My Post-It Notes Novel

As a writer, over time, I've only gotten weirder. I've gotten to the point where I can't finish any draft I start and have now resorted to writing my novels on Post-It Notes just so I can have the story organized and out of my head.

I discovered this idea from reading Roz Morris' novel, Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish with Confidence. I have to say, so far it's actually working! I'm about half-way finished writing up all the different scenes and snippets I want to include in my first draft. Half-way! That is so big for me. It's odd, but I really feel like I'm writing the manuscript already, even though I'm not literally doing that, yet. But, composing a cohesive, viable story is half the battle.

What I love most about this little tactic is that I can add and remove scenes so incredibly easily. I'm figuring out what works and what doesn't long before any prose is being typed up in "stone" on that computer. I realize I have a huge dislike, or dread for trying to find something I wrote within a sea of literally thousands of words in order to axe it, add to it or move it around. Of course, this has to be done during every author's editing phase, but at least I can do some of that axing, adding and moving before those scenes ever gets lost in that abyss known as a Word document.

Life made easier! That's progress for me. I've been in a horrible writing slump lately and this is really helping me to move past it. I never thought I'd actually be writing an entire novel on Post-It Notes, but now I can see myself doing this with every story I write from now on.


Have you ever tried anything off-beat or bizarre in order to get out of a writing slump?

Getting Rid of "That" in Your Writing

I don't even have a clue what to blog about this week, but I ran into a really funny issue last night when I was doing a special revision of my current WIP (about the mad scientist and wings. It gets ugly....).

I learned from K.M. Weiland's blog, Wordplay, a super awesome blog on the craft, how to do a really neat trick to catch every instance of overusing the word "that" in your fiction writing. Because, we all overuse it, don't we? It's just one of those words that<--right here, we don't even realize we're writing and don't even notice while reading, either! Ugh... It is frustrating, but you can do the following trick to catch yourself before you send your little darlings out into the cruel, "that"-hating world.

Open up your document and do a "Replace" search function on the word "that" for every instance it shows up in the document. In the line where it asks you what word to replace it with, put in a word you are sure to notice every time you read it. In fact, put it in ALL-CAPs because it will stand out a lot better and you'll be even more sure not to gloss over it.

So, which word did I use to replace "that" with? "POOP," in all-caps even. And, when I came across the replacements of "that" with "POOP," they read something like this:
  

“Thank you,” he said, coughing out the words. “I’m eternally grateful to you. You know, I sought you out because I had a feeling I could trust you. I was right about POOP.”

***

She would never say something so candid and informal like POOP to him while [he was] conscious, but she thought like this on a regular basis, especially on days like these. 

Regarding the second one, of course she wouldn't say something like that to her boss! That one actually made sense, interestingly enough. Needless to say, I busted my gut three ways to Sunday while revising my partial manuscript last night. OH, it was so much fun, I could barely think straight! But, most importantly, I caught all 50 of those "that" buggers and got rid of the ones that really didn't need to be there. 


Give this trick a shot if you suspect you repeat certain words way too often in your writing. It ought to clean it right up!