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FionaJoseph

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Writer tagged in blog chain. Forced to answer questions.

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I had my arm twisted last week to take part in a blog chain. Liz Broomfield, writer, editor, entrepreneur and author of five splendid non-fiction books, asked if she could tag me. All you have to do, she said, is answer four easy questions and then nominate someone else. Sounds painless, I thought, so here goes …

1. What are you working on?
It’s usual for me to have two or three writing projects on the go; I like being able to switch my focus from one to another if I’m feeling blocked.

At the moment I’m on the second draft of COMFORTS FOR THE TROOPS: a novel inspired by Cadbury women workers in WW1. I’ll be publishing this through my own imprint, Foxwell Press, later this year. I’ve begun researching another biography which I’m also hugely excited about, and looking forward to sharing more news about this very soon.

This month (March) I’ve been working with a BBC radio producer on a proposal for a Radio 4 documentary feature. Also, I’ve written my first ever script! WHEN WE SEE WINDMILLS is a 45-minute audio dramatisation of Beatrice Cadbury’s perilous journey to Holland on board a convoy ship during WW1. There’s zero chance of this actually being commissioned for Radio 4 (they are full to bursting with WW1 programmes) but as I’d love to write for radio I’m pleased to have a ‘calling card’ script under my belt.

2. How does your writing differ from others in its genre?
Let me pick biography as a genre. My readers are the best people to say how my writing compares to or differs from other biographers. However, I *do* think you need to be clear about your intentions as a writer. My rules are broadly these:

  • be truthful; be curious; don’t be salacious.
  • tell the best story you can: one that entertains whilst informing, and maybe – just maybe – inspires.
  • find the driving question behind the story.
  • honour your natural writing voice; don’t be hung up on some external ideal about how biography should be written; simple and elegant prose is all you need.

The most gratifying moment is to meet someone who tells me they’re “not really a reader”, but that they’ve read and enjoyed my books.

3. Why do you write what you do?
I write factual, fact-inspired AND fictional stories because I’m profoundly interested in people. Someone once said to be a writer is to be a lifelong student of human psychology. People are wonderful, surprising, perplexing, highly irrational – they do things that fly in the face of logic and rational thought! I find this fascinating so perhaps I write to explore and understand human nature.
Writing biographies can create an excellent talking point. It’s like being at a party, saying, “Let me introduce you (the reader) to this person. I think you’d find her/him interesting.”

NEO

First drafts on a NEO

4. How does the writing process work for you?
I do a lot of daydreaming at the start – ruminating, thinking, processing ideas. Does this work? Does that work? What am I actually investigating here? I write down notes and put them in a box.

I do first drafts on my NEO, a very low-tech word processor, and then send it to my Mac for editing, where I use a combination of Pages and a software program called Storyist (it has the same functionality as Scrivener). I print out the first draft and go somewhere away from home to read it through in one sitting. I’m an adder so what I have is more of an outline, which I layer and layer, building up description, depth of character, plot nuances and so on until I arrive at the required length. Then I usually need to strip back again by a couple of thousand words. That makes it sound very neat but of course it’s a lot more chaotic and mysterious than that.

 
Nominations
I’d like to invite my writing chum, the original and thought-provoking writer Rob Ronsson, whose marvellous book NO MEAN AFFAIR was published by Foxwell Press in 2012. Over to you, Rob!
 

Evernote: the next best thing to Barbara Windsor?

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Like all good control freaks I love order, and creating processes and systems. (The first time I met Excel, for example, I knew we’d be a match made in heaven.) But I must admit there are times when I’m researching on t’internet that I come across stuff that’s potentially interesting for my writing, but I don’t have a pressing need for it right there and then. So, what to do? Copy the link into a Word file or a spreadsheet? Print off the page and file a hard copy? Make it a favourite or a desktop shortcut? It seems like a big processing decision to make for something that I don’t actually want to deal with until later.

Wouldn't that be great?

I want one of those

It’s at times like this that I wish I was Barbara Windsor in the 1960s film Carry on Spying. Not for her magnificent bosom (well maybe) but because her character, Daphne Honeybutt, had another great asset: a photographic memory. With just one blink of her heavily mascara’d eyelashes she could commit huge documents to memory.

Wouldn’t it be cool if your brain could take a snapshot of your computer screen? And while I’m wishing, it would be even more fabulous if someone invented a USB cable that could download the information from our brains straight to our PC.

Hey, I’ll use Evernote instead

The inventors of Evernote must have been spying on me, because this is one of those thoughtful web-based tools that feels like it was invented just to meet my needs.

Evernote lets you ‘clip’ web pages, notes, files and images and store them in your online account, which you can create for free. You need to install Evernote on your computer and make sure the Evernote icon appears in the toolbar. Then, whenever you see something you want to save, you just clip it to Evernote. This is great as a way for writers to organise all those interesting web pages in a single place and then review their potential at a later date.

To see how it works watch this video:

Evernote is being developed all the time and there’s other whizzy stuff you can do with your smartphone. Me, I’m happy clipping pages from the web for now and pretending to be Babs.

Have you used Evernote? It’d be good to know whether or not you find it as useful as I do. Are there any alternative web tools out there? How do you keep track of your online research? Let me know.

Fiona Joseph

Writeboard: an editing tool for creative writers

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"But Mum, I really NEED that notebook."

"But Mum, I really NEED that notebook."

A couple of years ago I surprised myself by having the urge to write a poem. Yes, I actually sat down and wrote a poem! Now you might believe that poetry should be composed on sheets of handcrafted paper bound up in a leather notebook, preferably whilst sitting in a gentle breeze in the park or on a beach. (Now where’s that floaty dress?) And I was ready to buy into this writerly lifestyle, truly. I even got some real pens with different coloured inks. Then I remembered I had children. And part of the deal with kids is that you surrender all rights to ownership of beautiful stationery. Perhaps it’s a problem of boundaries (the lack of) in our household, but my offspring have a simple view of life – What’s yours is mine. End of.

Bye bye notebook, hello computer…

I’ve yet to conduct a survey on this, but my hunch is that the majority of creative writers with PCs use Microsoft Word for editing and formatting their work. It’s certainly my default option and, barring a few idiosyncrasies, it works most of the time.

But one feature where Microsoft Word falls down is when you want to keep track of multiple drafts of your writing – especially if it’s a short text (like a poem, a song, a comedy sketch, a blurb, a press release, and so on) where you could feasibly go through dozens of iterations of a single line. It’s a bit cumbersome to keep saving the file each time under a different name, i.e. myworkofgeniusV25.doc. I know that Word has the Track Changes facility but I find this difficult to use. And what about the version you wrote 10 or 20 drafts ago? Blimey, suppose the first draft was really the best version all along!

A better solution

The Writeboard is one of a number of work-based tools from the awesome Chicago-based company, 37signals. (I could sing the praises of these guys and their simple, elegant products all day long, but for now I’ll keep to the point.)

writeboard

Writeboard is an online text editor that lets you write, and then save every edit. It displays links to each edit down the right hand side of the screen so that you can easily select and compare different versions. Here’s an example, showing the deleted words and the new text.

Twinkle

There are other advantages. Because Writeboard is a web-based application, you can access and edit your file from any computer providing it has an internet connection and browser. This means less messing around with memory sticks or emailing documents to yourself so you can access them on another computer.  You don’t get quite as much by way of formatting with Writeboard, although you can certainly do bold, italics, underline, resizing headings and inserting weblinks. If you want more flexibility, simply copy and paste your best version into Word for a final polish.

The other cool thing is that Writeboard, like GoogleDocs, allows you to share work and collaborate with other people. You can each access the same document online and make changes to it. But what if you hate what your writing partner’s done to your text (like Raymond Carver did with his editor’s brutal cuts)? Again, you just roll back to the previous version.

How do I get a Writeboard?

Unlimited Writeboards are available here for free, and Writeboard is also bundled with 37signals’ online storage organiser called Backpackit, which has a free basic version, although I pay a few dollars each month because the upgrade is worth it for me.

So what cool tools or other software applications are out there for writers? Perhaps you use an alternative to Writeboard, like GoogleDocs? Let me know how you manage multiple edits and collaborations.

Fiona Joseph

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