"Wow, this could really go on forever, I need to make a plan"

Random apps, workshops, and other resources that have helped my writing

Here are some classes / programs / apps / resources that helped me either write and finish my novel Log Off (Shabby Doll House, 2024), improve as a writer overall, or learn some ‘business’ aspect of writing. Maybe they can help you too.

Workshops 

I don’t have an MFA, but I did attend some workshops. And they were all only for a long weekend, making them an easy commitment to take a few days off work for. I workshopped an early excerpt of Log Off at the Tin House YA Workshop (back when I thought it was still a YA novel) and the full manuscript at Writing By Writers Manuscript Bootcamp. I felt almost deliriously happy at both of them. Like, I loved that from morning to night, I got to talk about writing and writing stuff with other nice people who were obsessed with the same in a magical, idyllic setting. I didn’t want to leave, but luckily I had great workshop groups for both that I’m still in touch with.

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I also want to shoutout how much I liked the full manuscript bootcamp’s structure and what that involved. Two months prior to meeting up IRL, you were given the full manuscripts of your four classmates, with the expectation that you would read and provide feedback (both as an editorial letter and some light line edits throughout the manuscript) for all four. That’s a serious commitment and something you have to set aside time for, but I personally liked the intensity of it. Also, when it came time to workshop together, nothing beat the depth of conversations that happened when we all read the full book. If that’s something that appeals to you, this year’s Writing By Writers Manuscript Bootcamp applications are still open. And Bud Smith and Jimmy Cajoleas are holding a full manuscript workshop in NYC in the late summer/early fall and I believe a few spots remain open for that too. 

Another benefit: in full honesty, applications to both Tin House and Writing By Writers’ workshops were relatively competitive, and it felt good to get in. At the time of getting accepted into both workshops, I was getting lots of rejections—for short stories, for various fellowships and residencies, you name it. Some were really close call rejections and that hurt even more. Before the workshops even began, it was nice to simply have the external validation of getting accepted, as a sign that I was on the right track with this project. 

Morning Writing Club  

Every weekday morning (and I mean almost every morning, there are rarely days I miss) I sign on at 8am to Morning Writing Club. I have a testimonial on the MWC site about why I like this accountability program so much, but one reason is that it has consistently made me a morning person for the first time in my entire adult life. It’s also another place I’ve met other writers, and I feel an affinity to that whole group because if you’re in there, it’s because you have some other major demand on your life (9-to-5 day job, parenting, etc) and you’re fighting to find a way to prioritize writing and writing-related things. It’s run by Chelsea Hodson, and the precursor to Morning Writing Club was her Finish What You Start program, which I was also part of and where I finished my first draft. Which brings me to my next recommendation… 

A beginning-to-end approach to a first draft

To outline or not to outline, pantser or plotter, I see this debated ad nauseam on Twitter and I never understand why. Like, just do whatever works best for you? I’m not an outliner, but fine if other people are. For this novel, I just wrote whatever parts felt fun to me, and then wrote some other parts that occurred in my head, and started to build the novel out-of-order in one big messy Google Doc. However, after almost a year of doing this jumping around approach, I was like, “wow this shit could really go on forever. I need to make a plan here” and so what I decided to do was arrange everything I had in chronological order and then write on through from beginning to end. If I hit a part that had a gap, I had to write the thing that connected it to the next thing before I moved on. I did this until I got to the end of the story. That’s when I considered my first draft done. For reference, that doc was 109,670 words (lol) and the final novel is under 80,000 words. So, there was obviously still a lot of figuring out what this book was, and many storylines to cut entirely once I began editing, but at least I had a full first draft of material that I could scale back from.

TTS and Speechify 

It’s well established that reading your work aloud is a good editing practice, but I also have my computer’s text-to-speech app read my work to me. It’s a great way to catch typos and nothing will reveal a flat or awkward sentence more than a robot-y voice. For a while, I was so into this that I paid for a Speechify subscription, which gives you a variety of text-to-speech voices, including celebrity voices. I got a real kick out of hearing my writing read aloud by AI Gwyneth Paltrow or “Mr. President” (Barack Obama). I’ve since canceled Speechify though. The whole deep fake concept started to freak me out, and more importantly, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking your words are brilliant when they’re read by Snoop Dog. You need the flat computer voice to keep it real with you and expose all your bad sentences. 

Scrivener

Another hot topic in the writing world is whether you use Scrivener or not. Among Scrivener users, it seems pretty common that people will use it for a handful of features they find useful and disregard the many other things it can do. Same here. I used it for two reasons. I liked its index card format. Log Off is written as LiveJournal entries, and it was nice to put each entry in its own card and see things from that vantage point. I also liked this feature where you could see how many words you cut from a manuscript each day/month. I can get really numbers-obsessed and this tool fed into that compulsion, for better or worse.

Voice memos

Okay, this one is kinda embarrassing, and even more embarrassing if anyone catches you doing it (shoutout to my neighbor who gave me a sharp look and slammed down his window when he caught me doing this outside), but I recommend talking about your book into your phone’s voice memos, almost as if you’re like, on a podcast answering questions about it. I did this a lot, to articulate thematic ideas and character motivations. I rarely listened back to these voice memos, but something about speaking aloud what I was struggling with helped me work things out.

When I finally had people read the full manuscript and provide feedback on it, I think how much people “liked” the book ranged, but every single one of them understood my intentions or “got” what I was doing. I actually credit some of that to doing this dumb voice memo thing.

Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer

I know some writers who feel they didn’t learn anything new from this book, or just straight up disagree with its concepts, but (I’m sure this point has already been well-established if you’re still reading) I don’t come from a ‘traditional’ or ‘academic’ writing background as much as a ‘I learned some stuff from Googling and being on the Internet a lot.’ Therefore, a lot of Dreyer’s English’s material was revelatory to me. The book’s general manifesto revolves around writing and editing for clarity. Create sentences that have style and flair, but aren’t difficult to comprehend, that aren’t convoluted or ambiguous in their meaning. That’s something I believed in already, but that idea really crystallized for me while reading.

As a random aside, I remember talking to my friend Tim about this book, and we started using Benjamin Dreyer’s last name as a verb. To Dreyer is to edit, particularly to edit in the way that Dreyer’s English evangelizes. Tim and I use it to this day when we collaborate on things together: “I fixed the last two sentences by Dreyer-ing them.” or “Can you read over my email to X? I still need to Dreyer it, but I want to make sure it has the basic information first.” This can escalate to truly insane levels. If we read a piece of prose that we consider purple or unnecessarily lyrical, we’ll say we wish we could have “Dreyer’d their ass” or sometimes we’ll just send something we’d like the other to edit with the words “DREYER ME.” (Lol, I hope the great recently retired Random House Copy Chief himself never reads this. He’d probably advise I Dreyer this whole paragraph.)

Anyway, years after reading Dreyer’s English, it’s not necessarily what he advised about oxford commas or other specific usages that stayed with me, it’s the feeling that I emerged with after reading—that I should start to form my own ideas and guidelines around editing, both when editing my own work and the work of others, whereas before I was just like, ‘I guess I’ll see if there are typos or something?’ In general, I feel what’s great about Dreyer’s English or other style guides is that you will find yourself strongly agreeing or vehemently disagreeing with the rules, and therefore you’re reflecting upon and realizing your own style preferences in a way you haven’t before.

On the other hand, there are a few particularly bitchy things Dreyer says in this book that haunt me to this day. Characters rarely nod or shake their head in my novel because of the part where Dreyer points out that people rarely do these things in real life and then says this: “With all the nodding and head shaking going on, I’m surprised that half the characters in modern fiction haven’t dislocated something.” Whew!

Airtable

Speaking of Tim, around the same time I was telling him about Dreyer’s English, he was spreading the gospel of this app Airtable, as a way to get more professional about all the stuff we were tracking for our literary magazine The Bushwick Review. At first, I was like, “what is this, more complicated Excel? I don’t have the patience to learn this!” But now I’m into it. As discussed in the cover reveal post, we used it to track everything we did for the Log Off cover, and now I’m also using it to track publicity emails I’m sending.

Eric Smith’s query resources

I did query agents for Log Off before deciding to go with an independent publisher. A query letter is a tricky art, and if you google ‘how to write a query letter’ there’s a lot of corny advice or generic templates out there. The best resource I found was Eric Smith’s page Perfect Pitch. Eric is an agent and writer, and on his site, he simply shares successful query letters from his clients and explains why they were strong. That was so clear, to the point, and easy to follow.

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Alright, that’s it. Do any of you use these same resources, or have other recommendations of your own?