Professional writer
Suppose you’re in this position: you have created a document. You have sent it to someone else for their comments or to edit it. They have now sent it back to you, but in the meantime you have made some changes to your original. How are you going to sort out this mess?!
If you and your colleague have been using Microsoft Word, then you don’t have a problem. All you need to do is use the Combine Documents feature.
On one of my visits to second-hand bookshops I picked up a copy of The Writer, from January 1937. There are some things which haven’t changed, but the technology definitely has!
I’ve been playing around with a word processor called Jarte. It isn’t specifically intended for use by writers as such (as far as I know), but it does have some features which many writers will find useful.
It’s confession time again. When I said that I like to work on paper, for instance when drafting an outline for an article, I omitted to mention one important fact. Apart from when I jot things down in a notebook I carry around in my inside jacket pocket, all the notes I write the old-fashioned way are converted into a digital form as soon as possible afterwards.
There are two main reasons for this, both of them pragmatic.
I wonder if the management/business model of levels of competence applies to writers? The basic premise is that as you travel on the journey from novice to expert, you pass through four stages of competence. These are
Here are my reflections on some of the reasons that I think writers should maintain a blog. They are by no means mutually exclusive.
In no particular order…
They say that time is money, and this is certainly true for the professional writer. If you’re billing a client according to the amount of time spent on the project, you’ll need to keep an accurate record of that. You could use a spreadsheet, which certainly has its advantages, but the beauty of Taskcoach is that it will actually record the precise amount of time you clock up – as long as you remember to set it going when you start work!
Here is a set of rules that I hope you will find useful. The way I see it, readers’ time is far too precious to waste. People are made to feel guilty, or have somehow been conditioned to feel guilty, if they don't read every possibly useful report. Or every relevant newspaper article. But as writers, or content producers, we have a responsibility too. Here are some rules which I am gradually starting to live by myself.
I feel a bit like the first person in Khalil Gibran’s story of The Gravedigger. It’s taken me years and years, but I am finally getting rid of boxes and boxes of my clippings, ie the articles I’ve had published.
This is not out of necessity, even though they do take up a fair bit of room in our loft. It’s just that I’ve decided I don’t need them any more, which made me think: why does anyone need to keep their clippings?
I think there are three main reasons.
How do you keep your clippings?
If you keep them in paper format, they take up more and more room as your portfolio grows. If you keep them in boxes in the loft, as I do, you never get to see them anyway. I think if you’re going to store them in printed format you should go the whole hog and keep them nicely bound in some sort of presentation folder, and place them on shelves in your living space so that they can be admired by you and anyone who happens to browse your bookshelves!
Just because I love technology and spend a lot of time on the web, and writing for the web, doesn’t mean I’ve eschewed books. I still use books extensively (and intensively) for my writing. Not any books either, but ones written or contributed to by experts.
I think if you’re serious about writing you don’t want to be messing about with so-called “crowd-sourced” information, which may or may not be correct.
If there’s one thing that really annoys me it’s chapter headings and article headlines where you can’t tell what the subject matter is until you read it. Who needs a situation in which you don’t know if you want to read something until you have read it? The way I look at it is that if the author can’t even be bothered being clear when he’s trying to entice you to read his stuff, why should you be bothered to oblige him by reading it?
It's important to be published by a traditional publisher
Image by Terry Freedman via Flickr
In this day and age, in which anyone can publish and distribute their books electronically, or self-publish them by going down several routes (none of which need include the traditional vanity publisher), why should anyone bother approaching a traditional publisher? After all, very few of the thousands of manuscripts that publishers receive find their way into book form, and of those that do, very few hit the big time. There are, in fact, at least 4 reasons to try to get published by the age-old process of going to publishers.
It’s always a good idea to ask permission to quote someone, especially if you’re (slightly) putting words into their mouths. “How might that arise?”, you might ask.
If you’re doing research for an article, it’s easy to lose track of where you came across information, such as useful quotes you can use. This is where an electronic aide can come in very handy.
Two tools you might consider using are:
Can there be any excuse, in this day and age, for poorly-researched material? There are books, the internet and still, even in these straitened times, public libraries with reference sections.