Get Organized
Book Giveaway: The Time of Your Life
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Last month, at Kentucky Christian Writers Conference, I led a workshop on getting organized. I recommended Mark Porter’s The Time of Your Life: How to Accomplish All that God Wants You to Do. The book is meant for Christians seeking to integrate their work with their spiritual life, and I highly recommend it to Christian writers.
A review of The Time of Your Life is on Blog4writers here. In the Getting Organized posts, I mentioned some of the concepts in the book. See those posts here. (more…)
KY Christian Writers Conference Report
0Great faculty, great keynotes, and a great location add up to a wonderful conference experience for around 75 writers this past weekend. If you aren’t familiar with KCWC, take a look at the Web site.
Virginia Smith did an outstanding job as keynote speaker with a pothole-by-pothole description of her road to publication. Beginners and published writers alike enjoyed two days of networking, learning, and worship.
I taught a workshop entitled, “Get Organized—And Sell Your Work.” Some of the information in my session is included in a series of blog posts. See the summary and links to each post on this page.
If you’re reading this, and you were a KCWC attendee, I encourage you to subscribe so that you won’t miss the book giveaway coming soon.
Get Organized: Evaluating Your Progress
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The final step in organizing your writing effort is periodic evaluation—measuring your progress and making adjustments. You may choose to evaluate monthly, quarterly, or annually. Just resolve to do it.
Review your intentions: Take a look at the goals you set for yourself. Did you accomplish any of the short-term goals? How are you progressing on the long-term goals? The more specific your goals, the easier it is to measure success. As an example, if you stated that you wanted to submit one article per week, this goal is easily measured by counting your submissions. At the monthly mark, you should have sent out four submissions. If you’re behind on your quota, you can make it up before the next evaluation date. Vague goals like “submitting as many articles as I can” aren’t easily measured. You can excuse a low submission count by citing distractions or unforeseen circumstances. (more…)
Get Organized: Time Management
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“Write for at least one hour every day.” I heard this a lot at my first few writers’ conferences. Of course, writers will write every day. And, why only one hour? Shouldn’t you write all the time? The fact is, writing your content is not all you have to do. Besides knowing the writing craft, you must spend time studying the markets, scoping out the “competition,” researching subject matter, meeting other writers and editors, and keeping your efforts organized.
If you devote full-time to your writing career, you may spend as much as an hour each day doing these additional writer jobs. If you consider yourself part-time, organize your time, either daily or weekly, to perform each of the following functions. (more…)
Get Organized: Intentions
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Getting organized involves more than collecting your tools and managing your time. All of that effort is wasted if you don’t have clear intentions for your work. Ask yourself these questions as you plan your writing career
What are your goals for your writing? Organizations and individuals spend a lot of time developing goals and objectives to make their work more effective. A writer should have the same concern. If you don’t know what your goal is, you have no way to measure success.
Do you want to publish a book? The steps to publication for a published writer will be different from those of an unpublished writer. As you set your goals, be sure they are realistic. Miracles do happen, but it usually takes years, even decades, to see that first book in print. Attend conferences and learn what it takes to reach your goal. Then, set your sub-goals with your time constraints in mind.
For the Christian writer—do the goals you’ve set coincide with what God wants for your writing? The best resource on this topic is a book that is out of print. Published in 1983 and 1988, Mark Porter’s The Time of Your Life: How to Accomplish All That God Wants You to Do is not specifically for writers, but I highly recommend it. Porter outlines a time management method for Christians that includes several chapters on goal-setting. See my review of this book here. (more…)
Get Organized: Records
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Once your work space is set up, you need to organize subject matter, submission tracking, finances, and communications. For topics covered in previous blog posts, I provide a link to those posts in the text below.
Subject matter/content: If you write in more than one genre, make files for each genre in the beginning. As your collection grows, you will need to make sub-categories. For example, master category might be Nonfiction with subcategories Devotionals, Articles, or Book Ideas.
Other filing system ideas can be found here and here.
Submission Tracking: This is possibly the most critical organizing task for a writer, especially if you send simultaneous submissions. It’s also necessary for managing reprints. My previous post describes several methods, including a free Excel file I created for this purpose. See the full post here.
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Get Organized: Your Writing Place
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How can anything about your writing be organized if you don’t have a place to write? A place to store your records and resources? Today, I’m sharing with you how I’ve organized my writing space.
Ten years ago, when I first started writing for publication, I set up my computer and file cabinet in an unused upstairs bedroom. I could hide out in there and work undisturbed. However, it was too inconvenient to the rest of the house. I had to go downstairs frequently for breaks, household chores, and just plain interruptions.
Finally, I bought a desk for our den, thinking I could work on the computer and not be far from my other responsibilities while writing. The biggest challenge with this plan was where to put supplies and reference materials. I still wanted the room to be a den, but I needed to have handy storage. (more…)
Spring Cleaning for Writers
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Yes, it’s that time of year. Time to clean the debris out of the writing cave and bring in some fresh material. Time to dust off your writing aspirations and get busy making them happen.
Here’s my spring cleaning plan.
- Organize files (both computer and hard-copy). Dispose of duplicates and out-dated material.
- Clean equipment. See Computer Hope site for detailed how-to on computer cleaning.
- Make sure all files on the computer are backed up. See my post on backup methods here.
- Inventory supplies and equipment. Make a shopping list and a wish list.
- Look for fresh ideas. Spend some time reading old journals and/or writing projects you put aside long ago. Move the ones that interest you to your active file.
- Inventory writing books and magazines. Sell or give away those that you have not looked at in more than a year. I know. This is hard.
Don’t even try to do all this at once. You may feel overwhelmed and give up. Give yourself a week or even a month to finish the job. (more…)
Lessons from a Computer Crash
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Earlier this month, while I was reworking my Web site and setting up this blog, my laptop computer experienced what my support person called a “hard crash.” I asked what that meant, and he said, “All of your data is lost. You must reformat your hard drive.” I followed instructions, but doing this on the phone was taking forever. And, because things weren’t working out like I thought they should, I took my computer to my local computer repair store. I’m back up and running now, but I’ve learned some things that I want to share with you in case you have a similar experience.
Lesson #1: If support tells you that you have to re-format your hard drive, get another opinion first. The local repair guy said that, if I had not wiped the drive clean, it might have been possible to recover my data before reinstalling Windows XP. Just because the person on the phone works for the computer manufacturer doesn’t mean he or she is always right. I wish I had sought a second opinion. (more…)
Online Bible Resources
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Part of observing the passing of the old year is looking back, sometimes with nostalgia and sometimes with thanksgiving. This year, as I made my writing plans, I looked back to how we used to get our writing done—with a typewriter, paper, and an eraser. A writer had to be truly dedicated to persist with those tools. Today, my job as a writer is so much easier with the technology available to me.
It’s hard to say which of the computer-based tools are the most useful, but for Christian writers, I have to say having numerous online Bible versions has to be near the top of the list. For my writing, I’ve tried to find one online source that offers all popular translations. I submit regularly to publishers who use the New International Version (NIV) or the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). In addition, I like to use The Message on my devotional blog. (more…)
