Back Like a Cheesy Sequel, or Plotting with PowerPoint

So, it's been a while, but I'm back to a place where I want to blog.  Chalk it up to wanting accountability and/or a place to play with pictures.  Or, something like that.

Mostly, I've been simmering this idea about novel planning and I want to put it somewhere.  Okay, my friends, think on this: PPT can do everything, including helping you plot. 

Over the summer, I was listening to someone talk about planning a grant proposal.  She said she was such a verbal thinker, and she was so used to using PowerPoint to help her plan talks/lessons, that she made the leap to using PPT to help her outline proposals.  Bam!  It clicked in place in my head, because any time I'm preparing to do a presentation these days, PPT is where I start.  Sometimes, my friends, I think in PPT. 

Why not apply the same process to a novel?  Right now, I'm puttering around with a novel idea about a golem maker and I have some notes on key plot points.  The hard part about notes is that they're hard to move around.  When you decide that complication Y should come before plot twist X instead of after, etc. your page of notes becomes a page of notes and doodles.  One of the solutions to this is using index cards, but they're still so... permanent.  If you want to take plot point Z and chunk it into two parts, you still have to do a lot of re-noting.

PPT is like magic.  So easy to manipulate.  Plus, who doesn't like playing around with graphics?  Add hearts to the scene when the love interests confess their feelings for each other.  A dagger is a nice accent to the scene where the body is discovered.  For those of us who're visual thinkers, the ease of adding graphics is a definite bonus. 

I officially make it my mission to collect my novel notes and translate them all into PPT.  I'm also tentatively planning to do NaNo this year, so the two things are natural partners.

Do you have any brilliant novel planning tools?  What works well for you?

The Push/Juggling

So, after I've talked with Juan during our last meeting, and after he's said that it's important I keep bringing him pages, I make the bet with John. Then I tell Juan, "So, I'm going to write the next fifty pages of my thesis in two weeks and thus knock out a full draft of the fiction portion of it."

Then Juan looks at me with what can only be called an expression of skepticism. He said something to the effect of, "Well... that'd be good." The part he didn't say was, "If you can really pull it off." Oh ye of little faith.

We're rounding out the first week of the bet and I'm standing at 14 typed pages, plus two hand-written ones I did today when I was kicked out of the office because Amanda needed it to conference with a student.

The jist: I'm writing like a fiend because I know the only alternative is to come up short on my CWC submission. My honor is at stake here, yet again. Honor which I'm adamant about defending. I know I talk big sometimes, but I try to back it up. Ergo: motivation.

I've come up with an attack plan that's working well so far. In the past I've tended to stick primarily with either drafting longhand or on the computer - that way all the stuff is in one place at a time. However, since I'm back in the swing of the semester, this strategy wasn't going to work. If I had to rely on only writing on my home computer, it just wasn't going to work. Luckily, as I mentioned the other day, I've gotten a few new ideas for stories. This gave me a way to both split up my work and keep it on one notebook/computer at a time. Depending on where I am, I can work on a different story.

For the big push I'm relying on the interweb, Google notebook, especially, to give me one "place" to keep things. At home I've got it all together on a Word document, but then I get to campus and have a few minutes, so I add to Google notebook and then copy/paste when I get home. Then, since I wasn't in the office and thus not in front of a computer, for an hour this morning, I pulled out a notebook and wrote the first part of another story I had in my mind about a little boy who walks to Nevada.

In the midst of all this, I have to keep up with my reading for the thesis, so guess what I'm doing at the dog park?

There's a saying about how if you want to get something accomplished you give it to a busy person. There's truth in that. I am accomplishing oodles.

The Vital Importance of Failure

Here we are, in the midst of the Olympics, talking about things like inspiration, and even more importantly, failure. Deb has a post about the topic, and so does John. Lately, between the bet with John and these posts, I've been vividly reminded of my time in sales.

For a little over a year, I was a salesperson who sold things. Even though my time in sales was relatively brief, it was dense, and in the end I have a hard time remembering that it was only about a year and a half of my life. By the end of my sales gig, I had achieved the single most important, and most monetarily costly, failure of my life to-date.

The sales gig was also one of the biggest factors in making me who I am. I like who I am and I know that missing that failure would mean missing certain changes that I made in myself. But, enough with the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Though true, it's not my point.

My point, is that among other things, I learned how important it is to make yourself try. As a sales rep, and as a manager, I had a lot of practice setting goals. The best goals to make were never "sell X amount" but rather "schedule X appointments" or "make X phone calls." Because, as soon as you start weighting your success purely on end result, you set yourself up for falling short. Once you start thinking only of what you want, instead of the work you'll have to put in to get it, your chances of achieving that goal become poorer.

Not every sales call will end in a sale. It's statistics, you can't argue with statistics. However, in the sales job, we also knew that a certain percentage of sales calls would end in a sale. It all boiled down to a numbers game. If you wanted to hit a sales goal, you had to focus on first hitting a scheduling goal, which meant hitting a phone calls goal. You had to break it down and you had to count in a certain number for sales calls that you knew would not end in sales. If you wanted X in sales, you had to do a bit of number crunching and start at the bottom. Sales weren't a matter of getting from point A to point B, but rather from point A to something like point H.

Going through all those steps meant you could get to your end goal. However, at each of those steps there was the guarantee of a certain amount of rejection. We used to talk about ratios. Every "no" equaled a certain number of "yes"es. So, if you could wrap your head around it, each "no" became almost a good thing, because it brought you that much closer to the next "yes."

It became one great game of psyching yourself out and shifting your whole mentality of how you defined success. I remember one manager I had who had absolutely embraced this approach, and applied it to more than just sales. Specifically, he got a lot of dates. Granted, he was cute and personable, etc. However, this was not why he got dates. Not even close to the reason, in fact. No, the reason he got so many dates was because he got turned down so often. He knew that, like in sales, it was all a matter of statistics. For every X women who turned him down, X would probably say yes, which meant for every few dates he wanted, he had to ask out many more women. I would even, on occasion, hear him talk about his rejections with fondness, as if they were their own kind of success.

The funny thing is, when you get right down to it, they were.

One of the best ways to succeed at something is being willing to fail. By saying this I don't mean you shouldn't put your blood, sweat, and tears into it. I'm saying that failure is the key part of success. At the end of the day, how you deal with your failures says the most about your potential for success. And, if you're dedicated enough to what you're doing, you will fail. In fact, you will fail many times. Better get used to the idea, because it's only through that failure that you really stand a change of winning.

There are very few things we get right the first time, or the first ten times, or maybe even the first hundred times.

Wanna know the real secret of highly successful people? Being too stubborn to quit, despite all the times they've failed. Or, in some cases, because of it.

Remember, the guys who get the most dates are the ones who are most often rejected.