File Backups and Writing on the Cloud

Image courtesy Comindware.

As a young writer, I was obsessed with portable word processing.  Being able to work on *.doc files while on the go was why I continued to use Palm OS devices long after their heyday, and why to this day I'm still fascinated by anachronistic devices like the sadly now-discontinued Alphasmart series.  But one of the main reasons these technological milestones of yesteryear are no longer around is because they've been rendered obsolete, like so many other devices that serve specific purposes, by the ubiquity of the do-everything smartphone.

If you have a smartphone, you can write, edit, and process documents with 99% of the functionality of the full-blown MS Office suite.  Even redlined edits and footnotes, long ignored by mobile document apps and the bane of editors and legal professionals everywhere, can be utilized by apps like Textmaker Mobile.  And if you pair that smartphone with cloud storage accounts like Dropbox (my personal favorite), Google Drive, OneDrive, or iCloud, you don't need to fumble with USB cables or worry about keeping up-to-date between desktop and mobile versions of your files.  Every time you save your changes, they'll be uploaded to every device linked to your cloud account.  You can spend your 30-minute train commute drafting a new scene on your phone, and that draft will be waiting for you on your computer when you get home.

All that being said, storing your writing on the cloud isn't foolproof.  If you accidentally delete a file, you might find it also deleted from every other linked device.  (There are steps to recover those files, but it's not always a sure thing.)  Sometimes the cloud service itself may make a mistake and delete your files by accident.  The bottom line is, relying solely on cloud storage is still putting all of your eggs in one basket, no matter how widely distributed that basket's contents may be.

So while your writing should be on the cloud - and is made incalculably easier to pass from smartphone to desktop to laptop and back again because of it - it shouldn't only be here.  As with all vital data, it should be backed up in more than one way.

The main backup I like to use is on removable media, like flash drives or USB-powered hard drives.  I use the free version of SyncBack to copy the contents of my Dropbox to removable media on a weekly basis.  I'd suggest that mission critical files be backed up on at least two redundant mediums, so that if one fails, there's still a backup available.

The final backup is one I use rarely, but is a great fail-safe for those who don't completely trust their work to electronic devices (and, so long as most digital storage media remain susceptible to strong magnetic fields, perhaps none of us should):  paper copies.  I try to avoid printing things out whenever possible, but for your most important pieces of work, keeping hard, physical copies ensure that, short of a cataclysm that divests you of nearly everything you possess, you'll never lose the fruits of your labor.  

Fictional Tips: A Page A Day (APAD) Revisited

In one of the inaugural posts on the Nexus of Misc blog, I proposed that the three Rs of practicing any skill - including storytelling - are rigor, repetition, and ritualization.  The underlying notion is simple: to become good at something takes more than raw aptitude or inborn talent (though either can make the road a whole lot smoother).  In the end, though, you have to travel that road to get where you want to go.

This can often be easier said than done.  A penchant for procrastination is, I've found, something that almost everyone is born with.  Whether it's a term paper for a class, an article to be published in a scholarly journal, a short story, or an illustration, often times the hardest part about getting work done is getting yourself to sit down and actually plod your way through it.  The good folks at Writing Excuses offered the term "BICHOK" as advice for the itinerant writer: Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard.

My approach adapts the same principle to some of the progress benchmarks that writers like Stephen King swear by.  APAD, or a page a day, espouses an incremental approach to completing your creative (or even non-creative) undertaking, by 1) breaking it up into per-day-sized pieces and 2) most importantly, taking on each of those pieces day after day until the work is complete.

My original APAD post was intended as a call to action, but ironically, that post would be the last on the Nexus for almost a year!  Hardly practicing what I preached, as far as blogging goes.  Since then, I've tried to separate the Nexus's overly ambitious topic coverage into more clearly delineated niches, with Fictional Matters inheriting the posts focusing on writing and the creative arts.   I wanted to repeat that call to action, but this time couple it with an overt commitment on my part.  It has been my goal this month to begin providing new content on Fictional Matters, Watches to Wear, and Goods to Buy every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and to continue those scheduled updates into November, even as I take on NaNoWriMo 2011.

If you have large projects to write like a thesis paper or novel, a book or anthology to edit, or (the current occupant of my creative desk space) a comic book to pen, using the principle of APAD can help you to make it more manageable and to position yourself to make steady progress by minimizing the opportunities to procrastinate.  Give APAD a try, and if you do, be sure to tell me how it works for you by leaving a comment below.  Whether it works or fails, I'm interested in learning how it goes!

Fictional Tip: Creating to White Noise

Nearly every creator has stared at a vast expanse of white struggling to set down the first few words of a story or the establishing line work of an image.  Faced with the stark emptiness and contradictorily endless possibilities that a blank page or canvas presents to a creator, the silence of a controlled - but equally empty - work environment can sometimes echo so loudly that it only compounds feelings of apprehension and paralysis.    Perhaps this is why many creators create with music playing in the background; Stephen King, for example, describes his preference for Heavy Metal in his memoir, On Writing.  Another near-cliche has writers seeking out the comforting ensconcement of the coffee shop, where relaxing surrounds and the ambient buzz of fellow patrons can ease the oppression of the creative void.  My preferred white noise of choice is the TV rerun - but only of certain varieties, and all with one prevailing virtue: I've watched them before.

The first variety is cooking shows.  My favorites include Alton Brown's Good Eats (which I've watched so much that I've taken to refer to Mr. Brown as "shisho," the Japanese word for "master"), Iron Chef (original Japanese program), and Jamie Oliver's and Gordon Ramsay's various series.  I've found that they provide a welcome distraction for the small part of my consciousness that serves as the eternal critic, deriding every creative thought that enters my mind and dares to transfer itself onto paper or computer screen.  (That part certain has its uses - namely in the editing and revising phase of creation - but it's a voice that needs to shut up when a work is in its formative stages.)  The acts and instructions of cooking are far enough removed from what I'm writing or drawing in order to keep the programs from being distractions themselves, as my having seen them before keeps me from becoming too consumed with what's happening there to neglect the work I'm creating.

The second variety is specifically Star Trek episodes from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.  I've seen these series enough times to usually recall the plot of an episode with no more than the first few seconds of the opening scene, so once again the danger for distraction is minimal.  Also, though the plots and milieu are somewhat uncomplicated compared to the stories I endeavor to tell, they for me also represent a large part of my foundational narrative: that is, I grew up with these stories, so at some elemental level, they possess poetic resonance with the very reasons that drew me toward storytelling in the first place.  

The third variety are Japanese-language programs, primarily documentaries and - predictably - cooking shows.  While this variety may be of best use for those creators who are familiar with more than one language, I find that having a program or even music playing with voice overs or vocals in a different language from the one in which I'm writing helps to keep the white noise from doing more than distracting your inner critic, and perhaps distracting or even interfering with your creative process itself.  I've encountered situations where the white noise I've employed had a detrimental impact on my writing, specifically where I had set my music player to repeat a single song - usually one that I'd only recently discovered and therefore wanted to hear over and over again.  Some of the worst, most melodramatic and pandering drivel I've ever typed resulted from the ad nauseum repetition of an otherwise perfectly good song, and I can't for the life of me explain why it happened.  But not only did the repetition confound my creative efforts, it also tainted my feelings toward the songs themselves, as I'd remember the atrocities against creation they had lead me to commit whenever I heard them after that.  Through this painful trial and error, I learned that repeating a single song while creating is a poisoned well that taints both the one who drinks from it, and the very watertable from which it springs.

So what lessons can we draw from these examples of white noise that worked and those that didn't?  I would say that successful white noise distracts your inner critic, thereby giving your creative mind the clarity it needs to do its job.  But it distracts in such a way that does not pull your attention away from the act of creating, or exert undue influence on the creative process itself.  

Ultimately, what works best for your white noise depends on your own background and preferences, though I would suspect that creating to white noise is a useful technique for anyone who has ever had their inner critic shout down creative ideas that should have been given the chance to make the blank page a little less so.  

What do you think about using white noise while creating, and if you use it, what seems to work best for you?

NaNoWriMo #03, Fictional Tips #01: Where Story Ideas Come From

Now that I’ve covered the necessary background of what NaNoWriMo is and what you should do to get ready for it, I can back up a few steps and address those who would like to participate, but haven’t really given much thought to writing a novel until now.  One of the most common questions interested parties ask novelists and other storytellers is “Where do you get your ideas?”  It makes sense that this would be one of the first questions people would ask, as almost every story ever written began its life as a simple idea – or, phrased a little bit differently, a “What If.”

It Always Starts With “What If . . . ?”

In many ways, “What If” is the very core of storytelling.  Describing “What Is” doesn’t require a storyteller; all it requires is an attentive observer.  But considering “What If” implies a two-step process of posing a question, and then working out an answer.   Unlike the realm of “What Is,” neither question nor answer actually exists.  Both seem to spring from the storyteller like Athena from Zeus’s forehead: full-grown and ready to wage war.  Which can lead the casual onlooker to wonder: how did she get in there – and where did she find her weapons?

Like everything else in life, ideas for storytelling come from our experiences; they are not, however, limited to them.  A novelist can write about a murderer, or even from the viewpoint of a killer, without having ever taken a life.  Gene Roddenberry could create warp drives and Klingons without ever having to stop and work out whether either of them could actually exist.  In fact, the premise of Star Trek could easily be posed as a “What If” question:

What if advanced technology and an intergalactic egalitarian society allowed humankind to send its best and brightest out to explore the final frontier of outer space?

Or Lord of the Rings:

What if a ring of limitless and corrupting power fell into the hands of a young hobbit?

Or the Harry Potter series:

What if an orphaned boy discovers he is the wizarding world’s best hope against the very dark lord who orphaned him?

In posing what could be, and then attempting to answer that question, we take on the central challenge that storytellers have assumed since time immemorial.  It’s the first step in a journey that, in truth, can never end – and where the journey itself is everything.

Building to Critical Mass

Sometimes, no matter what idea you try to plug into the “What If” rubric, it just seems to fall short.  If that happens – or, more specifically, when – don’t panic.  And don’t simply discard your idea.  Just because it falls short on its own doesn’t mean it’s inherently doomed to failure.  It just needs a little help, and try as we may, we aren’t always up to the task of giving our ideas the help they need, at the very moment they need them. 

And that’s OK, because ideas come to us all the time, if we’re prepared to recognize and retain them.  As long as we hold on to those ideas that seem to fall short, they’ll be on hand when another idea comes – one that is, perhaps, also not quite enough on its own – and can lend us a hand.  As Orson Scott Card notes in his Characters and Viewpoint, combining two distinct ideas can give rise to something completely original and utterly compelling in a way that either idea alone could never achieve.   (His Nebula and Hugo Award-winning novel Speaker for the Dead is a great example, being a combination of the continuing storyline from Ender’s Game and an initially separate idea of a “speaker for the dead.”)