Tampa Writers Alliance President's Message

“A Writer’s Life…” from TWA president Sandra Kischuk

What are you doing day to day to reinforce your writing? Are you reading anything related to your work?
Are you doing research to develop your plot? Are you watching what goes on around you, hearing the pieces
of dialog you can take as your own? Are you writing, putting in the time and practice to hone your skill? It is
easy to get caught up in all the daily administrivia, and let what we think of as the non-essential slide.
Tomorrow. I’ll get to it tomorrow.
How many tomorrows have your promised yourself—tomorrows that never came?

How many times are you going to tell yourself that tomorrow you will write; you don’t have time for it today?
If you are not setting aside a little time for yourself, for what you want, the message you are sending to
yourself is that who you are and what you want is not important.

Writing, even if it is only journaling daily life, keeps those writing muscles limber. If technique is something
you battle with, if your critiques are less than encouraging, if you feel discouraged in your work, know, it is
practice that will get you to the next level. There are a lot of writers who weren’t too good to start with, but
were willing to put in the time, effort, and rewrites to perfect their craft.

Becoming a published writer results from being willing to listen to your editor or to critiques. If you refuse to
listen to an honest critique, you are not ready to be a writer. If you choose to take a quality evaluation as a
personal attack, you are not ready to be a writer. If you want an affirmation, adulation to reinforce your self
esteem, or people to stand in awe of your writing, give your work to a friend or someone in your family that
will love it because it is yours.

When someone gives you an analysis of your work, you are getting a response to how your writing has
affected them. Admittedly some of the critiques are from those who have their own agendas, or are dealing
an emotional insecurity or ignorance, but don’t discount every evaluation. If you have to explain what you have
written, then you haven’t communicated what you need to in your writing. You are not going to be there to
explain it to every reader. Decide what you want—if it is to become a published writer, be willing to work at it.
Act as if your writing is more important than your excuses.

Writing is a private activity. Even though we gather at times with other people, writing, the actual process,
requires us to be alone with our thoughts, to listen to the voice of the muse without the interruption of other,
more corporeal voices. We get labeled antisocial for that, as if taking time alone was a bad thing. In a world
afraid of silence and space not filled with “things,” the writer (artist) stands alone.

As a child, I remember the comment of a pastor visiting from England. Turning on the light in the church
bathroom also switched on the fan. It didn’t seem out-of-the-ordinary, but he noted, “Americans can’t go
anywhere without noise.” It seems even more that way now, with boom boxes and i-pods drowning out
interpersonal communication. More than once I have gotten in a car with someone who promptly turned the
radio up so loud that there was no chance to talk and little chance to escape into my own thoughts. Who
hasn’t seen adolescents with their heads plugged into group-think music, young persons who find it an
affront if you threaten their connection with the pulsing media-mother?

In a world where people are shouting, “Listen to me!,” the primary response is to crank up the volume and
drown out the individual voice. The publishing industry is collapsing in on itself, with fewer publishing houses
printing even fewer new writers except for those who are already famous and adding “author” to their list of accomplishments. (Try ghost-writing…) For a novice writer to be recognized in this cacophony is difficult.

At the same time, there are more books published than at any time in history. The different publishing options
have made it easy enough for anyone with a few hundred dollars to put their words in print. Quality suffers,
although I won’t say that is a problem of the self-publishing industry alone. I have taken more than one
mainstream book back to the library before I finished reading it because it was so poorly written.

I liken the current situation to adults who want their childish crayon scribblings to be proclaimed as art without
taking the time to learn the craft and techniques that can truly make them great. “Self-published” gets its bad
name fairly…many books have not even seen one editor before they are bound and presented as completed
works. Self-publishing is a good exercise in learning the publishing process. Sadly, many times, that’s all that
can be said.

As writers, we observe, listening for a turn of phrase, for a new viewpoint that will give the reader a greater
understanding of life, and allow them to organize and process their thoughts. We write the words: sometimes
the reader is us.

“Since your not doing anything,” a friend interrupts me. Not doing anything visible, I think. I’m sitting here staring

at the wall, fingers on keys, composing a symphony of words.

“I don’t read fiction,” a man told me. “I don’t have time for it.” I had to think on that one for a while. Is writing,
fiction or otherwise, a luxury?

I don’t think so. My feeling is that it is essential to whom we are as human beings.

What is fiction but a truth told in the form of a story?

What is poetry, except, like music, a way to reach deeper into ourselves and our feelings?

What is non-fiction, but a way to communicate thoughts and ideas, of creating the ‘a-hah! experience’ over and
over again?

Somehow, in the middle of all of it, I ended up president of the Tampa Writers Alliance. But TWA, just as I say
when I am doing personal coaching, is not about me. It is about you. One of the things my mom told me many
years ago is that the way to be happy, wherever you are, is to get involved. So I’m passing it on to you. If you
want to hear a speaker, let me know. If there’s not a novel pod close to you or a children’s literature writing group,
start one. If you want to see a change, let one of the ExCom members know.

Craft? Technique? Publishing options? Its all out there. I hope we can bring enough of it into our general
meetings to encourage you to become the best writer you can be, hone your skills in our critique groups,
novel pods, and poetry workshops, and provide camaraderie with other writers when you finally come out of
your writing room.

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“A Writer’s Life…” from TWA president Sandra Kischuk

Tools…and how do you use WordÔ instead of letting it use you
Symbols and Effects
First, that little Ô. Where does that come from? Along with the © symbol. Go to:

· Insert ® Symbol ® (you’ll find these characters under the Font: Symbol selection) Highlight
the character you want, select Insert at the bottom of the dialogue box, then close the box
(Select the red ‘X’ in the upper left hand corner.)

While we’re looking at all the neat symbols in the text box, select:

· Insert ® Symbol ® (you’ll find these characters under the Font: (Times New Roman – more
about that later. What is neat here is that you can find all those odd and foreign characters:
é, á, ñ for starters. Now you don’t have to pull out your pen and add in those odd accents
and tildes [ ~ ] by hand.)

Fast selection (to turn it on and turn it off):

· Underline – Control [CTRL] [keystroke] U

· Italics – Control [CTRL] [keystroke] I

· Bold – Control [CTRL] [keystroke] B

Text manipulation commands:

· Select “All” – Control [CTRL] [keystroke] A

· Copy – Select desired text, Control [CTRL] [keystroke] C

· Delect – Select desired text, Control [CTRL] [keystroke] X

· Paste – Select desired position to place text, Control [CTRL] [keystroke] V

· Save – (the whole document), Control [CTRL] [keystroke] S

Now let’s talk about setting up your document. Choose:

· File ® New ® Blank Document (Control [CTRL] [keystroke] N) will do the same thing.

When you have your document, you need to set up the page.

· File ® Page Setup ® (leads to a dialog box with 3 tabs.)

- Select: Margins

- Scroll each of the sides, the top and the bottom to set the margins at 1”. This is
standard for submissions to most publications. Ignore the “Gutter” options unless
you want to play around with them and see what happens. Click on the Portrait
option for Orientation, Pages – Normal, Preview – Whole Document.

· File ® Page Setup ®

- Paper size: Letter (8-1/2 x 11 in.)

- If you want, you can select Print Options, and choose reverse order (which
actually stacks multiple page documents in the correct order) or draft output
(which saves ink.)

· File ® Page Setup ®

- Layout: This is where you can get in and set it up to have a different header on
the first page.

Format:

Most publications want double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman font. How do you get it?

· Format ® Font ® (Select Times New Roman, Regular, 12, Font Color Black)

And the double spacing? Don’t hit the ‘Enter, twice to get it. If you haven’t started typing
anything yet

· Format ® Paragraph ® Indents and Spacing

- Align: Left

- Indentation: If you choose: Special: First Line, By: .5, you will get a consistent
irst line indent on your paragraphs.

- Spacing: Line spacing, Double.

If you already have information typed in, highlight the whole document or

· Select “All” – Control [CTRL] [keystroke] A

· With the material highlighted, format your Font and Paragraph as above.

Header and Page Numbers and Word Counts:

This is how to get those page numbers that don’t arbitrarily wander from page to page and get a
word count that doesn’t count the words in your title.

· View ® Header and Footer ® (A Header box will show as active and the rest of your document
will be grayed out. Type in your title. You may have to highlight the words you type and go
to: Format ® Font ® (Select Times New Roman, Regular, 12, Font Color Black).

· While the box is still active, tab over to the right, Now look at the toolbar that popped
up when you opened the Header and Footer. If you select the “#” icon, the page number
will show in the header on each page. If you then type in a “/” (slash), you can select
the “++” icon and the total number of pages in the document will appear following the
page number. So if you have a three page document, the upper right hand corners will
show 1/1, 1/2, and 1/3.

· Tools ® Word Count will get you the number of pages and word count.

Other Tools

· Tools ® Spelling and Grammar (You can have the system check a certain word or
the whole document, but it’s not 100%).

· Tools ® Language ® Thesaurus (Don’t quite have the right word? This is a fast and dirty
way that may occasionally solve your problem.)

· Tools ® Options ® Spelling and Grammar tab (You can find a lot to pick, but checking
readability statistics can be quite useful. If you select that, run a spell check over your
whole document and the readability statistics will pop up at the end.)

·
Edit ® Find (Replace) (Know that word is somewhere in your document. Use the Find
command to locate it. Or maybe you decide that your character Hieronymus should really
ust be called Sam. Use the Replace command to fix all of it. Be careful in replacing
smaller words since quite often they will appear as parts of other words, and if you
[Replace All], you might not be real happy with the results. You can also select a word
you have and Find other examples of it in your document.

“A Writer’s Life…” from TWA president Sandra Kischuk

Discipline.

Most of us remember that word from our childhood. Usually it meant something bad was about to
happen to us because we had not met someone else’s expectations. And that person was usually
bigger than we were.

I have been coaching a man for the past month who finds himself resisting whenever any form of
discipline tries to edge his way into his life. I turned the responsibility over to him (it was his in the first
place): he decided that it made sense for his business to pay his bills on Monday since it would free
up the rest of his week. At our next session, he reported to me that when it bothered him to constrain
himself to that obligation, he waited until Tuesday to pull out his check book. He still wished he could
pay the bills on Monday.

To write takes discipline. To sit down and hammer at the keyboard to produce something that may or
may not be of recognizable merit once is a challenge. To keep doing it until you get good requires
discipline.

The rewards from self-discipline don’t come immediately. People are not standing in line to tell us what
a great job we are doing or encourage our efforts. As in any pursuit in life, practice is something done
behind closed doors. Those who come out too soon are labeled amateur. Those who wait and come out
later when their skills are honed are called “instant successes.”

They’re usually not.

Yes, they may be successful. But it is not instant. It requires discipline.

One sixteen year old girl I talked with told me that she used to hate writing. Home-schooled, her
parents insisted that she write every day for years. When I talked with her, she was writing her
second novel and defined herself as a writer.

Her discipline was still external. As adults, we don’t have anyone standing over us to make sure
we write. If we try to set up a personal goal to write (pay the bills on Monday), we may find ourselves
rebelling against the discipline, even if internally imposed.

How does each of us overcome that? Ask yourself. What will it take to make your writing a priority?