Okay, this is Val Campbell, and this is the third post in How to Write. I explained in the previous one that I havd published many novel books. I've done a lot of technical and business writing in my life, and I just decided to write a novel because, frankly, a lot of what I was reading kind of left me uninspired. I found myself saying, Geez, I can write better than this—and they're selling books! Then I thought, No, wait a minute—I can write better than that. So I kind of put my money where my mouth is, as I explained in the first post, and I just dove in and started writing without really knowing what was involved in writing fiction, in writing a novel. Then I discovered a lot of things as I went along, and decided to do a series of articles so you can learn from my experiences.
One of the reasons I wanted to write this article is because when I looked on YouTube and saw all these people making videos and selling books about how to write books, I found that so many of them—I'd read the book or watch the video—and it just left me with more questions. They didn’t really answer the basic questions. There could have been many reasons for that, and I talked about that in the first article. I also talked in the first article (the first class) about the importance of the physical place where you're writing and the tools you're using—the keyboards, computers, and things like that—and why those are so important.
In the second class, I talked about understanding the process of writing and what it's about. Basically, your brain is divided into two parts: you've got the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is the part that organizes things—this is the part that's going to do your outlines and stuff like that. But much of your creativity comes out of your subconscious mind, and you need to let that happen. So if those two are fighting, that's not a good thing, right? What you really want is to organize things a little bit with your conscious mind (in my opinion) but not so much that it interferes with your subconscious mind and the creativity that comes from there. The better you can tune these two together—which just takes practice, it's just going to take some time—the more inventive and amazing your work becomes. This is your craft, right? So: space and tools, letting yourself just relax and write, let that subconscious mind work for you, and understand what that process is.
Now that we've covered those subjects, let's get into some of the technique of writing, I use Google Docs quite a bit for my organizational,
this bulk of this class is about how to organize your writing. I have everything I can think of about details: what clothes the characters are wearing, maps, information about my specific characters that I keep here, different people in the—you know, goals for how many words I want to have in the book, all kinds of things. The first book in Operation Austin has a lot about sailing—a catamaran—so I did tremendous research on catamarans, sailing in the Caribbean, the nation of Belize, water currents, airstreams
I mean, tremendous. So I keep all that in one place, okay? And so it's all in one place—literally 71 pages. And you can see, even right down to the clothes
now, why do I do this? Because I have a scene where I wanted Paige to wear something like this, so I had to go look and find this because I needed to describe it. I'm trying to share with my audience a piece of clothing that a beautiful young woman is wearing
how am I going to describe it if I don't know what it looks like? I literally sat and looked at this dress as I was describing what she was wearing in that scene.
*And this is—nobody taught me this. I just started doing this because I thought, Well, how—you know, I'm a guy. What do I know about a woman's dress or a bathing suit or something like that? I know when I see—when I go, Wow, she's hot!
but I don't know about styles and things like that. Men's or women's—I'm the least stylish character you can imagine, and yet I'm writing a book about people who would value that. So here I am—different suits,
different—you'll recognize this right here from one of the scenes in Operation Austin where Andy, one of the characters, wears this with a dress. And as I roll down through here—this is Layla.
You know, in my mind, I've got to visualize because the more I can make this real in my subconscious, my conscious mind takes it and internalizes this and makes it real to me. At one point, people have said to me, Gee, you talk about these people like they really exist. I said, They do exist—they exist in my mind. And if you realize that everything on the outside of you only exists in your mind—that's the only place that it, for you, that it lives. Now, it does exist in a physical world, but to you, it's what comes in your eyes and your senses that's interpreted by your brain. So to a certain degree, philosophically and from a brain function standpoint, these people—my characters—are just as real to me as anybody else in my life. And so I act like they are, and hopefully, I fall in love with them, and you will fall in love with them just as much.
Okay, I'm sharing with you some of the methodology and why I use this visualization technique. This is Paige
and—why did I pick this one? I don't know. I just happened to see her someplace, and my subconscious mind grabbed her. I said, First off, if you saw her somewhere in the world, she does bikini shots. Don't know her, never met her. We'd love to—hopefully someday she'll contact me and read this article and see, Hey, that's me!—and she'll get a hold of me. But her smile and the way she—you know, exploded the camera—I mean, she just—the camera loved her. All these models and whatever on there, but as soon as this woman came on the scene, the camera loved her, and that's what I imagined Paige was like. Okay, so I modeled—you know, you'll see some of these things and you'll understand. Here's the dress that Paige wore one night at dinner.
So you see what I'm doing—I'm not only building it in terms of words, I'm building it in my mind in terms of images that I can use to then translate in the book.
Okay, so on and on we go—you know, here's a dress right here that andy wore in one of the scenes where she had the thigh jewelry on
I don't know what you want to call it—body jewelry. So anyway, you get the point, right? Lots of shoes, and the boat, and you know, on and on and on up to 71 pages.
All right, so enough of that. Let's go on so You see what I'm doing? This becomes so important because I refer back to this when I need details.
Another part of this that you'll see—maybe if I go down here some—is a script. You know, here's one
I would be driving down the freeway, and I would get an idea for something I wanted the characters to say. Then I would try to remember that, come back, and write it down. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle—I had times I'd wake up at three o'clock—my brain was creating a dialogue, and I would have to get up and come downstairs and write it down because I didn't want to lose it. That's the repository of all of that information. I keep it all in one place.
Now, this is a spreadsheet
and again, this is Google Sheets—and primarily the reason I use it—you could use Excel the same way
I just kind of got started doing this because I wanted to explore using Google Docs as a writing platform, and I'll talk about that in a minute. Okay, but this is a spreadsheet. I had so much trouble keeping track of who was in what city, what time it was, time zones, what they were doing because my book Operation Austin is about a covert mercenary team, and they're on operations in Austin, Atlanta, and Belize all at the same time. I had to have all of that coordinated and come together, and I didn't want to have a time be off a little bit—somebody would pick up on that.
I wanted accuracy, so this is what I did. This was the date—in some cases, I even got into times—where each person was, what they were doing, and how they were coming together because this is what I needed to do.
Now, later on, I found out the key tools, you know, in some other videos that I watched on YouTube—that this was actually something that people do. I didn't know—I just started doing it because it was a way that I could keep things organized. So these are some of the key tools that I've used.
Whether you're using Word and creating a separate document (which I do more now—I don't use Google Docs so much—I won't be going forward in the future), if you love Google Docs, if you are a Google Docs fan, that's great—Docs and Sheets. I just got to share something with you: I've compared writing in Google Docs, Word, Grammarly, and also another platform I'm not even going to mention (not important). I found Google Docs to be less accurate in their ability to suggest spelling and grammar changes. Okay, so I've abandoned it. Word is so much better—it's profoundly better. Now why? I don't know. There's actually a couple of things that Google Docs does a little better, but not enough to overcome the issues because when I started looking at punctuation and would bring something back over into Word, it would start highlighting all these things, and I thought, Yeah, that's not—I don't like the punctuation style that was created over in Google Docs. There's just some severe limitations there. I don't know why—I'm not going to spend time trying to figure it out. I'm going to write in Word now.
Sheets and Excel—for what I'm doing here, I don't see any difference. But again, not sure that I want to try and keep multiple files open. So—but you know, once in a while I'll come over here and I'll work—maybe it's a mind break for me or something like that. But I will use Google Docs and Sheets for some things, and Word and Excel for some others. But if I just had to limit what I was doing, I would stick with Excel and Word and Grammarly. That's going forward—that's the pattern I got into. I started doing all kinds of things, and then, over the course of time and evolution, I just found that this is what ended up being. I was writing chapters in Word, pulling them over into Grammarly, looking at sentence structure suggestions, making changes, pulling them back over into Word. And when I get to that point, I'm going to explain to you why I do that and what some of the issues are that I've found. But that's the process, right? You learn these things, and that's why I want to share with you how I do this, what techniques I use.
Still, I end up spending quite a bit of time with a piece of paper and a pen—on my stationary bike, I'm pedaling there, and I've got this in front of me the whole time with a pencil or a pen. And as a thought comes into my mind, I stop and just jot a quick note. So right now, I'm putting down thoughts—major thought points—for the second book. And just sharing with you that I originally conceived of this book going in one direction, in a different country, and as I started thinking about this, my subconscious mind has started taking over and shifting in a different direction. I thought, Well, that's really interesting, because it sounds to me like one of the major subplots is going in a direction that I thought was going to be minor. I'm coming up with more ideas for the minor subplot than I am the major plot. So it will work itself out—I trust the system and the process, and it's going to be a lot of fun.
And I do believe in setting goals—I'm not married to them because I want my craft, I want the art to be what happens, right? And so if it takes a little longer, I'm not going to obsess about that. But I'd like to publish my next book sometime between Mother’s Day (which is the 12th of June) or the end of June—so sometime that's about two weeks from now—and I think I can probably pull that off. And then the next one, I want to have around Easter. So within a six-month period of time, I want to have three new novels out. And I think that's doable for me with my schedule and with the content that I have already laid out in front of me.
Everybody's going to be a little different. I think I might have mentioned before that in one of the writing groups I joined, one of the ladies said it took her five years to write her novel, and I just thought, Oh, Lord. And I mean this not as criticism—just looking at myself, I thought I would be in agony if it took me five years to do this because it was like a little demon inside of me fighting to get out. It was eating me—I was trying to claw its way out of my chest, you know? And that was how I felt. It was so demanding that it get out of me and into the book. And I think if it took me five years, I would—I don't know. I can't imagine it. But people do what they have to do. If you're a writer, you're going to write, and you're going to take your own time, and it's going to be what it is.**
I hope this series is helpful and you can see how a technical process can help you start creating content. Having a process that uses available tools is a key to good writing.