I’m Counting
Filed under: 1-For General Writers, 3-Collecting Ideas, Uncategorized
It’s ironic: a couple of months ago, I uploaded a post entitled “Who’s Counting?”. Little did I know that within weeks it would be me doing the counting.
Las Monday I sent off a succinct query letter to a well-known writers’ magazine proposing a feature article, already written at 1660 words. A reply arrived the next day expressing interest — if I could cut it in half.
That would be a challenge. Encouraged, I opened up a writer’s tool especially suited to the task: KeyNote. This program keeps a running word count in the bottom left corner. Delete a word and the word count immediately changes, ideal for monitoring my march toward 800 words.
But what to do with the deleted paragraphs, sentences and phrases, which I might wish to call back into the piece? I simply opened a second tab in the program, pasting my deletions there. This program held my hand as I chopped and snipped my way toward my target, knowing I could easily recapture phrases if necessary. As I went along, I ruthlessly chopped away and rewrote remaining portions to tighten the focus, shuttling material back and forth from the holding tank. All along, I applauded myself as the word count steadily dropped.
Within a couple of hours, I was done, finishing up with a more tightly focussed article, probably stronger even than the original.
Quickly the revision went back to the editor. “814 words,” I wrote, “as requested,” attaching the finished piece. He simply had at least to take a look at it.
Fortunately, he liked it. We sealed a sale within 48 hours of the original query.
The point of this story isn’t self-congratulatory. Instead, it’s an example of having just the right writer’s tool at hand. Without KeyNote, the task would have been more arduous, perhaps not as swift or successful.
That’s what this blog is all about: exploring the tools available and various ways of using them. I hope you have similar tales to tell about your favorite tools — please pass them along in a comment.
I’ll post a detailed review of KeyNote once my travels are complete, with screenshots, so that you’ll see exactly how that little, and free, program works.
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1 - THINKING
2 - ORGANIZING
3 - WRITING
4 - PROMOTING
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