I thought it might be a good time to talk about some of the housekeeping tasks associated with writing.  The most important of these, of course, is backups.

Backups 

I know people who never back up their work.  It sets my teeth on edge when I talk to a novelist who has been working on their book for two years and find they have not backed the file up once in that time.  Not so much because they haven’t backed it up, but because knowing that if they lose that one file they lose two years work.

I would be absolutely shattered.

I know that back-ups are boring, and take time out of writing, but consider what you might lose if you don’t have them.

You need to back-up to cover:

• A corrupted file—what if your word processor crashes in the middle of typing and you can’t get the novel back?
• Computer failure—your computer dies, or your hard drive crashes, or your computer-savvy son decides to reformat the disc for you, or your computer gets stolen
• Human error—you accidentally delete the file.

In an ideal world I would also include more dramatic scenarios here, like your house burning down.  If that happens, then the least of your worries will be the novel you spent two years slaving over (at least initially).  Any good back-up recommendation should include considering this as well.  However, here we will just consider computer failure or human error.

How we back up our novel

Here’s what we do. You may find it excessive, but it works for us.

We have a folder named for the novel.  In this case, Barrain.  Underneath this we have the latest draft.  It’s a word document.  The document is named for the novel and the draft.  For example, Barrain_Draft3.doc. 

In the Barrain directory we have a sub-directory called Backup.  Each night before we open the document, we copy the current Barrain_Draft3.doc into the Backup directory.  We then rename it to include today’s date at the start of the file name.  For example, 20070222_Barrain_Draft3.doc.  We write the date in YYYYMMDD format so that the files are ordered.

Note that I said we do this before we open the document. The problem with doing it from within the word processing program is that you must do a ’save as’, save the file into the backup directory with the new name, then close the file, and open the original again.

If you are anything like me, you’ll forget to do the second part and start typing in the backup file.  Then the next day, when you open the Barrain_Draft3.doc file, all yesterday’s work is missing.

It may seem excessive, but this way we have a complete version of every day’s work.

Once a week I copy the latest version over onto one of the other network PCs (one of the advantages of having a home network), and every couple of months I copy it onto a flash drive instead.

For some people, this might be overkill, and it probably is, but it works for us.  Disc space is cheap compared to two years lost work. 

Most important for us though, is that it’s a habit. 

Develop a habit of making regular back-ups.

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I have mentioned before what I think about writing courses, and how my experience to date with universities hasn’t been much good.

Calder started a part-time writing course at the local TAFE this term.  From what she has told me, it sounds pretty good.

She chose three subjects:

• Writing and editing
• Photography for writers
• Web design.

She had her first classes last week.

In ‘Photography for writers’ she learns how to use a camera and take photos for articles.  She also has to write the articles that go with the photographs.  They will be marked on the article as well as on the photography.  After all, this is a professional writing course.

Likewise with ’Web design’.  Here they are asked to create web pages, and put content on them. Again, they will be marked not just on their ability to create the web pages, but on the content they include.  After all, this is a professional writing course.

So far, I’m impressed.

We haven’t done a lot of work on Barrain at present. Most of our writing work has been on Shared Memories, a novel we had completed previously, that is currently going through the draft process.

There is one section left to re-write in Shared Memories, and that’s another major draft finished.

Barrain has suffered in the interim. Progress is slow, almost non-existent.  We’re up to 18,000 words at present.

Why start one story and move on to something else?

Over Christmas Barrain was hard going. Sometimes, when you are stuck, you just have to take a break from the story that is giving trouble and work on another.

It’s always good to have more than one project going.

But … I don’t mean start a new story every time.  Have works at different stages—one in first draft, another that just needs a polish.

When you get bogged down creatively, switch over to the other book and do some nuts and bolts editing.

• Don’t work on two creative drafts at the one time
• Don’t juggle too many projects—two is about all we can manage
• Don’t use it as an excuse to drop what you are doing and start something else.

Persevere until you absolutely sure you are stuck.  Sometimes, when a story isn’t working all you need to do is take a couple of days off. Only occasionally does it need the more drastic action outlined here. Ensure that you don’t put the novel away until you have really tried—and I mean really, really tried—all other options to get back on track.

Lastly, when you have finished the other project, go back to the book you put away for the interim.  You may be surprised at how much enthusiasm you have for it when you are ready.

I was reading some of Calder’s writing today. Her style is a lot different to mine.

As I read I tried to work out what made her style so different. After all, we have written together for so long you would think our writing would almost be interchangeable.

In the end, the only description I could come up with was that her writing is more ‘removed’ than mine. I think she would write great literary fiction, the detached observer type.

Now I know that you can’t confuse style of writing with story telling, but given that her writing is so much more removed from the reader, what makes her so much better at characterisation than me?

Why aren’t her characters distant too?

Why do so many writers of science fiction persist in creating worlds set far into the future and making it exactly like the one we have now.

One thousand years ago:

• The once mighty Byzantine empire was falling apart
• The Song Dynasty was unifying China, creating a central bureacracy and paper money
• The Vikings raided and explored most of Europe, and parts of Asia, Africa and America
• Western Europe was entering a period of rapid population growth in the middle ages
• The Aztecs were searching for a home.

Life was different, considerably different, and a lot of things have happened in the intervening time.  The great civilisations of that time no longer exist. As Hamish McRae says:

Go back 1000 years and Asia … accounted for two-thirds of world GDP. Africa accounted for nearly 12%, much more than western Europe … 

Empires rise and fall while the economic wheel keeps turning. The last millennium saw the west gain ascendancy – but our decline is inevitable.

1000 years of globalisation, Hamish McRae, November 2001.

Why then, do some science fiction writers persist in setting their novels 1,000 years into the future, and then creating a world based on a Western civilisation almost exactly the same as we have today?

One thousand years has a nice ring to it. It’s far enough into the future to permit anything to happen, to allow all sorts of wondrous technology to be invented—genetic engineering, humans living forever, space travel. You name it, we can achieve it by then.

But don’t tell me the United Nations is the primary ‘peace keeping’ force in the world or the universe.  Don’t tell me that the hero of the story, from the most technologically advanced race on the planet, is from one of the current ascendant western civilisations such as the United States of America or Western Europe.

Western civilisation will be history, the United Nations lucky if they make it as a footnote on the page.

How much would your writing change if, instead of typing or writing it, you dictated it?

As a teenager all the science fiction stories I read agreed on one thing. Computers of the future would be voice operated.

The personal computer is 30 years old now, and voice recognition has come a long way, but most of us still communicate with our computer via the keyboard and mouse.

I believe I can see the future of the mouse—replaced by touch screens—but what about the keyboard?  Will it ever be replacecd by voice?

According to the Writer’s Blog, novelist Richard Powers claims to have dropped the keyboard in favour of dictating his novels into voice recognition software. (Original link from Lorelle on Wordpress.)  Voice recognition is not without its problems, though.

I recall, during last November, Future Boy decided to try voice recognition to write his NaNoWriMo novel.  I don’t know how he went.

The technology has certainly improved enough to make voice activated writing possible, but what about us?  Do we actually want it?

I remember the work it took to train myself to type words straight onto the computer, rather than writing them on paper first, and then transcribing them. Even though I was a touch typist, and used to the PC from my coding days, it took months to train myself.

In the end I succeeded. So much so that now I find it more difficult to write longhand.

Will the same happen for voice recognition text?

I honestly don’t know.

As we writers know from our writing, people don’t speak in real life the way they do in books. I definitely don’t write like I speak.

I repeat myself when I talk.. I use ‘um’ and ‘ah’ a lot. I waffle. I definitely cannot ‘tell’ a story anywhere near as well as I can write one.  Other people I know, who can tell beautiful stories, can’t write them.

Most people can become competent at something with practise. Toastmasters is the perfect example of this. You may not be the world’s greatest speaker by the time you finish their sessions, but you will certainly be a better speaker than you were when you started. 

Training is the same. I am a competent trainer, because I run regular training courses. I am not a ‘good’ trainer, though, in the way that someone with natural teaching skills is.

I suspect voice activated writing would be the same.

When, or if, voice activated input arrives in the mainstream, people will gradually switch over to it, the way we switched from pen-based writing to keyboard-based writing. It will take practise to get used to, but most of us will eventually become competent at it.

What might change, however, are the naturals at the top of the writing tree. Those who can ‘tell’ a good story, but not write it, will now have a natural advantage over those of us who can write a good story but not tell it.