techie question and nanowrimo wk 3

[lobelia321]

techie question
Faced with ten days without a keyboard and the need to write 17,000 words in that time and the need to preserve my back (so I can certainly not lug my ibook around Germany with me):

What is the best alternative to a spiral notebook and a pen?



Does anyone use a thing called the Alphasmart Neo or Dana?

Does anyone use a Palm with a collapsible keyboard? (I am so clueless here that despite several clickworths of googling I still cannot provide you with a link.)

Any other suggestions? My main aims are to have something that:

• is small and light
• costs no more than 200 pounds (and ideally less!)
• doesn't need recharging very often
• allows me to store 20,000 words
• and then allows me to move those 20,000 words back onto my iBook
• has a QWERTY keyboard and a UK/European ISO layout (ideally)

I don't need:
• anything besides a typing function
• internet connectivity (it will just distract!)
• a colour screen

Online reviewers shower the alphasmart with praise, and many nanowrimos allegedly use it but it weighs as much as a kilo of sugar, and I just lifted a kilo of sugar in the kitchen and it was quite a bit heavier than my spiral notepad and pen. It's also quite large, with a footprint larger than an A4 sheet of paper so it can't be stuffed into a coat pocket. But it may have compensatory functions??

nanowrimo wk 3
Btw, I am at the moment totally disheartened about my so-called novel which is utter shite. I am following the sage's advice and not re-reading but I can't help re-remembering wot i writted + it is crapulous. Still, the Book says I'm not allowed to give up and must forge on. It also has the useful advice: Make a pact with yourself that you will never show this novel to anybody.

I'm at 28 something thousand words. I have, I guess, learned things. The main thing I have learned is that: A Novel Is Not A Short Story. I have never written a short story, and I have imported my short story habits into the novel writing, and it's Not Working. I have, for example, no chapters. This works fine in a short story, even in a long!fic, where no subsections or little asterisks between the lines do the trick. But it doesn't work in a novel. I flipped through the pages of some novels on my shelf, and indeed: they all have chapters. Some even have parts. Some even have chapter headings. They are all tightly structured around some sort of unit. My prose just balloons out uncontrollably.

Lesson Nr 1, therefore: Have chapters.

I have also found that the manic drive to produce words while sometimes enjoyable and exhilarating is also a shackling hindrance to the blossoming of exciting prose. All those experimental writing pieces I did earlier last year, where I played around with pov and sparse style vs baroque and tense and lexicon -- these have all gone out of the window, and what is left by speed typing is the sort of straightforward, just-tell-it prose that I was trying to transcend in my writing experiments! So I realised yesterday that this was, for me, somewhat unsatisfactory. I wanted to use metaphors carefully, and let fly with jargony words, and parody text types. Instead, I'm writing Janet Evanovich.

Lesson Nr 2, perhaps: Preserve the prose excitement. And for that, I may have to a) slow down, b) do more pre-preparation so that I have the words I want to use at my fingertips, c) decide on types of prose I want to use beforehand.

I don't know my characters very well. This is, for me, a function of origfic. Not only am I not used to writing a novel, I am also not used to writing orig. I have a lot of experience in getting to know my fanon characters very well. I go to canon, extract relevant info; zoom through fanon, write against fanon's grain; and bingo, I have what I call My!Characters, backstory, emotional depth, diction and all. In this orignovel, I'm still trying to figure out who everyone is and how exactly they respond to stuff and were they orphans or did they have an overbearing dad or what? As a result, I have an awful lot of plot (my fanon fic never has this much plot!) but don't know what my characters are going to do in response to all that plot!

Lesson Nr 3: Do some pre-preparation. Know and love my characters. (I thought I did but I don't.) Figure out a way to create better canon so that in the writing process I can concentrate on fanon (as it were).

Finally, all that plot! A short story has one pithy focus and that's it. There may be secondary story threads but in the main, it's enough if the focus is on one thing. A novel is more unwieldy. All sort of shit happens, to a plethora of people. It's not enough just to write the juicy, delicious scenes on which I can linger at my pleasure in a short story without ever bothering about anything else. There also needs to be some sort of connective tissue to get people from one scene to the next, and This Is Hard. I haven't mastered this At All. As a result, my scenes drag on in the kind of 'and then, and then' fashion I normally abhor.

Lesson Nr 4: Learn how to do summary and exposition as well as scene. Learn how to keep momentum going past the initial set-up of setting, tone and character.

One good thing is I have learned what I need to learn. And if only to learn more things that I need to learn, I guess I need to keep going. Otherwise I'll never know what my exact and precise shit actually consists of in detail.

Also, in case I don't get another posting chance: I'm off to Germany tomorrow. Back on the 11th. :-)

Comments

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

1. Much of the bit of novel I wrote during NaNo 2004 is unusable, certainly as a novel. But I learned soooo much from doing it. I also consider that I've got a lot of stuff there that can be recycled. I've already taken one piddling little idea from the novel that never got off the ground and made it into a fairly decent short story.

2. If your novel is a bit ropey, it doesn't matter too much because it's only a first draft anyway. You can always rewrite and edit.

3. Really fun exercise I did the other week (this is from the Telegraph): write your character's CVs. You can take that any way you like. I just started of doing name, date & place of birth, education, parents' origins, work history, and then used the interests section to expand on all sorts of wonderful stuff about them I didn't know - like one of them drew on all his mother's shoes as a child, and another one has a NVQ in hair design. Such fun!

4. Plot is hard. I'll get back to you on that one.

Have a good trip!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

1. It is very interesting that you learned a lot. That's how I'm trying to look at it right now. Today, I didn't write one word; I tend to get into a state before any sort of travel.

2. Thank you. I tell myself this but it can be hard.

3. Aha!! I may do this and use it as novel word count!!! These cheat codes are useful.

4. Ack.

oh YAY!

[helenish.livejournal.com]

Now I get to recommend the alphasmart, which I love, and I think you will, too.

I have one of the really old school ones (four lines of text, no backlight,) and it's a little bit on its last legs now, since I've had it for years and spilled tea on it (it was fine!) but it is incredibly portable and quite sturdy. I wouldn't bang it around, exactly, but it requires much less care than a laptop.

It doesn't use a lot of batteries (I think I've changed out the batteries only two or three times total) and the best thing about it is that it powers up immediately, like a calculator, so if you have ten minutes - a situation in which you wouldn't bother to power up a computer - you can just whip it out and bang away. Same thing goes for turning it off. If the bus comes, for instance, you hit the off button and get on the bus, the end.

I don't use mine much anymore, but I worked at Starbuck's for a couple years and used it constantly--on dinner breaks, for instance. I've also used it on public transportation.

Um. They are really great. Feel free to ask any questions if you have them.

That said, there probably have been changes in the market since I bought mine (ca. 2001) - so there could be better and cheaper things out there. Cursory google search turns this up.

Re: oh YAY!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you. This is very helpful. I read about a dozen enthusiastic reviews here and there but these weren't from people I knew. Still, though, isn't this thing a bit heavy? I like the instant on-off functionability.

Another of my Flist Friends works at Starbucks. Is this a phase all Americans must pass through on their occupational trajectory?

That little google search thing looks nifty but doesn't come with the aura of the alphasmart. It's that photo of a 'Writer' typing away on some seaside cliff on the alphasmart website that got me. I am a sucker for clever advertising. (I wore nothing but button-up 501s for about two decades because of that guy washing his Levi's in the laundromat and then soaking his jeans in the bathtub, with him in it...)

[msilverstar]

Technical issue: the alphasmart is far too heavy. A Palm or other little personal information manager with keyboard might work if you can stand to read the little display screen. Or just use your spiral notebook and type it later.

On the novel, yis, I think you're learning exactly what you're supposed to, your strengths and weaknesses. But I'd say keep going to the end, don't get involved in fixing it now. You may have to dump the thing and start over, with plot and characters and chapters, but that's OK. Finish it as best you can before you take the next step.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I was worried about the alphasmart weight thing. It's what bothers me about the iBook right now: the other day I lugged it to a coffee shop and immediately my back played up.

Thanks for cheering me on the steep slope of novel writing!