Blogger: Rachel Kent
We live in interesting times. We have instant access to news, pictures, shopping, etc. online 24/7. There’s so much information being shared each day. In some ways technology has made life/work simpler, but in many other ways having so much information just complicates things.
The internet opens up opportunities for finding and researching stories. Before the internet, I assume newspapers, TV, or magazines were the way for authors to find real-life stories to spark the imagination. Now we have access to stories the day they happen and we have archives of real-life stories to search through and use for research.
We use online dictionaries and thesauruses now. I haven’t picked up my hardcover dictionary in a couple of years. Do you tend to use these online tools or do you stick with the “old school” books?
I also see a lot of authors sharing pictures of people online that match their characters’ looks. Is this practice a useful tool for you? Do you like to have a photo of your character’s lookalike to keep in view as you write?
How often do you use the internet as you are writing a book? (Not to check Facebook, but for book-writing purposes.) If the internet was to suddenly go away while you were writing your book, what helpful tool would you miss the most?
And the big question: Do you think you might actually be more productive while writing if the internet was gone? Or is it more of a help than a distraction?
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!
I use a little of both. my initial ramblings are all pen and ink, so that the first edit is the transcription to pc. My dictionary is MS word (helps with some grammar too, but it’s not always correct, particularly in dialogue), my thesaurus is a mix of MS Word again and also my old school Collins Little Gem book. sometimes I will scan the Internet, specifically if it is a turn of phrase I want to change.
I have used the Internet extensively for research into areas of knowledge I know little about, e.g. concussion. and also when looking for character names which follow a theme.
I have looked into a number of software packages aimed at helping novelists, e.g. scrivener. but none of them do what I really want. I would like to be able to load my story in and have it search and highlight each character, to enable me to indicate scenes in which they are in. Then i would want it to help identify how often and where characters pop-up so that I can easily follow each one and check for consistency, characterization and growth. I have not yet found such a tool. so in the meantime it’s plugging away by hand and keyboard
without the Internet I would visit a library, no biggie! 🙂
I like your attitude! Libraries were the go to place before! I remember doing all of my research projects in the library and I think I’ll make my kids do research there too when the time comes.
My blog and non-fiction Christian life WIP are wrapped around Bible references. The process would be slower without the internet. I recall a snippet of a verse, and **click** there it is, in context and in every translation.
*I also use short quotes from old hymns and the likes of Spurgeon, Brother Lawrence and St. Teresa of Ávila. Back in the olden days, I would have maintained endless card files. Now I click, copy and paste.
*I try to write for those who don’t read easily. I want to keep it simple. I often click on the thesaurus to find a shorter, simpler word.
*I am old enough to have written and typed the hard way. I could go back to it, I suppose, if our technology failed. But I would mourn. There would be tears.
Lol! Thankfully, we aren’t likely to suddenly lose the internet–so no need to invest in a box of tissues. It is interesting to think about what that would look like though.
My ready resource is “The New American Bible”, which is sitting next to the laptop. Beyond this is Strong’s Concordance, and a dictionary whose cover has long since been lost. I figure that if I can’t write a good story with only these, I shouldn’t write at all.
* Obviously, the internet’s a big help, and so is the technology of the personal computer. But they aren’t vital, and what I research online are details that are good for verisimilitude, but not vital for storytelling.
* To me the practice of finding photographic representations of characters is a terrible idea. I never rally think through a character’s appearance beyond the needed description, and write that in a fairly disengaged style (which is probably a failing). There are probably two reasons for this, one conscious, the other subconscious, and both are predicated on the assumption that an imaginary person’s attributes will be idealized –
1) Consciously, I try to remember the doggerel verse:
“It’s always tempting to impute
unlikely virtues to the cute.”
We don’t WANT attractive people to have a bad side, but we do need three-dimensional characters, and a handsome or pretty face can get in the way…forcing us to write what we don’t want to see.
2) Thinking about this before finishing this comment, I realized that I subconsciously find physical beauty boring and bland. Perhaps it’s as a simple analogue to Tolstoy’s comment that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is uniquely miserable.
I’m impressed! You and many others would not let the lack of technology stop writing productivity.
I’m surprised you wouldn’t want to find photographic representations of your characters, but I do understand your point. Maybe it is more of a female writer thing, too?
The internet is very helpful to me as I write. My most used website is thefreedictionary.com. I use it for synonyms, to help me use better words, to ensure I’m using the word properly, etc.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Happy Mother’s Day to you, too! I use thefreedictionary as well. 🙂 Very useful and fast!
Thanks for this, Rachel – it’s interesting to think about! I definitely use online tools for research and finding alternative words or checking the definition on something, but I also get a lot of use out of the Thesaurus on Word. I enjoy finding pictures of people that look like how I’ve imagined my characters, but I don’t generally refer to them as I write, they’re more for interested friends. If the internet were gone, I would have to be much more organized about my research. Instead of being able to pop onto Google to look something up on the spot, I’d need to plan my research either ahead of time or leave blanks until I could fill them in. But even then, I probably would be more productive without the internet 🙂
Yes, I wonder the same about myself. I bet I would be more productive. There are so many things to look at and read online. Blogs everywhere. Social media. Pictures to keep up on on Instagram. It’s time consuming!
Google regularly suggests I take a time out. 🙂
(Joke)
I’m with Andrew, I don’t search for faces of my characters–that would be too intrusive for me.
Since I’ve been writing on a computer, and before that a typewriter, since before you were born, I would miss those electronic tools the most.
Indeed, the last time I tried to write on just a typewriter–my mother’s obituary– I botched it up so much my brother and I laughed until we cried.
Which was good.
Yes, I’ve never had to use a typewriter. We did have one to play with in our pediatrician’s office. 🙂 I am old enough to remember not having internet though.
You threw off my male/female theory with the searching for characters’ faces online. I guess it’s just a personal preference. Some people find that helpful and others do not.
Because I write both fiction and non, I use the internet almost every day. I use Dictionary.com, Blue Letter Bible, and of course, Google. I’d definitely miss technology. Plus I recently learned how to use Scrivener, which is technology driven. The internet HAS made my life easier. I was scanning FB yesterday and saw a post on feral children. The lightbulb went off, as I’m making notes for a novel about a child found wandering in a homeless camp. I had no idea they were called feral. Which led me on an internet search. Which took me to Amazon to buy a book. Bam! All that in less than an hour.
Feral children are fascinating and very very sad. My sister was watching a show on the few true Feral children that have been found and these little ones had actually been raised by wild animals. Yes, it happens. Even wolves will raise a baby once in awhile, just like in jungle book. So amazing, and so sad as usually these little ones cannot smile and only learn human social cues with great difficulty if at all.
Isn’t it amazing?! Research does become easier with the internet, no question about it. And the things you can discover. It is fascinating.
For research, I am on the internet a lot.
I was blessed beyond words to be gifted with a digital file of the entire 15 years of research conducted by a park ranger who spent years at Bosque Redondo, the Navajo interment camp where my first book is based. Personal letters from staff, camp records, military correspondence, everything!!! But? It is ALL on iCloud, and yes, I did download the entire collection to my hard drive.
Stuff like that is not in any book.
Nor are the oral histories told to me by the descendants of prisoners and survivors.
More productive without internet? If I was able to schedule my writing time, most likely.
Wow! What an amazing resource. And yes, things like that would be very hard to come by without the internet.
I learned to limit myself to 20 minutes of “researching” before I write. Research can be looking up pictures, checking emails or Facebook, even zinging around on Pinterest.
**Literally, I set an alarm and stick to it. If I am stuck for a word or phrase or something needing more research, I’ll highlight it and go back after I’m done for the day. Or I’ll tackle it the next time I sit down, because it gets me back into that plot.
**For me, the internet is a useful tool. Unless I hop on Pinterest. And then I happily fall down that hole of funny memes and pictures that make me think, “That’s the start of a good story.”
Wow! You are disciplined! I want to be more like you. 🙂
Well I’d certainly have to work harder without internet as far as research and grammar check go, but my tattered Thesaurus is always close at hand if my Mac doesn’t fulfill every word search desire. I also have a huge dictionary, which I enjoy reading just for the fun of it. Weird, I know, but I like words.
*I don’t search for faces to go with my characters because I’m not even fond of seeing an actor’s face on a book cover after the movie version is released.
I don’t think you’re weird, Lara. I have my own Webster’s Unabridged, and it is fun to just open randomly and read. It’s fun to do a click-tour from synonym to synonym in the electronic dictionaries, too.
I don’t think it’s that unusual to like words and reading the dictionary. 🙂 I used to have a page-a-day calendar with a word and definition for each day.
I do prefer it when characters are written to look more real. People all have flaws and are beautiful anyway.
I think it depends what I’m working on.
That being said, the internet is great help for certain things I’m writing. At other times, it is very much a distraction.
It helps with Bible research for sure, is often an inspiration when I find needed pictures (even if I don’t use the exact picture), and it has been a help to connect with other writers when I can’t find the answer to a certain writing issue.
I think life would be much simpler, at times, without the internet. I wonder what we’d do with all that free time often wasted as one internet site leads us to another one. ???
I do love using online Bibles for searching verses and searching different versions of the Bible.
I still get books for heavy research, but I use the internet to find the books that I then order from the library. I would miss the quick fact check the most. I read a Gothic mystery the other day and they were talking about alligators in the Amazon…wait a minute…isn’t it called The American Alligator because they only live in the U.S.? She must have meant crocodiles. As an author nowadays I could just jump online and Google, “Are there Alligators in the Amazon?” There, I just checked. True Alligators only live in the U.S. and the Yangzte River in China. So handy. I also like walking a location with Google Earth, but have to go to a coffee shop as our internet can’t handle that…oh and there are hiking websites where hikers post their pictures of a particular place, very valuable.
Alligators are only in China and US? How did the alligators get from China to USA? Or vice versa… something to think about. LOL
One of the reasons I got a smart phone is so that my husband and I could stop arguing about silly things. We both think we know everything, so now we can search right away to see who is correct.
I use Thesaurus.com and Google constantly. Sometimes I shut off the internet so FB won’t be a distraction, but then I miss my online tools.
You want to hear something crazy? My high-schooler writes his term papers on his phone! And that’s for AP courses, so he’s no slouch. I was shocked the first time he did that. Another author (Pepper Basham, I think?) told me she used her phone to write the rough draft of her last book. This must be what it felt like when writers first started switching over to computers.
The first word processing program I used was a sort of programming. We’d type the content, along with commands (I remember “.sp1” to end a paragraph, “.sp2” to leave a blank line). Then we’d use some other command to “script it out”–that is, to see how it would look printed. We’d find and remember the errors, then go back to the other format to fix it. And it was all so amazing and wonderful!
*The next big step was WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get.
*After years of retyping multipage contracts, and literally cutting and taping pages together to avoid introducing new errors, we were happy to let our Selectric typewriters go.
Wow! I am shocked that someone could type up an essay or book on a phone. Amazing.
I like using my phone for a lot of things, especially reading manuscripts, but I don’t even like composing emails on it.
The web is only as good as the particular site you access, but it is an essential tool for my style of writing.
*While I use Wikipedia as a starting point, I try to look at original sources (hardcopy and electronic) and expert sites when I need information such as cattle gestation and weaning times, wound healing, cooling rates of dead bodies, etc. Google Scholar is a useful search tool for finding reliable sources.
* Since I write historical, I use the web to check whether a particular word was in use at the time of the novel. Using Google to search “definition (word or phrase),” you can access a box with a place to click at the bottom for translations, word origins, and additional definitions and synonyms. For my Roman era novels, I use Google Translate to make sure there is a direct Latin equivalent for a word or phrase that I suspect might be too contemporary. It would be very handy for contemporary novels in foreign locales, too.
*For my Roman era novels, I use the web primarily to locate books written by scholars specializing in a topic. The information on the web tends to be too generic, trying to condense 800 years of Republic and Empire into a short article when there were major changes in details that are important when you are trying to locate something in a single year in a specific province and even a specific town.
Very true. You have to be careful what you take as fact online. Make sure you know the author is an expert before using their info for research purposes.
My goodness, I use whatever works at the time. The Internet is my constant companion, I use it often to check word definitions or grammar usage, facts and info), but I also have stacks of physical resources that are accessed per need. I like to keep current on world affairs, so I make time for that as well. As far as images, I’m not much for that sort of thing, I tire of seeing graphics and don’t like to use them…but find a I have to or my blog picks up other images from my site (arg!!!). I don’t think I would be more productive if there wasn’t the pull of the Internet, but I would be more focused. It’s easy for me to go on rabbit trails. I do think it would be more fun without the constant distraction. Now, if I were more disciplined… Have a blessed weekend everybody.
It sounds like you use a good mix of tools. I need to be more disciplined, too. It is hard to avoid those rabbit trails.
Rachel, would you believe I use a paper dictionary in my writing room? I work on manuscripts while I’m offline, and I use social media in a different room so I’m not distracted.
The tool I would miss most is Google search. It’s great for looking up things like poisons for cozy mystery plots—however—I sure hope my computer browsing history doesn’t set off any alarm bells.
Mother’s Day Blessings ~ Wendy Mac
You should be OK, Wendy. It’s the searches on explosives recipes, detonator designs, and aerosol dispersal of bioagents that will get you on the three-letter-agency radars.
Thanks for the tips, Carol. I’ll avoid those questions—maybe—first I need to figure out an easy way to to flatten a nearly empty restaurant in my latest MS. 😉
There is an engineering saying that any problem can be solved by judicious application of high explosive. Andrew is the expert here, but I would say it depends on the type of construction, the architectural layout, and how much you need to flatten. You can gloss over detonator design and not search that topic to stay off radar.
It sounds like you have a lot more discipline than I do! Good for you!
And yes, mystery and suspense writers probably have the most interesting browsing histories. lol.
Happy Mother’s Day to you, too!
Thank you, Rachel. It was my huge lack of willpower that initially drove me to this plan last year. Once it became a habit to write in a separate place, it was easy. Getting set up was the hard part. 🙂
I do a lot of geographical and historical research for stories, so the Internet and things like Google Earth have made a big difference.
Also, my writing group exchanges manuscripts, critiques, and support using Google Docs and a private Facebook group.
I’ve also gotten to know several people in the local writing community (including my group members) through mailing lists, Facebook, and blogs.
The Internet also provides backup opportunities we didn’t have before. I can sync my files between computers, plus back up to the cloud. Even if my house were vaporized by an alien death ray, my files would be safe.
I can make notes on my phone or tablet, or even my eReader, and have them on my writing computers. (I write mostly on three different computers.)
And, then there’s the whole online/email submission and submission tracking process.
And that’s just a few of the ways I use tech in my writing life. I use it from brainstorming through submission.
It’s hard to even remember how it was when I started writing, back before computers. I look forward to whatever is coming next.
I’ve always got a thesaurus open!
I definitely need the Internet open when I’m working. I get so stuck and the only way to “unblock” is to focus on something unrelated for a minute or two.