By
Scott D. Parker
On New Year’s Day 2023, I decided to try something new.
I have long kept scattered notes about the things I consume. This includes books, movies, TV shows, music, and various other things. But these lists and such remain, well, scattered.
Over the past couple of years, the writer Ryan Holiday landed on my radar. He is the bookstore owner who writes about the Stoics and their philosophy and how it is still relevant in the 21st Century. In my reading about how Holiday researches and studies his subjects, I learned he keeps an extensive notecard system. His research assistant, Billy Oppenheimer, also keeps an extensive set of notecards. He wrote about his process here.
Being inspired by the two of them, I wondered what it would be like to start and maintain a notecard system of the things I read and watch.
And it’s been a blast.
As you can see from the picture, each card gets a title on top. The lower right corner is the date(s) where I read or watched the thing. Then, in the space of a 4x6 notecard, I write my thoughts. There’s a nice discipline about keeping your handwritten thoughts to a few lines that fit on a notecard. It’s wonderfully tangible to have the notecard you can hold and review.
You’ll also note that I have weekly and monthly assessments. Those I’ve found quite valuable at seeing personal trends, the wins, and the things I need to work on.
Since I’ve decided to read a comic book a day for Summer 2023, I’m also writing at least one notecard a day. Again, the discipline of doing this is proving very rewarding.
Oh, and yeah, I’m just using a binder clip right now. I graduated from the smallest to the middle and now a giant clip. And I just opened my second package of notecards this week. Maybe as a present to myself, when I get a couple hundred notecards, I’ll buy a box. A long-term goal.
How do you keep track of the books you read and the stuff you watch?
Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts
Saturday, June 17, 2023
How Do You Keep Track of What You Read?
Friday, October 31, 2014
Scary Movies...
By Russel D McLean
Since I've already shared my five scary books (here, at What's On North), I figured I also needed to share my five favourite scary movies here at Do Some Damage. It is, after all, Halloween... Just to warn you, I'll be sharing clips here, and some of them may not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition...
Happy Halloween, folks...
1) The Shining - Jack Nicholson may have later become a parody of himself, but here, despite the final reel's overacted moments, he is truly chilling as a writer who slowly loses it at a haunted hotel high in the mountains. All work and No Play makes Jack a Dull Boy...
2) Night of the Living Dead - the low budget shocker than spawned a million and one imitators, but there's an atmosphere here that can't be beaten by any of the other movies in the sequence and a low budget inventiveness that is truly unnerving.
3) Invasion of the Body Snatchers - "They're here already! You're next! You're next!" Another movie that spawned imitations and remakes, but that's never quite been beaten. The very fact that the invaders look like those you know adds an atmosphere of unsettling paranoia that can't be beat!
4) The Thing - John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the classic horror is a classic in its own right; a paranoid, terrifying thriller where there is no escape for anyone at the icebound Arctic research station, it again plays on the fears of how those we know could be hiding something dark and terrible inside. The effects are both bloody and brilliant, and the film still holds up today with its unsettling atmosphere, making the 2011 remake utterly unnecessary
.
5) Misery - Again, as with The Shining, a movie crafted from a novel by Stephen King, this movie has no supernatural ghosties to chill you, just an intense and dedicated performance from Kathy Bates who plays author Paul Sheldon's "Number one fan". When she rescues him from a car accident she seems like an angel, but as Paul soon discovers, she's perhaps far more sinister than she first appears. Its essentially a two hander between James Caan and Kathy Bates, but the limited cast and the increasingly terrifying stakes make this movie one that truly gets inside your head.
Since I've already shared my five scary books (here, at What's On North), I figured I also needed to share my five favourite scary movies here at Do Some Damage. It is, after all, Halloween... Just to warn you, I'll be sharing clips here, and some of them may not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition...
Happy Halloween, folks...
1) The Shining - Jack Nicholson may have later become a parody of himself, but here, despite the final reel's overacted moments, he is truly chilling as a writer who slowly loses it at a haunted hotel high in the mountains. All work and No Play makes Jack a Dull Boy...
2) Night of the Living Dead - the low budget shocker than spawned a million and one imitators, but there's an atmosphere here that can't be beaten by any of the other movies in the sequence and a low budget inventiveness that is truly unnerving.
3) Invasion of the Body Snatchers - "They're here already! You're next! You're next!" Another movie that spawned imitations and remakes, but that's never quite been beaten. The very fact that the invaders look like those you know adds an atmosphere of unsettling paranoia that can't be beat!
4) The Thing - John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the classic horror is a classic in its own right; a paranoid, terrifying thriller where there is no escape for anyone at the icebound Arctic research station, it again plays on the fears of how those we know could be hiding something dark and terrible inside. The effects are both bloody and brilliant, and the film still holds up today with its unsettling atmosphere, making the 2011 remake utterly unnecessary
.
5) Misery - Again, as with The Shining, a movie crafted from a novel by Stephen King, this movie has no supernatural ghosties to chill you, just an intense and dedicated performance from Kathy Bates who plays author Paul Sheldon's "Number one fan". When she rescues him from a car accident she seems like an angel, but as Paul soon discovers, she's perhaps far more sinister than she first appears. Its essentially a two hander between James Caan and Kathy Bates, but the limited cast and the increasingly terrifying stakes make this movie one that truly gets inside your head.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Making a List and Checking It Twice
Today, I'm excited to have novelist Linda Rodriguez visit us. I met Linda a year ago at Malice Domestic and she has become a great friend. Her Malice Domestic winning mystery EVERY LAST SECRET hits shelves on April 24th! Check it out! Trust me--you won't be sorry. In the meantime, please welcome her to DSD with open arms.
Take it away, Linda!
I’m a big believer in using all the help technology and professional writing books and programs can give me in writing. I’ve tried using all kinds of workbooks, charts, and forms in working on a novel. I’m even exploring Scrivener-type software programs for use in writing my next book. I’m hardly on the cutting edge, but I’m also not one of the “if it was good enough for Hemingway, it’s good enough for me” types. Still, sometimes we look around and find simple everyday solutions to our problems, and it would be silly not to take advantage of them.
One of the most useful tools I’ve found in writing a novel is the simple, old-fashioned list. If you’re like me, you use lists to remind you what you need to do during the day, what you need to pack for a trip, what you need to buy at the grocery store, and dozens of other mundane projects, large and small. It’s easy to assume we need something more sophisticated for this complex novel (for novels are all more or less complex) that we’re trying to hold in our heads and build on paper. However, I’ve discovered that simple lists can help in several ways with making that story in our head a reality in print.
First of all, I keep running character and place lists. I write a mystery series. When I wrote the first book, Every Last Secret, I was creating all the characters from scratch, as well as all the places in my fictional town. I wrote personality and appearance sketches for each character, but in addition, I made a list of each character as s/he appeared with a few words to note key characteristics. I did the same for places in my made-up town. This meant I could look up the full name of walk-on characters easily when I needed to much later in the book. It meant that I could easily look up the important details of the buildings on the campus and the shops on the town square as my protagonist, Skeet Bannion, walked past them or into them.
These lists tripled in value when I started the second book in the series and now the third. No one will have brown eyes in the first novel and baby-blues in one of the later books. Old Central, the 19th century castle-like mansion on the Chouteau University campus, will not morph into a 1960s Bauhaus box of a building.
Next, when I’m plotting ahead, simple lists come to my aid again. I’m a combination of outliner and follow-the-writing plotter. I like to know where the next 25-50 pages are going, plotwise—or to think I do, at least. I do this by making a list of questions that I need to answer about the book. In the beginning, I have lots of questions. The answer to only one or two may give me enough to start the next several days’ writing. I stole the idea of asking myself questions and answering them in writing from Sue Grafton. She posts to her website journals that she keeps while writing each novel, and in these, she often asks and answers these types of questions. I took it a bit further by trying to make long lists of questions that needed to be answered, which often, in turn, add more questions to the list when they are answered.
Answering the questions tells me where the story wants to go, but these lists also help me keep the subplots straight and make sure they tie in directly to the main plot, and they keep me from overlooking some detail or element that will create a plot hole or other disruption for the reader. These questions can vary from broad ones, such as “What is the book’s theme?” and “How can I ratchet up the excitement and stakes in Act II?” to more detailed, such as “What clue does Skeet get from this interview?” and “What’s on Andrew’s desk?” Such question lists come in handy during revision, as well.
During revision, I make yet another kind of simple list. As I’m reading the manuscript straight through in hard copy, I write down a list of questions as I go. I notice a weak spot and ask myself, “How can I let the reader know how much Jake meant to Skeet, as well as Karen?,” “Should I have Skeet attend Tina’s autopsy?,” and all too often, “Reads competent enough, but where’s the magic?”
After going through my lists of hundreds of big to tiny fixes and changes to make, and either making them (most) or listing by scene where in the book to make the fix (for major issues), I sit down to wrestle with 5-15 major problems from almost but not quite minor to huge and complex. This final list is my guideline through the swamps of revision. The issues on this list require changes that thread throughout part or all of the book. Trying to do them all at once or even to keep them in my mind all at the same time would bog me down—perhaps forever. Listing them and working my way one item at a time through that list helps me to keep my focus even while dealing with very complex situations that must be woven in and out through the length of the novel.
In short, simple lists make the complex task of writing a novel doable for me. What about you? Do you use lists in your writing? Are there other tools you use for keeping track and keeping focused as you plot, write, and revise?
Linda Rodriguez’s novel, Every Last Secret, won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition and will be released April 24. She blogs about books and writers at www.LindaRodriguezWrites.blogspot.com, reads and writes everything, even poetry, and she spends too much time on Twitter as @rodriguez_linda. Every Last Secret can be pre-ordered at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/p/home.html.
Take it away, Linda!
I’m a big believer in using all the help technology and professional writing books and programs can give me in writing. I’ve tried using all kinds of workbooks, charts, and forms in working on a novel. I’m even exploring Scrivener-type software programs for use in writing my next book. I’m hardly on the cutting edge, but I’m also not one of the “if it was good enough for Hemingway, it’s good enough for me” types. Still, sometimes we look around and find simple everyday solutions to our problems, and it would be silly not to take advantage of them.
One of the most useful tools I’ve found in writing a novel is the simple, old-fashioned list. If you’re like me, you use lists to remind you what you need to do during the day, what you need to pack for a trip, what you need to buy at the grocery store, and dozens of other mundane projects, large and small. It’s easy to assume we need something more sophisticated for this complex novel (for novels are all more or less complex) that we’re trying to hold in our heads and build on paper. However, I’ve discovered that simple lists can help in several ways with making that story in our head a reality in print.
First of all, I keep running character and place lists. I write a mystery series. When I wrote the first book, Every Last Secret, I was creating all the characters from scratch, as well as all the places in my fictional town. I wrote personality and appearance sketches for each character, but in addition, I made a list of each character as s/he appeared with a few words to note key characteristics. I did the same for places in my made-up town. This meant I could look up the full name of walk-on characters easily when I needed to much later in the book. It meant that I could easily look up the important details of the buildings on the campus and the shops on the town square as my protagonist, Skeet Bannion, walked past them or into them.
These lists tripled in value when I started the second book in the series and now the third. No one will have brown eyes in the first novel and baby-blues in one of the later books. Old Central, the 19th century castle-like mansion on the Chouteau University campus, will not morph into a 1960s Bauhaus box of a building.
Next, when I’m plotting ahead, simple lists come to my aid again. I’m a combination of outliner and follow-the-writing plotter. I like to know where the next 25-50 pages are going, plotwise—or to think I do, at least. I do this by making a list of questions that I need to answer about the book. In the beginning, I have lots of questions. The answer to only one or two may give me enough to start the next several days’ writing. I stole the idea of asking myself questions and answering them in writing from Sue Grafton. She posts to her website journals that she keeps while writing each novel, and in these, she often asks and answers these types of questions. I took it a bit further by trying to make long lists of questions that needed to be answered, which often, in turn, add more questions to the list when they are answered.
Answering the questions tells me where the story wants to go, but these lists also help me keep the subplots straight and make sure they tie in directly to the main plot, and they keep me from overlooking some detail or element that will create a plot hole or other disruption for the reader. These questions can vary from broad ones, such as “What is the book’s theme?” and “How can I ratchet up the excitement and stakes in Act II?” to more detailed, such as “What clue does Skeet get from this interview?” and “What’s on Andrew’s desk?” Such question lists come in handy during revision, as well.
During revision, I make yet another kind of simple list. As I’m reading the manuscript straight through in hard copy, I write down a list of questions as I go. I notice a weak spot and ask myself, “How can I let the reader know how much Jake meant to Skeet, as well as Karen?,” “Should I have Skeet attend Tina’s autopsy?,” and all too often, “Reads competent enough, but where’s the magic?”
After going through my lists of hundreds of big to tiny fixes and changes to make, and either making them (most) or listing by scene where in the book to make the fix (for major issues), I sit down to wrestle with 5-15 major problems from almost but not quite minor to huge and complex. This final list is my guideline through the swamps of revision. The issues on this list require changes that thread throughout part or all of the book. Trying to do them all at once or even to keep them in my mind all at the same time would bog me down—perhaps forever. Listing them and working my way one item at a time through that list helps me to keep my focus even while dealing with very complex situations that must be woven in and out through the length of the novel.
In short, simple lists make the complex task of writing a novel doable for me. What about you? Do you use lists in your writing? Are there other tools you use for keeping track and keeping focused as you plot, write, and revise?
Linda Rodriguez’s novel, Every Last Secret, won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition and will be released April 24. She blogs about books and writers at www.LindaRodriguezWrites.blogspot.com, reads and writes everything, even poetry, and she spends too much time on Twitter as @rodriguez_linda. Every Last Secret can be pre-ordered at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/p/home.html.
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