Happy New Year everyone!!! I hope yours is off to a good start.
I’m gearing up for the spring semester at Huntingdon College where I teach History. I’ve also been hard at work on writing the Batman book. So here’s a few updates on things here:
I’ve started using a writing program called Scrivener. My friend Kate Jewell at Fitchburg State recommended it a couple years back. I was reluctant to adopt it at the time because on its face it seemed too complex and cumbersome. What has finally sold me on it is a few things. First, I can really easily write my chapters in sections and quickly reorganize them as I need with the simple drag of an icon rather than a cut and paste job that may or may not keep everything intact and the formatting clean. Second, it keeps everything (all the chapters with all their individual sections and all of my research notes) all in one document that’s super easy to navigate in a click! So I don’t lose track of anything or lose focus clicking back and forth between windows. It is all right there in one window without scrolling through a recklessly long Word doc. Third, it has an easy feature to set and track targets for word count in each writing session.
I’ve been trying to practice a lesson I learned from Stephen King where you set an ambitious goal for the day, write until you meet it, and then set it aside and step away from the work. I have found one of the hardest parts about a long writing project is that it can make a single day’s work seem insignificant in the bigger picture since 500 drafted words is far short of 80-100,000 finished words. This can get discouraging, feeling like the day you’ll be done is never today! But the truth is that a long project is essentially made up of a hundred little steps. I’m learning that accepting this and setting up my writing schedule accordingly is making a real difference in my outlook about my writing.
I don’t have to finish the book today. What I have to do today is finish my target word count. When I do that, I can be done. And I can feel accomplished! That’s really important when you’re talking about something that can take months of work to complete. The other thing this does is help provide with a process I can repeat each day. Because consistency is really the key to writing a book.
I learned a lot of these lessons just by necessity in trying to finish my dissertation, but I never really formalized them into a consistent action plan. Finishing a dissertation was mostly about survival, especially at the end when I had a second baby at home was working 3 jobs, including one that required a 2 hour daily commute. My biggest goal for Charlie Brown’s America was always to do well enough that someone would let me write more books. Well, thanks to all my wonderful readers out there, that dream has become a reality!
So 2023 is the year that I focus on installing the habits necessary to be a professional writer. And, as I said, the heart of that is a consistent, repeatable process with attainable daily goals.
What I’m reading, watching, etc.:
I just finished Mary Beard’s SPQR and have already passed it along to a friend. It was so good! She’s really masterful at bringing her expertise to readers in a really accessible and endearing way. She’s not talking down to the reader, trying to impress them with her lofty ideas and fancy words. Instead, she talks with the reader as she guides them through her argument. You feel that you are taking a journey in time and space and it is really is a lot of fun! She also smartly broke up long chapters into much more manageable subsections (a welcomed approach for a slow reader like me!). And she understands that readers of popular history like to have bits of interesting trivia they can then share with friends and family. That trivia should NOT be trivial. It has to relate to the point the author is making. But it has got to be there for your reader to really get the sense that they walked away with something they can hold onto. SPQR is a great book and I highly recommend it!
I’m also interjecting my nonfiction reading with some fiction (which has been quite rare for me over the past decade). What I’m looking for is creative inspiration to not lose sight of the drama and thrill and mystery of the narrative I’m writing. So just before Christmas, I read my first Stephen King book (I was too scared to try reading any of his stuff as a kid!). I read Carrie and really enjoyed it. The part that surprised me most was the way he interspersed fictionalized news reports, interviews, and scholarly assessments of the events to fill in what characters could not know in the heat of the moment and foreshadow outcomes. Very nicely done and an important lesson in how to pace a story in a way that keeps readers turning the page.
Next up in my reading, I’m bouncing back and forth between Beverly Gage’s new biography of J. Edgar Hoover, G-man and Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October.
As far as watching goes, I went back this week and rewatched Zack Snyder’s Batman v. Superman (the director’s cut) and was struck by how much I really liked it. There was so much bad blood and internet turmoil surrounding that franchise and Warner Bros. mishandling of it all. And I know it is a controversial take on the two lead characters (Batman with guns?? Ma Kent reinforcing Pa Kent’s point that maybe Superman isn’t obligated to save anyone?? Martha??). But I think it explores some important questions about the characters and about American society in the 21st century. Questions like how far we’re willing to go for security. What price we’re willing to pay to keep our world the way we like it. And what drives a superhero to be the one willing to take all the punches on our behalf.
And to someone I saw claim the other day that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was the only unabashed post-9/11 superhero movie I say, did you even watch Batman v. Superman?! I won’t go into all of it here because I need to save things for the book, but Snyder’s film is undoubtedly about the post-9/11 world.
I also watched Glass Onion with my wife and we had a lot of fun with it! I think you have to understand Rian Johnson’s work as purposefully a genre work. It is a visual mystery novel in the mode of Agatha Christie (whom I loved reading as a kid!). These Knives Out movies are fun with some over the top characters and a point of view.
That’s all for now! This was supposed to be a short update. Oh well… until next time!!