Those words hurt. And for quite a long while after reading them, I couldn’t write.

I sat around a table with ten people I’d never met before, listening to a young man haltingly explain the synopsis of a novel he was hoping to write. I listened politely, but I didn’t make eye contact with him or with anyone else around the table, because I didn’t want anyone to know what I was thinking: “insipid,” “boring,” and “shallow.” What he was proposing to write did not sound at all interesting to me. It sounded like nothing I would ever want to read, and if I had chanced on a paragraph or two, I would have put the book down and gone looking for something else. But when he finished, everyone else had interesting ideas that made me think of his story in a different light. I even found myself contributing ideas of my own.

I came to see that the story that he was hoping to tell was not necessarily going to end up the way I saw it, and was able to admit to myself that it might eventually become something that I would like to read.

I suppose we all have different tastes.

Maybe I should finally forgive that reviewer for his or her own opinion, and the fact that they probably never thought that their precise words would get back to me. In the same way, I would hope that my first reaction would not tarnish a young writer’s enthusiasm for his own work. I would not want him to be unable to write after hearing my unfiltered opinion of his ideas.

And just because I don’t think I’ll like it doesn’t mean the other ten people around the table won’t.

Reddit for Writing Prompts

“What’s everyone doing on this fine Tuesday?” she tweeted to her followers.

“I’m probably going to head over to tumblr and find a writing prompt,” I tweeted back.

“There’s a Reddit for Writing Prompts, too! If that helps!” she replied.

“Thanks, I’ll keep that around for future reference,” I assured her.

What is even
happening here

Then I googled “Reddit for Writing Prompts”

Then I googled “seriously how do I even use reddit”

I generally tend to stay away from stuff online that will take a week and a half to learn how to navigate. And I’m even more apprehensive about reddit, which I only ever hear bad things about. It’s as though the entire website is holding a sign that says “abandon hope all ye who enter; here there be trolls.”

It’s even more intimidating because I know there’s a reddit for, like, everything. Cows? Probably. Chick Fil A? Most likely. Sandwiches? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Also I have no idea what’s going on with any of the millions of arrows all over the place. Am I supposed to use them to like/not like certain posts? There are too many, and I am afraid I will be overwhelmed by reddit's cascades of arrows.

Even though I’m weirded out by the confusing website and convinced half the people who use the site will be jerks to me, once I calm down enough to actually look at some of the writing prompts, it’s actually pretty cool. There are some good ideas, and not just for original fiction. Today I saw a suggestion for a Harry Potter/House M.D. fanfiction crossover, and another for a Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares/Breaking Bad fanfiction crossover. There were several ideas for “last person on earth” stories, and a few for scenarios involving characters being at the gates of heaven. The most interesting prompt was “A time traveller from the 1930s travels to modern day in his time machine and wonders why his invention never caught on.” But my favorite was “You are part of a powerful order of mages. Some control fire, others, water. You however... Have the power of bread. That's right, you're a bread mage. Tell me about your day.”

So even though I’ll probably never sign up and actually learn how to use reddit, I might head over to the writing prompts if I ever need an idea, or just a laugh.

Writing About Writing

It’s very easy for me, especially on the days that I can’t immediately think of something to write about, to let my attention wander on the internet. Sometimes it’s a good thing, because I will occasionally get inspired by a news article, or an argument about something random, or by the contents of a webcomic. Other times I will spend several hours reading the webcomic’s archives and floating in a state of non-working bliss.

Usually it’s the guilty thought of “I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ANYTHING TODAY” that pulls me back to doing what I actually should be doing, but occasionally I come across things like this.

Image property of The Oatmeal.

Earlier today I thought several witty things and amused myself, and found myself thinking, “if only I could draw, I wouldn’t have to write everything down; it would be less work.” Then I read this comic and realized that when you can draw, not only do you have to do the drawing part, but you also have to do the writing part. So really, not being able to draw is a good thing (if I’m looking at the less/more work scale).

Sometimes the only thing you can do when you’re in a state of “I’ve got nothin’” is to write about writing. You might think that “writing about writing” is the same thing as “writing about nothing,” but it’s surprising how stepping back to take a look at what you do will produce a wonderful piece. This comic, like most by The Oatmeal, is endearingly rude and half full of swears, but makes amazing and inspiring points.

As a writer, I get to make my own schedule. For me, this means that once I write something sufficiently amusing, I can do whatever I want for the rest of the day. Play video games, ignore housework, nap, whatever. Once I click that ‘publish’ button, my day is my own.

Every job has its faults, and even though this is my dream job, I still feel like complaining about it sometimes… just not to my wonderful husband who actually has real reasons to complain about his job. “I couldn’t think of anything to write” is such a lame thing to whine about in the face of his actual hardships that I’d rather write something I wasn’t happy with than admit that aloud to him. My husband is awesome.

I love the freedom of being able to write whatever I want. I remember being in school and chafing at ridiculous assignments that I had no interesting creative ideas for, and then feeling like I was set free to romp in a field whenever the assignment happened to be “write whatever you want.” Today it seems like it’s almost opposite. A day full of hours of promise, glistening with the freedom of writing whatever I want seems like oppression, but an interesting phrase, a few words, or an inspiring image can give me the structure I need to creatively produce something amazing.

Sometimes I wish there was an idea generator for the days I when can’t think of anything, a machine without feelings capable of being hurt that I could just push a button as many times as I needed to find something that inspired me. It would be better than playing the writing equivalent of “what do you want for dinner” with my friends. “What should I write about?” “Um, how about…?” “No, that sounds boring.” I suspect that when I inflict that sort of thing on myself and others that deep down I really just want to tell someone else that “your ideas are bad and you should feel bad.” Maybe it somehow makes me feel better? After all, when that situation comes up, I can’t think of anything good, so I suppose it comforts me to know that no one else can either.

An inspiration isn’t something you can control. When I get inspired (usually by a writing prompt of some kind), I can’t turn it off or walk away from it. If I sleep on an idea (or a story), it’s really hard to get that inspiration back. Several times I have ended up working late into the night on something because I knew that if I stopped, I would never be able to come back to it. “What? You want dinner? Well, I started thawing some chicken a couple of hours ago and the recipe I was going to use is sitting on the kitchen counter. Good luck with that; hope the kids like it.”

Cultivating seeds of ideas is sometimes difficult for me. Something funny will happen, or I’ll start pondering a situation and see the interesting or amusing things about it. The smart thing to do, you’d think, would be to write these ideas down somewhere so that later I can come back and use them when I needed to. And I’ve got one of those ‘somewhere’s, a google doc named “stuff to blog about” or some such. But I’ve found that sometimes, writing down that idea before it’s ready can kill it (or make me lose interest in it), just like planting a seedling in the ground ground outside too early. If it’s really a great idea, it will tumble around in my brain for long enough that eventually it will make its way out.

“Make a new friend,” The Oatmeal encourages near the end. “Learn to chainsaw juggle. Read a book. Go hang gliding in your underpants. If you have done all these things and you still don’t have anything to write about, then you shouldn’t be a writer. ...if you don’t have anything to say, then you shouldn’t be talking. And if you don’t have anything to write about, don’t write.”

It’s not like I don’t have things to write about. It’s just one of those moods you get in sometimes, like when you’re eleven and sitting in the middle of your room, surrounded by toys, and whining at your mom: “I’m bored.” I’ve got stuff to write about. I just started reading that cool Rothfuss series (Name of the Wind); there’s a rad spider who’s been living on our front porch for a week or so (I’ve been thinking about ways to start charging him rent, but I’m not sure how I’d monetize slightly digested insect carcasses); and my kids constantly pretend to be dinosaurs. There’s a wealth of stuff going on around here.

It’s hard to get rid of that mood, when you feel uninspired and that there’s nothing interesting enough going on in your life to share with your readers. So when in doubt, write about writing. You may discover that you’ve got quite a bit to write about after all.

Writing Prompt: Boldly Go

Writing Prompt #727

There’s a reason why we love exploration stories. Space, the New World, it doesn’t really matter. People love to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, and study the parts of history with Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo: brave people, going forth into the unknown without fear, only hoping to find something new and exciting that has never been discovered before.

However, the idea that people today have missed out on their chance to discover something or need to step into a cryogenic freezer to wait until humanity has invented the warp engine is silly. People everywhere on earth are discovering new things in different fields every day.

Engineers are designing products to increase efficiency. Astronomers are keeping their eyes on the skies and finding tons of new planets around other stars. People in the service industry are working hard to make each customer’s day a little better. Teachers are testing out new ways to help people learn. Pharmaceutical companies are experimenting with their products to see which are safe for the public to use. Historians are researching the past, determining the reason behind the actions of people who have impacted it. Writers are dreaming up new ways to make their readers think.

Just because we’re not all on an actual vessel that is headed off for unknown lands doesn’t mean that this is not an age of brilliant discovery.

Whatever it is you do, make it new. Make it better.

Boldly go where no one has gone before.

4 Stages of Writing

BLOG CANCELED ON ACCOUNT OF MORE WRITING

Yeah, I'm still writing that story I started yesterday. (I'm on stage 3 now.) I hope it will be awesome enough to be worth the wait.

The 4 Stages of Writing by Debbie Ridpath Ohi.
Check out her awesome work at debbiohi.com!

A Bit Cliché

Once, for an assignment in a high school English class, I started a story with the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.” It was followed by a very amusing tale of two friends whose car broke down and who were forced to walk though the night to a nearby relative’s house. I don’t remember much else about it except there was a musical interlude featuring excerpts from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music and the fact that I started every sentence with the last letter of the previous sentence.

But my teacher didn’t like it.

Check out the article about the phrase
on tvtropes.org. Or, y'know, go read
Peanuts.

It wasn’t because my story wasn’t good, it was because of that beginning. I had thought it was funny. In addition to an evening of bad weather, the picture that “it was a dark and stormy night” conjures up for me is Charles Schultz’s Snoopy, perched on top of his dog house with a typewriter.

I thought it was clever. My teacher thought it was cliché.

I guess it was, in a way, but what’s wrong with that? Clichés permeate our language. Most of us use them without even thinking about what they mean. It doesn’t mean they’re not useful or interesting, but the fact that they’re everywhere puts them on every writer’s blacklist.

Or does it?

Today I came across a list of “681 Clichés to Avoid in Your Creative Writing.” The writer of the article seemed to take a huge amount of satisfaction in shoving as many clichés as possible into the warning that other writers should not do so.

I shouldn’t do it, eh? Challenge accepted.

I love my writing prompts. I enjoy taking a photograph, drawing, or phrase and making up my own story about it, so why shouldn’t I do it with clichés? Unlike someone else’s visual work or quote, clichés aren’t owned by anyone, so I wouldn’t owe royalties to another artist or writer. Unless I’m going to track down some of Benjamin Franklin’s family and give them a cut of whatever I make off of a story inspired by “A penny saved is a penny earned.” (Which would probably feature characters descended from a famous person whose sole means of providing for themselves is by royalties collected from use of their famous ancestors’ words.)

So I guess if you need me, I’ll be perched on top of the dog house with the typewriter.

Ode to the Keyboard

Ahh, a keyboard. You can keep your tablets and your touch screen smartphones. Voice to text doesn’t cut it for me, and even setting pencil to page isn’t as fast as my fingers on the keys. For me, it’s the closest thing from brain to screen.

I can live without a mouse, without a great speaker system, and even without a pristine, unspoiled monitor. I don’t care how many broken pixels there are: just give me a keyboard!

It’s so much easier to be inspired when I know I don’t have to wait long for my ideas to take shape in words. When the words can flow out my fingers, writing no longer seems like a chore, and I can let myself be creative at whatever pace that creativity takes.

Dear Keyboard, I love you. Don’t ever change.