Chris Orcutt, Writer

Like a lot of writers I get my best ideas in the shower, but for years I refused to acknowledge this fact. When I sniffed my mint shampoo and got an idea for an Irish woman assassin that specializes in poisoning through the epidermis, I told myself, "You can wait to write it down. You'll remember."

Guess what? Didn't remember.

And that's where my shower notebook comes in.

Now, I'll admit that many of my shower ideas suck, but as Creativity Guru Michael Michalko teaches in one of his books on the subject, when it comes to ideas, quantity begets quality. So, in the case of my shower notebook, when an idea comes to me, I don't judge it; I simply stick my arm out and write it in my little yellow vinyl notebook. It's called a WetLog™, and it's a lot more pleasant than it sounds.

The WetLog™ notebook—perfect for outside the shower.

Into my shower notebook I have put dozens of ideas, most of which will probably never come to fruition because I lack the skills, experience or both. (So, if you like an idea and can do something with it, by all means steal it.)

• A science-fiction story about H3 extraction on the moon, wherein nano-machines enter the moon rock and suck out the H3 we need for fusion on Earth, and then because the humans start treating the little mechanical miracle-workers like shit, the nano-creatures turn on them.
• An idea for an "editing engine" software program for writers.
• An idea for a nanotechnology shaver, whereby hundreds of microscopic "Roombas" shave a man's face while he sleeps, effectively gnawing down the hairs like micro beavers to tiny trees, chipping them up and storing them in their bellies until they return to "base"—a canister on a chain around the man's neck. Hopefully these nano-guys won't revolt.
• An idea for a new GEICO commercial. A while back, my wife and I were watching TV and remarked to each other about how tired the gecko-caveman thing is. So, why not a commercial that starts with a TV showing one of the old ones, then it pans back to show a couple on the couch. He says, "You know, that ad campaign's getting pretty tired." And she says, "Yeah, you'd think they'd realize how media-savvy people are these days and that they're saturated with this crap." Then CUT TO: "GEICO, fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent on car insurance..."
• Characters' names. I've come up with a lot of character names in the shower over the years, and NO, I've never stooped to calling any of them Ammonium Laureth Sulfate, although I have used Laurel in a story, and YES, I got it from the shampoo bottle.
• Dialogue. Most of the time I get the dialogue while writing or during my daily walk. However, now and then I find myself mulling over a line in the shower, refining it as I scrub, trying out different phrasings, comma placements and such.

Well, there you have it—the wonders of my shower notebook. Writer or not, I believe every creative person should have one. I don't know what it is about water that seems to stimulate most of us, but whenever I'm going to be around it, I make sure I have a notebook handy.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let me preface this entry by saying that I am not a tax professional. I'm merely a writer who has filed a Schedule C (sole proprietorship) on every return for the past 10-12 years, and during that time I've learned a few things that can make tax time a lot easier.

(NOTE: Do not take any of this advice as gospel; if you have any questions, consult a tax professional.)

H&R Block's TaxCut for the Mac:
Like a good date, it's cheap and easy

Continue reading "Orcutt's Tax Tips for Writers" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because I spend 75% of my time on the computer writing, for years I've allowed myself to get suckered into purchasing (yes, actually buying—I refuse to pirate software) the latest version of Microsoft Office. Now that Office 2008 for the Mac is out, I briefly considered picking it up. Very briefly.

In a previous entry I described the three writing programs I use most often: WriteRoom, Pages (part of Apple's iWork suite), and Final Draft. Conspicuously absent from that list is MS Word.

Office 2008 for the Mac. I'm
running out to get it now—NOT!

Unless the fellows in Redmond, Washington get their heads out of their asses and figure out what people who actually write want in a program, Office 2004 for the Mac will be my last Microsoft purchase.

I'm tired of their shipping faulty software and letting "early adopters" (never me—I know better) find the glitches and essentially fix it for them. I'm tired of "productivity software" that is anything but productive and in fact ends up wasting your time as you jerk around with it, trying to get it to behave the way you need it to. And I'm tired of programs like Word that are written for the lowest common denominator—for people who don't know the difference between a gerund and an ampersand.

So, listen up, Microsoft. In case no one's told you before (like they haven't), here are the features writers of book-length work want in a program. In some cases, Word has these features, or similar ones, but they're so deeply buried in the program, or presented via a clunky, obtuse interface, that they're useless. Here's my list:

Continue reading "Goodbye MS Word, You Lousy Whore" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once upon a time, there was a writer. He lived in a small house in the country, and each day when he finished his work, he would walk his little town, saying hello to all of the wonderful people—the postman, the fireman, the doctor, the grocer. Life was very good for the writer.

Each day, when the writer edited that morning's work, he printed out the pages, put them on a clipboard and went through the material with a red pen. The red pen was a nasty throwback to his teaching days, but he liked it because he could always see marks made in red. The writer, you see, was slightly colorblind.

Clipboard in hand, the writer would go to his neighborhood diner and drink 3-4 cups of coffee while editing his work. Stimulated by the din of his fellow townsfolk, the writer often came up with insightful edits, and in some cases whole new scenes. The diner was always where the writer outlined and planned a piece of writing. Maybe it was the worn Formica tabletops, maybe it was the comfort of being in a place where everyone knew him and left him alone. Whatever it was, the writer liked it.





Once finished at the diner, the writer went on his long daily walk and returned home to his snug, gold-painted office with the fancy desktop computer. When he was younger, the writer had always fantasized about having a real home office with a door that closed, but the gods had never blessed him this way. Now, however, the writer had a marvelous space in which to work, with two computers, two typewriters, two printers, and a dedicated hard drive for backing up his work.

Merrily would the writer enter his edits into the computer. With each line he entered, the writer pressed CMD-S to save his work. Not that it mattered because the fancy computer also auto-saved his work every 2 minutes. And each day's work was saved with a suffix, thusly: MY_WRITING_MMDDYY.

At the end of each day, the writer would upload his finished work to his best friend's server. The best friend was profoundly generous and gave freely of his bounty of bandwidth and mass storage capability. And all the friend ever asked for in exchange was some cash when the writer had it and the occasional case of non-alcoholic Pinot Noir grape juice.

Nothing could impinge on the writer's world.

So the writer grew smug, smug in the belief that he had shielded himself from any possible disaster.

"Fires and floods and tornadoes and blizzards—blow, wrack and rage!" the writer yelled. "Fuck you all! I'm covered!"

Meanwhile, Zeus and his daughters, the Muses, did not take kindly to the writer's arrogance. For years they had immersed him in a delightful fog of never-ending inspiration. One of Zeus's daughters, a comely redhead, was especially hurt by the writer's haughtiness because she was the one who had been charged with ensuring the safety of the writer's work. And now for the writer to suggest that it was technology—mere flecks of silicon—that was protecting him....

The redheaded goddess seethed.

Continue reading "Little Boy Dumbass" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Even though success with my own writing—my fiction—continues to elude me, I'm very fortunate in so many ways, and I know it.

I have my health. I have a terrific, supportive spouse, a nice place to live, food on the table, and I'm well-paid for my words. Even if it's writing speeches, scripts, websites and technical docs for now.

Oh, and there's one other thing I have to be thankful for: a new computer.

Make that the new iMac. Pure aluminum-encased hotness.

With the 24" screen, I can have two complete pages of text visible at once, which makes it a lot easier to see what you're working on. You also get a better sense of the flow in a chapter, scene or stretch of dialogue.

The Delicious New iMac Keyboard

Truly, it's a pleasure to sit down to work every day knowing that you won't have to fight with your tools. For the record, the keyboard is the best I've ever worked on. I can't explain why; just go to an Apple store and try it yourself and you'll see what I mean. I won't go into detail about the computer and all its features, but I will mention what writing software I'm using because I've discovered that so far these programs work flawlessly with the computer:

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For bare-bones writing, I use a sweet little program created by a guy from Bangor, Maine. It's called WriteRoom. If you're looking for something that is truly "distraction-free", check it out.







Once I have some text and need to form it into something longer and more structured, like a book, I move my work over to Apple's iWork, specifically the word-processing program, Pages. Unlike working with MS Office, it's seamless, with none of the compatibility issues you always seem to get with Word.







Finally, for any kind of script work, I go to a workhorse of a program—Final Draft. This is a great tool for any kind of scriptwriting because it automates all of the formatting. It's the one all the pros use.

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A major event in the life of any Mac owner is the arrival of a new Mac. With this in mind, here's a cheesy photo essay documenting the morning mine came:




The workspace, before

Continue reading "The Pleasure of Having the Right Tools" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's the thing with pencils and typewriters—they never go out of date, they never need updated software, and they never require virus protection.


Three years ago, I found I was spending a lot of my writing time making my computer usable. I had an iMac, of course, which was great, but for a portable I had an IBM ThinkPad, which seemed to have been steeped in a stew of viruses right from the factory. I got tired of jerking around with Windows, so I erased it and loaded on (per my friend Jason's suggestion) SUSE Linux. This worked well for a while, but then I discovered I couldn't network it to the iMac and was spending a lot of time emailing files to myself. There had to be an easier way.

Continue reading "On the Virtues of Typewriters and Pencils" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)