The Other Stuff to Write

Today's guest post is by Nikolas Baron, who says he has the pleasure of being tasked with talking to writers, bloggers, teachers, and others about how they use Grammarly’s online proofreading application to improve their writing. Nikolas discovered his love for the written word in Elementary School, where he started spending his afternoons sprawled across the living room floor devouring one Marc Brown childrens’ novel after the other and writing short stories about daring pirate adventures. After acquiring some experience in various marketing, business development, and hiring roles at internet startups in a few different countries, he decided to re-unite his professional life with his childhood passions by joining Grammarly’s marketing team in San Francisco. His free time is spent biking, travelling, and reading. Here's Nick:

You need to be honest.  Years have passed; the novel has not materialized. You have not written it.  The little that you have written is sitting in a file “in the cloud” taking up a pitiably small portion of its virtually unlimited storage.  You are not going to write that novel, are you?  Well, if not, do not just sit around gathering dust.  Write something else.  Use that A+ that you received in English Literature.  What can you write other than that thing that you obviously are not going to write?  Here are some ideas that will put your atrophying creative voice to work.

• Short Stories

            If you already had an idea in mind for a novel, you have a great start for a short story.  Consider a short story as a brief episode in one of your character’s lives.  Are you familiar with Winesburg, Ohio written by Sherwood Anderson?  This collection of short stories focuses on the inhabitants of a small town; I will let you guess where.  The characters interact with each other, so the stories overlap.  Sherwood Anderson compiled the stories into one book.  I am not a huge fan of short stories, but I loved this book because of how the stories relate to one another.  Take one of your characters and develop a story around a major theme in his life.  Before you know it, you may have populated a small Midwestern village with characters as interesting as those in Winesburg!

• Blogs

            Blogs kill two birds with one stone.  On one hand, you are exercising your writing muscles.  You can write about your life, travels, and interests.  Blogs are a vehicle for sharing writing tips with others.  As followers give feedback, you discover what your readers really want to read.  When you are ready to tackle “the Great American novel,”  you have built a fanbase eager to hear your story.

• Poems

            Those who write stories are not necessarily talented at writing poems.  Poems require a different set of skills.  Trying your hand at this art form will bring a refreshing change to your routine.  As an added bonus, magazines often accept submissions of a single poem.  

• Product descriptions

            Would you like some extra cash?  Companies pay freelance writers to describe their minventory.  Companies rely on product descriptions to inform the public of product features and to entice them to buy.  Often, you will need to learn how to use SEO, or search engine optimization.  Take a class in this skill online.  

• Reviews

            A lot of online articles about writing encourage new writers to read many different types of novels.   While reading, why not write a review?  Your analyses will teach you what makes a novel fail.  When you write, you will know what to avoid.  Furthermore, reviews are also great content for blogs.

• Grants/Proposals

            If you want to support a non-profit organization, donate your writing talent to help them to gain funding for special projects.  Otherwise, grant writing is another way to generate income from your writing skills.  You will need special training because grant writing requirements are very specific.  

• Query Letters

            Do you work best under pressure?  If a publisher accepts your proposal, it will obligate you to start writing.  Use the loads of templates available to give you ideas.  Do not copy them, not even brief phrases.  Many publishers use plagiarism checkers to ensure that content is original.  Any suspicion that it is not equals an automatic rejection.  Besides, if you cannot write a simple letter, you have no business proposing to write a novel.

In addition to what I have already mentioned, there are tutorials, screenplays, and dozens of other writing options to explore.  A masterpiece of a novel could be a part of your future, but you still need to be busy now.  Experiment with other writing styles and genres.  What a great way to get your mind moving again!

Infamy Isn't All Bad

Let me start by saying I'm reasonably pleased with the way my life has turned out. For sure there are things I would have changed, had I known what I know now, but I'm quite happy with the overall result. At this point, you're probably thinking what the devil does this have to do with infamy?

It goes back 69 years to that fateful December 7, 1941. What happened that day put me on the path that led to where I am now. It was one of those blockbuster events that cause people to recall what they were doing when they heard the news. I was riding in my dad's car, listening to the radio. It was around 1:30 p.m. when the news broke on CBS Radio (WLAC in Nashville). I don't remember if I heard the initial announcement or a follow-up. But I remember the message.

The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. You can listen to the original radio reports at the Modesto Radio Museum website.

I had just turned 16 and gotten my driver's license. I didn't get to use the car much back in those days, and even less after gas rationing started in 1942. But like every other boy in my school, I couldn't wait to get out and join the service. My older brother was drafted after finishing his first year in college. I was only 17 when I graduated but promptly enlisted in the Army Air Corps Reserve, getting called to active duty a month after my next birthday.

In his famous declaration of war speech, President Roosevelt called December 7 "a day which will live in infamy." For me, it was a day that set the course for my life. That decision to join the Army sent me on a circuitous route around the Southeast Training Command. My final assignment was at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas.

While there I worked with a fellow Aviation Cadet who had studied a year at Yale before entering the service. We were talking one day about what we'd do when the war was over (it was winding down at the time), and he said if he had it to do over he'd have studied journalism. Up to that point I had never considered writing either as a hobby or a profession. But the idea struck a chord, and I decided to find a journalism school to attend.

One thing leads to another as things develop through life. If the Japanese hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor that day, I probably wouldn't have joined the Army Air Force, wouldn't have wound up at Randolph Field, and wouldn't have been steered into a writing career. So for me, that day of infamy started things in motion to produce a life that has been uniquely satisfying.

Currently I enjoy writing mystery novels and have no plans to break off in another direction. I've had a lifelong adventure with words. I tell the full story on my website in an essay entitled "Reflections on the Writing Life - my 60-year odyssey with the written word."

How to Write a Novel

First you sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper. A pencil? In this day of PCs and laptops and Alphasmarts? A pencil can’t get you on Twitter or Facebook or Blogger.com. Maybe not, but it can jot down all those notes you gather to get started.

John Steinbeck used as many as sixty cedar pencils a day in his writing, and Ernest Hemingway was a major pencil user. I don’t advocate writing your mystery in pencil, but the marvelous little device is a must during the creative process. Look at this neat display of penciled notes on my desk. Okay, neatness isn’t my specialty.



There’s a website called Pencils.com that has all kinds of info on the wooden widget. It notes that the pencil is the only portable, lightweight invention that can draw a line 35 miles long, average 45,000 words and correct its own mistakes.

If you thought it was a latter-day invention, you’re way off the mark. Scribes in ancient Rome wrote on papyrus with metal styluses that left their mark on the forerunner of paper. Some early styluses were made of lead. This led (a little humor there) to calling the legible part of the pencil "lead," although it’s made of graphite.

The first lead stick pencils were wrapped in string. Sort of like those peel-off China markers that will write on most anything. During later times, the lead (or graphite) was inserted in a hollow wooden stick.

Pencils first came into popular use when mass produced in Germany in 1662. The first U.S. pencils were fashioned by a cabinet maker in Concord, Massachusetts after they became unavailable from England because of the War of 1812. Incidentally, Leonardo da Vinci did a lot of pencil sketching. Don’t know how much penciling Dan Brown did while writing Leonardo’s Code.

Meriwether Lewis, the famed explorer of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, carried “1 Set of Small Slates & pencils” on his historic adventure. Which brings us back to mystery writing. My character Sid Chance in The Surest Poison was the former police chief of Lewisville, Tennessee, a fictional small town near the Natchez Trace where Meriwether Lewis died in 1809.

One other note regarding the noted explorer, a small town not far off the Trace named for him, Lewisburg, is home to one of several pencil manufacturers in southern Middle Tennessee. Nearby Shelbyville, better known now for its Walking Horse Celebration, was once called Pencil City. Tennessee became noted for pencil making because of its abundant supply of eastern red cedar, the best wood for writing instruments.

The Shelbyville Pencil Company, which started in 1933, gives their pencils four-to-seven coats of paint and can turn out 400,000 a day. But no doubt the yellow variety called No. 2 is the No. 1 choice of writers.

Now you know how to write a novel. The next question is what do you put in it? Words, of course. And where do you get them? Can you spell t-h-e-s-a-u-r-u-s?

Checking the date on the entry below this one tells me I have neglected this blog the past week or so. I've been holed up working on the next Greg McKenzie mystery. I'll try to do better in coming days. Depends on how well the new book, tentatively titled A Sporting Murder, plays out.