So, you might be wondering how I’m doing on the Page-A-Day Challenge?

It’s been two weeks since it started, so we’re on day fourteen and I’ve added 23 pages to my manuscript. True, they’re double-spaced pages but still. I started with 179 pages with 48,358 words.

Currently?

• 202 Pages
• 55,372 Words

That’s an increase of 23 pages over 14 days, so I’m definitely meeting the quantity part of the challenge.

Of course, part of Weronika’s challenge was to write quality pages, and that I can’t really speak to. I admit that I’m using this challenge more as incentive to get the draft of this old, patient manuscript done than in trying to get the pages really, really good. After all, isn’t editing easier than dragging the original words out of my head and forcing them onto paper in the first place?

Do you do your best writing in the morning? Or at night?

This is one of those topics that can raise strong opinions.

People who write in the morning say that their brain is fresher, more creative. Their energy level is high, and they can crank out their best work before they’ve had their morning coffee. Or, at least, before lunch.

People who write at night say that their best work comes when their brain is tired after a full day, too tired to snipe and criticize at every sentence. They can focus on their writing with the satisfying knowledge that everything else they needed to do that day is done, and they can get words down on the page while the overly critical portion of their brain naps, dreaming about lists of tasks to do tomorrow.

Personally, I have trouble writing first thing in the morning. I like my sleep too much, and have difficulty enough dragging my eyelids open to get to my day job. The idea of waking up an hour earlier and pulling open the laptop and writing before I’m even out of bed (as I hear some writers do) seems almost obscene, and way too energetic for that hour of the day.

Could I go to bed earlier so I could wake up earlier without grumbling? Maybe, but then I’d lose the time I get some of my best work done. I find when I write later in the day, my inner critic is too busy napping to interfere with my getting words on the page. I like her awake and alert when I’m editing things, but dragging the words for a first draft out to my keyboard? She just gets in the way, trying to be too helpful. “Shouldn’t you have a comma there?” “Is that really the best word to use?” “You forgot to mention the strongest selling point.” It’s like trying to cook a Thanksgiving dinner with a toddler underfoot. She means well, but really isn’t helping a bit.

But, if I wait until she gets tired and nods off? I find I get so much more done, and then I welcome her help with the actual editing process. “You’re right, that spot really does need a comma.”

How about you? Morning? Or Evening?

Of course, maybe you split the difference and write in the afternoons…

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s one of the cardinal rules of writing:

Don’t Forget Your Audience.

This should be obvious. If you’re writing for children, there will be language or graphic scenes that you don’t need to detail. If you’re writing romance novels, on the other hand, you can go into (ahem) a lot more detail.

If you’re writing an article geared toward an elite group of highly educated people in a particular field, you can use a lot more jargon and industry-specific language than you could if you were writing the same article for the general public.

Newspapers are usually geared toward adult readers who presumably have a running knowledge of current events. Magazines and periodicals aim for people with common interests, such as photography, cars, fashion, their home town. Blogs can be directed toward general readers (everyone who thinks dogs are cute!), or focused on very specific people (fans of Holst’s “The Planets,” writers trying to get published, knitters who love making socks).

The point, though, is that you almost always have a specific audience.

But, how do you write differently for different groups?

This is harder to define, but I’d say it comes down to three elements. They’re all related, and the borders are fuzzy, but here’s how I think of them:

Tone.

Friendly. Cool. Informed. Gracious. Intelligent. Condescending. This is your tone of voice.

Think about this. When you get a phone call from a stranger and only have their voice with which to judge how capable they are, how helpful or convincing … it’s their tone that’s going to have the most impact. Do they sound tired? Bored? Excited? Interested?

You could have two marketers call you with the exact same pitch, but one will turn you off, and one will pique your interest … it all comes down to Tone. You’re going to be drawn to the one who sounds friendly and capable, the one who sounds interested in what she is doing and eager to help you.

The same thing goes with writing–it’s your choice how you sound, but that old saw about catching more flies with honey holds true … let your tone of voice show that you care about what you do.

Voice.

This seems similar to Tone, I know, but I think of Voice as how you use the language. A person addressing a conference of etymologists, for example, is going to dust off the fancy vocabulary, like bringing out the good silver for Christmas … but a GOOD writer is going to make that presentation interesting and entertaining, regardless of syllable count. A bad writer? Um, you remember those dense, dry, incomprehensible text books from school, don’t you? The ones that were so darn educated you couldn’t understand a word they said?

Writing can be made more or less accessible simply by the complexity of the language. Are the sentences long or short? Simple or complex? Are the paragraphs long, solid blocks of text? You get the idea. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t sound “smart” and “friendly” at the same time. Or that, if you’re writing for a professional journal that you can’t let your humanity show.

Vocabulary.

All the writing mavens love to tell you to keep your vocabularly simple–that the high-falutin’ words are just going to make you inaccessible, or confusing, or whatever the reason-of-the-week is. Not that I’m denying the truth of this, mind you–too many people simply don’t know what to do with one of those high-priced, fancy vocabularies, any more than they can drive a Lamborghini perfectly on the first try after a lifetime of Chevys.

My point, though, is that sometimes you have to gear your vocabulary to your audience. When talking to a child, we tend to downshift the vocabulary level to make it accessible. “Why don’t you go out to play?” instead of “Perhaps you would care to consider transferring your recreation to an outdoor venue?” Is your vocabulary held to a reasonable level that makes it accessible, yet not so “dumbed down” that you sound like you are constantly talking to a toddler?

I’m all for stretching people’s vocabularies–the more the better–and it never worries me to use a word or two that my readers might not have met before. I’m happy to provide the introduction. But there’s a difference between being in a room filled with familiar faces with just a stranger or two, and a room filled with strangers. If you fill up your writing with words that your readers probably don’t recognize … they’re going to ditch the party and decide to go hang out with their friends, instead.

There’s the built-in censorship element, too, of not using certain types of language in front of young, impressionable ears and eyes. Of writing in a gentlemanly or ladylike manner in such a way that your grandmother could read your work without blushing.

Don’t forget who you’re writing for.

What do you think? Do you write differently for different audiences?

As instructed as part of Weronika’s Page-A-Day Challenge, I’m setting up one post to track my progress.

My “victim” for this challenge is an old manuscript I’m resurrecting. If you don’t already know, I’ve got three novels written.

My first, “After Happily Ever,” was finished back in the mid-1990s and is a retelling of Cinderella, but one which gives the stepmother and stepsisters a fair break and then goes on to tell what happens after the prince finds the girl. It was finished, it is finished, but I recently chopped 30,000 words out of it to make it better, stronger, faster, so … still finished, but much improved.

The second … well more about that in a moment.

The third is “After Titanic” which tells about a young woman who lost her husband on the Titanic on their way back from their honeymoon, and has brought back an orphan with her. He was handed to her as her lifeboat was lowered, and she felt obliged to look after him. Little does she know, though, that the child is enormously wealthy, which brings up all sorts of interesting problems for her as she tries to deal with her grief and restart her life in the midst of gossipy neighbors, a distraught mother-in-law, and nosy reporters poking around, looking for a good story. This one stood unfinished for years while I tried to figure out the legal ramifications of her trying to adopt a rich orphan, on her own, in 1912 when women still couldn’t even vote. But, as of a month or so ago, it is done now, too.

The thing is … my second novel got bumped to the wayside by the Titanic story, and so it has languished even longer, even though it’s about halfway done. 48,000 words, in fact, with a rough outline as to what has to happen in the second half. Not only that, it’s a sort-of sequel to the first book. Not a direct sequel, but one that follows the great-great-great-whatever granddaughter of the couple in my Cinderella story, here in modern day New York. (Or, kind of modern day New York. Judging by the dates I put on each chapter, I started writing this in 1997, and the occasional anachronism regarding cell phones or internet access is kind of amusing. But I’m digressing.)

The thing is, rereading what I’ve got, I’m still pretty intrigued by this story. I like Cynthia and John, the main characters, and I’m tickled by the side-story I squeezed in based on Sleeping Beauty. (Hey, don’t mock the fairy tales.They’re classics for a reason. The originals are far more fascinating than the Disney versions, too.)

So.

For this page-a-day challenge, I’m going to work on finishing this poor book, stuck in limbo for over a decade. I’m a pretty monogamous writer, in that I like to focus on one thing at a time, if I can, and it’s irked me for years that this incomplete novel has been sitting in my “works in progress” folder. For my own peace of mind, I need to at least get the first draft done.

The beginning: 179 pages, 48,358 words.

I’m not usually one to sign up for writing “challenges.” Externally imposed deadlines or goals always seem so … artificial.

But, then … Weronika Janczuk made an excellent point.

We discussed mind tricks for a little while, and the prime example included the “page-a-day” trick. Instead of giving yourself a word count goal or a time goal, all you owe yourself is to write a page a day. The trick here is that you don’t psyche yourself out. And, if the writing comes easily, you’ll end up writing twenty pages before you know it.
And what’s the worst case scenario? You spend one year writing a novel. Typical novels tend to be 350 double-spaced pages or fewer (12 point font, Times). I’ve blogged about the importance of patience, and here’s a way to do multiple things at once: Learn to be patient. Train your discipline. Write good pages. Think about structure and organization day in and day out.

She intrigued me.

Well, Weronika is an intriguing person to begin with, what with still being in high school (for a few more weeks) and having a finished novel. A good one, I hear. I wish I’d had her kind of drive when I was a teenager.

I’m getting off-track.

The POINT I’m endeavoring to make is that it doesn’t actually matter what kind of writing you do.

The POINT is to do it every day.

It’s not about the quantity. It’s not about large, staggering chunks of time in front of your computer screen.

It doesn’t have to be HARD.

But if you sit down every day and write a page, or a blog post, or an article, or whatever it is that you write, even 100 words a day is going to add up … especially when you let yourself relax into it and just let the words flow.

Because, every writer can tell you, the hardest part is SITTING DOWN AND STARTING.

Let me ask you a question.

Do you like being told what to do? Or do you prefer making your own decisions?

I wrote recently, when discussing the “Show, Don’t Tell” rule, that writing is about taking the reader on a voyage of discovery

The minute I typed that, my fingers paused on the keyboard in a “That’s really profound” moment. (Okay, kind of profound.)

I don’t know about you, but the things I most enjoy reading are not posts, books, or articles that simply tell me things. I don’t so much enjoy the bullet-post lists, or the informative articles that sound like lectures. They have their uses, and I’m not saying they’re bad … and certainly, I’ve written them myself … but they’re not my favorites.

The things I enjoy reading are the things that take me along for a ride. It can be a story, a murder-mystery, an article explaining why certain types of red dye are so valuable, or why a certain shampoo is the best for my hair–the genre doesn’t matter.

What makes a difference, what makes me enjoy reading some things more than others, is the EXPERIENCE.

When a writer frames an article  by asking a question at the beginning, and then leading me through the quest to find the answer, I get swept up in the adventure.

When a writer presents me with a mystery and then helps me, step by step, discover the solution, I feel involved.

When a writer takes me to a place that feels real and makes me ask the questions I need to ask, I feel like I was there.

It’s easy to lecture. (I’m doing it right now.) But there’s a reason those old J. Peterman catalogs were so popular. They didn’t just tell you “This is a silk blouse with a flower print.” They wove an exotic story that took you to a place, an image, an idea. They drew you in and let you explore the image of an Arabian bazaar, or a British country house on a warm summer day.

The best kind of writing takes the reader on a voyage of discovery. The kind where you find a better world, or just a better shampoo. The kind where you see the person you want to be, with the lifestyle you want to have.

The kind that reawakens that little child you used to be who looked at the world with wide eyes, asking “Why?”, back when everything was new.

Isn’t that the kind of writer you want to be?

Taking people along on the journey is so much better than just showing them the photographs after you’re back home.

It’s one of the cardinal rules for writing, though you hear it more with fiction than non-fiction. (It applies to both, though.)

Show, Don’t Tell.

Instead of saying,

“He was nice to small children and animals.”

You write,

“As he dashed out the door to put out the fire, he paused to pat the toddler on the head and scratch the dog behind the ears.”

Instead of saying,

“We’re offering great deals!”

You write,

“Buy now and we’ll pay for a European vacation for you and your dozen closest friends!”

Instead of saying,

“The teenager was bored.”

You write,

“Charlie flipped through his pile of video games, dashing them to the floor in disgust, before flinging himself to the couch in despair.”

Instead of saying,

“This is the best tool you’ll ever buy!”

You write,

“This tool not only fixes computers, it will save your marriage, create world peace, and save the environment, all for the low, low price of $19.95.”

Instead of saying,

“Her dress was tacky and cheap.”

You write,

“Her dress was avocado green polyester that had to be a leftover from the 1970s, and the way it clashed with her “Autumn Sunrise” hair made us long for the sunglasses we’d left at the rest stop.”

You get the idea, right?

Good writing is a voyage of discovery.

You want your reader to discover the man is good to children because the reader sees it, not because you told them.

Really, it’s more fun for everybody that way.