Challenging Myself February 9, 2010

I signed up yesterday for Script Frenzy, which begins April 1.  As a participant, I have 30 days (i.e., the month of April) to write 100 pages of a script.  Mind you, I have no idea what I’m doing–I’ve never written a script, nor have I ever really considered writing one before I started thinking about joining the Script Frenzy challenge.  So why am I doing it?

The hardest part of writing for me is writing dialogue.  I tend to feel the dialogue from all my characters ends up sounding the same–I have a hard time finding individual voices for my characters.  Because dialogue is hard for me, I’m terrified of writing scripts: Scripts are entirely made up of dialogue.  But what are fears for if they’re not for facing down and conquering?

A writer friend of mine said she was also considering Script Frenzy, so I decided if she could take the plunge, I could, too.  After all, I’m not shooting for the best script ever–or even a script I’d want anyone else to see.  My goal is to simply complete the challenge and know that I can grow through trying new styles of writing.

Plus, a cool side effect of the challenge is that I get to try Scrivener’s screenwriting side of its program.

Writing on a Mac: Jer’s Novel Writer January 28, 2010

Not too long ago, I wrote a post about my love for Scrivener, writing software made to make writing and organizing an easier task.  For anyone who is curious, I am still in love with Scrivener and use it for everything from creative writing (working on my novel) to academic writing (organizing research for papers).  It also has screenwriting features, but I haven’t yet attempted to write a screenplay, so I can’t tout those features quite yet.  In my previous post, I had said one initial reason I wanted to use Scrivener is that they seem like a good company with business practices that are fair and oriented toward the customer.  I have a new reason to respect them: After combing their website, I went to the “Links” page and found that they provide links and descriptions for other writing software (including separate lists of writing software available for Macs and PCs).  In today’s world, it’s refreshing to see that some people still care that the customer is getting what (s)he wants and needs–even if that means sending the customer to another place to get it.

One of the other writing software possibilities on that list of links is Jer’s Novel Writer.  I was intrigued by the description, and so I headed on over to the website to check the software out.  The developer, Jerry, created this software specifically for creative writers working on longer projects, though I’m sure writers could also benefit from using it for short stories or novellas or other such shorter forms of creative writing.  I downloaded Jer’s Novel Writer and began playing with it.  It is so fabulous that I started writing something new just so I could have a reason to keep playing with it.  The appearance is clean-cut, making it feel like I’m playing with a shiny new toy instead of writing software, and the features offered are designed just for creative writers–something I will keep mentioning because their being tailored to a specific audience makes the software that much cooler.

The first screenshot is the basis of my general overview of the cool features of the software:

A basic screenshot of Jer's Novel Writer

Jer’s Novel Writer has a feature that lets you put in margin notes, which is something I love (in the above picture, you can see a margin note in the left column).  I like knowing that if I want to revise, I can put the virtual version of a post-it on the page for easy reference to remind myself what it was I didn’t like (or what it was I liked) about a particular scene.  The margin notes are more than just post-its, though, because they can be linked to a specific word while still being placed in the margin.  That specificity makes it so you can mark a single word that you want to play with and have an entire note dedicated to it.  You can also move the margin notes so that if you have a lot on one page, they will appear in the order you want them to be in (or so they will be equally spaced from each other–whatever it is you aesthetically like).

On the right, you can see the outline for the current work (Jer’s Read Me file) in a drawer that you can choose to have open or closed.  Using the outline makes it easy to navigate through your text (so if you want to find a particular scene to reference, you can easily do so) because all you have to do is click on the section title or text that you want, and it will take you directly to it.  The outline can break your work into chapters, parts, sections, and text blocks.  The text blocks are what you see in the center–where you do the actual typing of your creative work–in alternating yellow and white background blocks.  When you want to put in a new text block, all you have to do is hit the “Insert” button, and it lets you have the option of putting in a new chapter, section, part, or text block.  Every time you create a new dividing line, it automatically shows up in your outline.  The more you provide, the more specific your navigation abilities will be.  While you can title the chapters, sections, and parts, the text blocks will show up in your outline as the beginning text of the first line, which is handy for reminding you exactly what was written in that portion.

While I would love Jer’s Novel Writer solely for the margin-note capabilities, I am fascinated by the possibilities the drawer presents.  When you open the drawer (which in the above picture has the outline), you get three options: outline (pictured above), database, and notes.  The notes are what you would expect them to be–a place where you can write notes to yourself that will be visible from any place in the text.  I want to focus on the database feature, as I think it is particularly helpful for creative writers.

The database portion of the drawer in Jer's Novel Writer

The database is a way you can keep track of your characters, settings, and more.  You can create full sketches on your characters and group them into folders; you can write descriptions of your settings and have them laid out for easy reference; you can really put in anything you want for background information to have at your fingertips during any stage of the writing process.  It’s a fancy way of taking organized notes.

And, of course, you can choose to have the drawer closed, in which case, all you have staring at you is the space where you’re writing and creating margin notes.  In the text portion, when you add in titles, you can format the titles to look however you want them to look:

Jer's Novel Writer with the drawer closed and titled segments

The document I’ve been showing is the “Read Me” document that comes with Jer’s Novel Writer, and it is one of the most helpful and user-friendly guides I’ve seen for getting started with new writing software.

For my particular writing style, I still prefer Scrivener, primarily because its corkboard feature works with my outlining system but also because it works with both my creative and academic writing needs.  However, I think Jer’s Novel Writer is an amazing product, and I hope there are readers out there who will give it a shot and support Jerry as he works toward further developing the software.  I don’t think a writer can ever have too many options when it comes to writing software choices because new projects bring new needs.

Backing Up Your Work: Mac Time Machine January 24, 2010

I tell my students time and time again to back up their work in several places every time they work on a paper or project because I know, from personal experience, how devastating it can be to lose work in the middle of a project.  I made the mistake of beginning my dissertation data collection without backing up what I was doing as I went.  Three weeks in (and hours and hours and hours of data collection in), my computer died.  It wouldn’t start; it wouldn’t respond; it wouldn’t do anything.  It died, so I had to start over because I hadn’t taken the time to back up my work.  I learned the hard way, but my hope is that there are still people out there who can learn the lesson the easy way: listening to someone who has been through it.

The first thing to remember is that your computer will die at an integral point in your work.  Your computer will eat every word you’ve slaved over without caring about the blood, sweat, and tears that went into picking those words.  It is the only thing you can count on in the world of computers: They die or freeze or explode only during critical moments.  Count on it.  Be prepared for it.  That way, the only thing you’re mourning when your computer dies is the fact that you have to get a new one–you won’t have to mourn the loss of your hard-earned work.

After my computer died, I learned my lesson and invested in an external hard drive for my computer, which at the time was a PC.  I bought a Western Digital external hard drive and hooked it up; shortly after, I hit my first wall.  I found out that if I wanted the instant update feature on the hard drive, I had to buy special software from WD.  Otherwise, I had to remember to drag and drop new files I had worked on onto my external hard drive.  I was good about it for a few weeks, but then… I started forgetting to update; once I started forgetting to update on a regular basis, I couldn’t remember which files I worked on that needed re-saving on the hard drive.  After a while, the hard drive started collecting dust on my desk, and I was once again counting on my luck to keep my work safe.

And then I bought a Mac and was introduced to the wonderful world of the Time Machine…

I hooked up my handy WD external hard drive and turned on the Time Machine, and my Mac took over from there.  It asked me if I wanted to make the hard drive my preferred Time Machine, and I said, “Yes, please.”  That was the smartest computer decision I made since I got my Mac.  When my hard drive isn’t hooked up, nothing happens.  But as soon as I hook my hard drive up, an automatic update begins; if I keep it hooked up, it will continue doing automatic updates every hour (my preferred time interval) until I eject the hard drive.  The updates are saved at those intervals, and if something happens, I get to pick which point I want my computer to be restored to.

With the Time Machine feature, there doesn’t have to be a catastrophe–I might simply want my computer to go back to the way it was an hour ago, before I made a drastic change that I’m not happy with to a story I was working on.  As long as I had my hard drive hooked up and doing the automatic updates, I’m only a few clicks away from erasing the unpleasant changes.

While doing NaNoWriMo, I had my hard drive running every time my computer was running because I was paranoid I would lose everything.  As computer axioms go, since I was prepared for computer problems, my computer performed perfectly.  Yet I was happy to know that my novel was securely saved on more than one device.

If you have a Mac and haven’t yet hooked up a hard drive to start your own Time Machine experience, I highly suggest you do so.  You don’t need to be a writer to want to take advantage of the continual updates–you just need to be a computer user who keeps personal documents stored on your computer.  It’s minimal hassle for maximal ease-of-mind.

The Scary World of Publishing January 21, 2010

I enjoy writing.  I like getting wrapped up in a story I’m creating in my head, and I like the idea of being able to share that story with other people who enjoy reading just as much as I do.  The problem, though, is that the publishing world really just scares the crap out of me.  It’s the world of the unknown, and it seems like every time I read advice for writers, it doesn’t actually help.

Then I read a post by Debra L. Schubert on her blog, Write on Target.  She laid out her own journey to getting published and described the bumps she took along the way.  I’ve queried several agents with my manuscript, and my manuscript is currently sitting in some business office as an entry for a writing competition.  I was starting to let myself get discouraged and allowing myself to ask if I could really do it.  Debra’s post both scared and inspired me: She had a long run of submitting queries, attending conferences, and writing, writing, writing before she was signed with an agent.  Her post reminds me that it is difficult, but it is also possible.  But only if I’m willing to really work at it.

I’m scared, but I also believe I have a story others would like to read.  I’m stuck in a waiting game while my manuscript is being judged as part of a competition, but I know that just because I’m waiting for news that shouldn’t mean I’m also waiting to write.  I can do this.

What post/book/article helped you navigate the world of publishing or provided you with the inspiration you needed to keep trying?

On Style: Remembering My Audience January 20, 2010

During the past month or so, the majority of my writing has been academic in nature.  I haven’t had a lot of extra energy to devote toward my other writing (in particular, the novel I’m currently working on), but that seems to be how my life goes: I work crazily on one project until I’ve reached a stopping point, and then I put it down to work crazily on another project.  Currently, my project is the spring semester and putting together all my course material for the courses I’m teaching this semester.  Some of the writing I’m doing for that is quite brief; for example, the writing I put onto slides in a slideshow to go with my lecture is brief, but it is still writing.  Even the briefest of writing, though, cannot be written in a vacuum, and so I dedicate today’s post to the fact that every time I sit to write, someone, somewhere out there, is on the receiving end.

How do your readers react to your words? How do you want them to react?

As a writer, it is entirely too easy to slip into a writing groove where the words are flowing, the fingers are flying across the keyboard, and the mind is in a buzz, excited to be making so much progress.  Those grooves are the best feeling you can get while writing because everything seems to come together and just flow from mind to page.  Unfortunately, though, sometimes those grooves can also lead to tunnel vision, where the only things you’re worrying about are what is in your mind and on the page, and not on how what you’re writing will be received by an audience.  Or more specifically, your intended audience.

Naturally, as you can imagine, when I write slides for my students, I write in a completely different style than when I’m putting together research for a paper; how I write when writing a research paper is, then, also very different from how I write when writing a novel.  Sure, there are some qualities of my writing that carry over into all aspects (such as my love for semicolons), but if my style were to remain the same across all those genres, it would be my downfall as a writer.

The words I write on the page should be driven by who will be reading them.

For all writing, I think it’s helpful to talk out loud as you write and pretend that the person you intend to be reading your writing is sitting right in front of you.  When I put together my slides for class, for example, I pretend that I’m standing in front of my students.  I try to use the best words to get across the concepts I’m lecturing on without using words that are so far entrenched in jargon that I’ll lose the majority of students, and I try to add in elements that will keep them interested, such as pictures or activities or discussion questions.  When I write a research paper, I imagine a group of my past professors sitting in front of me, reading what I’m putting down on the computer screen.  Keeping fellow professors interested is often not reliant on a cartoon or visually stimulating picture; instead, I have to show I can “sling the lingo” of the trade and use all those jargon-y words I try to avoid when lecturing to my students, and I try to keep those readers interested through laying the paper out clearly in a way that they’ve come to expect from journal articles in our field and incorporating novel ideas or data into my work.

That same concept applies to writing fiction.  I ask myself who I want to be reading what I’m writing, and then I picture them in front of me.  I talk to them.  I read my words out loud and try to hear those words through my audience’s ears.  Are they interesting?  Do they flow?  Are they real, or do they sound fake?  This is especially helpful for dialogue or descriptions.  Reading a description out loud can help me remember that my audience can’t see what is in my head and won’t know that the door is supposed to be on the left unless I tell them so.  Reading dialogue out loud helps me remember that dialogue is meant to represent spoken language and that how we speak is not how we write.

Who is your audience?

Writing is an active art–the words may be stationary on the page, but they are not meant to stay there and do nothing.  They are meant to spark interest or create a new world or get people talking/thinking about an idea.  The only time writers should write entirely for themselves is if they are writing in a journal.  Otherwise, writing is a conversation, and who we’re writing for should drive how and why we are writing.

I like to speak out loud and pretend I’m talking to my readers to help me remember to write to my audience; what do you do to help you tailor what you’re writing for your intended audience?

On Characters #3: Change January 4, 2010

Every year, I sit down either on January 1 or shortly after to make a list of resolutions/goals for the year.  Most years, I’m rather ambitious and hope to complete some radical changes in myself.  And yet at the end of each year, I realize that I accomplish some goals while pretty much ignoring the goals that require me to change from being me.  When I looked over my lengthy list of goals from last year, I realized something: the only things I’ve accomplished over the year are the goals I listed that were measurable.  For instance, one goal was to get a real job.  I got a real job this year.  However, another goal was to spend at least 30 minutes a day practicing the piano.  There was no real measure, and I dropped the habit shortly into 2009 when my work schedule got hectic.  This year, I learned from my mistakes and only wrote down measurable goals; for example, instead of saying “practice the piano daily,” I said, “Learn one new song on the piano.”  For my playing skills, that will take the majority of the year, especially since I tend to pick difficult songs to learn.

What does all this self-reflection have to do with writing and creating characters?  Too often, I come across characters in books (and movies/TV shows, for that matter) that experience an enlightening moment and change “from the inside out.”  While I do think people change on small scales, I am a skeptic when it comes to people’s ability to completely change themselves.  I know I’ve yet to become a new person and eradicate my flaws that I point out to myself year after year.  I yell at myself for being a procrastinator, yet the next time I have a deadline looming, I know I’ll still wait until the last possible minute before I get any real work done.  Why?  Because I know me.

Do your characters know themselves?  I think it takes a special type of reflection to get inside your characters’ heads and let yourself see their good and bad parts and accept them for who they are.  Then, when your characters go through “life-changing” moments, I think it’s imperative that authors further reflect and ask themselves, “What changes are reasonable to expect after such a moment in a human’s life?”  Characters who are “bad” to begin with shouldn’t immediately switch over to being “good” after seeing the error of their ways.  How likely is it that one dream will change the way Ebeneezer Scrooge views the world on a daily basis?  Sure, for one Christmas his heart might be changed.  But what about the next Christmas?  And the one after that?  I think people like to fall into the trap of thinking that massive change is something that is reasonable and attainable, but I guess I’m more of a realist who wants to see characters coming to terms with themselves and making the changes they can while still keeping what makes them them.

So the next time you find yourself writing a scene that will change one of your characters, take the time to ask yourself how that character can actually change.  Take the time to reflect on the possibilities while being realistic and true to the character.  Don’t rip off your character (and readers) by simply letting him/her wake up one day a brand new person.  Even the simple changes are journeys rather than instantaneous.

When Life Interrupts Writing December 2, 2009

In the middle of the NaNoWriMo fever, I found that I rather enjoyed sitting down to write and having writing as a part of my daily life.  And so I did what I tend to do in those situations: I made a resolution of sorts.  I told myself that when NaNo was over, I would continue my daily writing so that I could continue my progress toward a finished (and eventually polished) novel.  Four days after meeting my NaNo goal, I can say that I’ve managed to write about 500 more words.  That’s it.  Five hundred words in four days.  Not only have I been slacking there, I’ve also been slacking on my blogging and Twittering and all those other socializing things I had set up for myself.  Why?  Because life got in the way.  When reality hit once the writing adrenaline bug died down, I realized that I have a lot of other things that need my attention right now.

As a professor, the end of the semester is a hectic time–no matter how well I prepare myself for the end of a semester, the work piles up and gets dumped onto my desk all at the same time.  My office is a nightmare, with piles of papers covering pretty much every surface but the floor (thankfully, I’ve managed to keep that clutter-free. . . for now), and that nightmare is a direct reflection of what my brain is feeling about now.  Every time I sit down to relax, I’ve got a mental list running through my head that won’t turn off and let me just be.  I’ve tried the trick of writing down what is running through my head to get it out, but that only seems to make it worse.  Once I’ve committed a to-do list to paper, I feel pressure to pay attention to it.  At least if it is just in my head, I can be in denial that I have less than a week to finish all that grading, write final exams, hold extra office hours for student appointments, and write that paper I’m presenting next weekend at a conference I’m totally unprepared for.  That’s not even mentioning family obligations.  In short, I’m busy and feel I’ve got every excuse I could want to slack off on writing for the moment.

And yet . . . And yet I have found that I miss writing.  I miss sitting down at my computer and letting my mind open up to fill the blank page in front of me.  Just writing this post is putting me at ease–watching the white box fill with words makes me happy.  What makes me shake my head at myself is that I know writing is fulfilling for me, yet I walk away from it during times of stress to do far less fulfilling things: watch TV, stare at a wall with a blank expression in my eyes, mindlessly eat chocolate and cheesy poofs–you know, the normal stress relievers.  My original resolution didn’t exactly work out for me, but I’m optimistic that if I keep trying, I’ll eventually stick to my goal.  My new goal, which I’m sharing publicly to add that little extra push to succeed, is to write for at least 30 minutes every day.  I don’t even care what I write–just as long as I write.  For my sanity, I need to continue trying to fill white spaces with words.

If you, too, know that you need to write to keep what little grasp you have on your sanity but find that life often gets in the way, I’d be interested in reading about what works for you to keep on track.  When you barely have enough energy to stare blankly at a wall, how do you force yourself to do something–anything–productive?  I honestly don’t know how I crawl out of my energy-less funks; it just seems that one day, I realize I have something to do, and I do it.  I’ve been trying to figure out what tip(s) I could offer my readers from my own life, and the only one that comes to mind isn’t exactly a secret: If you want/need to get something done, get off your butt and do it.  I find once I start being productive–even in little spurts–I’m more likely to get other work done, too.  It’s like Lucille Ball once said, “If you want something done, ask a busy person.”  She made the point that people who aren’t busy most likely aren’t busy because they aren’t getting things done.  She’s right; the more I take on, the more I get done (even if what I’m getting done isn’t directly related to what I’ve taken on).

Now that I’ve written and allowed my brain to settle for the night, I think I can go lie down and drift into a peaceful sleep.  Writing: it’s free therapy.

NaNoWriMo: “I did it!” Post November 28, 2009

NaNoWriMo Winner Badge

 

I just verified my status as a NaNoWriMo winner, and I feel like running around the house, my arms waving madly around my head while my heels kick together in mid-air.  My family would just shake their heads and say, “Oh, she’s lost it again.”

 

Apparently, I’m not a great mathematician, as my final word count is significantly higher than what I had thought it was (as in, I was about 8,000 words off from the actual total, but at least that 8,000 made it a higher number than what I had calculated…).  Oops.  Ah, well.  I take it as a good sign that I was so into writing that I forgot to update my word counts when I should have.

 

My inability to count is not the purpose of this post.  I wanted to take a moment to celebrate authors everywhere, whether they are participating in NaNoWriMo or not.  For all you writers out there who take the plunge and put pieces of yourself on a page for others to read, take a moment to pat yourself on the back and realize just how brave and amazing you are.

 

The adrenaline rush is only going up from here, and I can’t stay seated much longer, so this post will be cut short.  I literally need to run around to burn some of this energy.  I wish all you who are working on your NaNoWriMo novels the best and hope that either you are already celebrating with me or you will be celebrating with me within the next couple days.  You can do it!

NaNoWriMo Update: Day 20 November 20, 2009

I am exactly 2/3 of the way through NaNoWriMo, and I’ve managed to stay on target to finish the 50,000 words by the end of the month.  I want to do a happy dance for myself, but I’m disappointed that my progress has stalled lately.  The only reason I’m still on target is that I had worked ahead earlier on in the month.  I haven’t made my daily writing goals for the past few days, and I’m in need of a pick-me-up.  I am at that point that is supposed to be “magical” where you are so close to being finished that making 50k-goal should feel so much easier.  Yet, it doesn’t.

 

Parts of writing have become easier–I’m more familiar with my story and my characters, so when I sit to write, the words tend to come a bit more easily.  And since I had outlined so much in advance, writing the scenes goes smoothly.  My problem is getting the motivation to sit and write when I’m sick, when the semester is getting more hectic the closer it gets to the end, when there are so many good shows on TV, when there are so many blogs to read…  Okay, so once I start making excuses, they tend to get lame pretty quickly, which means I need to stop making excuses and start writing again.

 

My goal is to make it to 36,000 words by the end of the day tomorrow; as a different way of looking at it, my goal is to make it through the next chapter of my novel by the end of tomorrow.  If anyone has any encouraging words for writing to send my way, I sure wouldn’t mind hearing them.

On Characters #2: Showing, Not Telling November 18, 2009

As I am working my way through my rough draft for NaNoWriMo (which, believe it or not, is already close to being over), I know that my next two (or three) months should be dubbed “National Novel Revising Months.”  I still have “National” in the title because the majority of writers do not write a final draft in their first shot through the material.  One of my strengths as a writer is that I already know my biggest weaknesses, so when I revise, I know what to look for: flat characters, forced dialogue (goes hand-in-hand with the flat characters), and instances where I tell instead of show.  In today’s post, I am focusing on the showing-not-telling angle while looking at characters, but the same principle can be applied to any aspect of the story: plot, setting, etc.  I will explore the dialogue and flat character issues in other posts; the “On Getting to Know My Characters” post is what I am considering to be my “On Characters #1″ post and focuses on taking a new angle for using questionnaires to get to know your characters better.

 

In my non-writing life, I teach college students; as a member of the English department, I teach freshmen composition along with my specialty (linguistics).  When I grade compositions, I notice one problem over and over again: students tell their readers what is happening rather than showing them.  For example, I see a lot of essays where an idea is introduced but never explored in sentences like, “My dad has always been there for me.”  The student then assumes that is all that needs to be said and moves on.  In cases like this one, the writer is choosing to tell the reader about her dad’s continual support without showing examples or providing details about the support.  It is difficult for my students to get over this habit (and sometimes difficult for them to even see that they’re doing it), and I can understand why: It’s a bad habit many writers have, even writers who have been working on their craft for a long time.  I know when I go back to read through my NaNoWriMo work, I will cringe when I see how many times I summed up what could have been a really descriptive paragraph into one sentence.

 

In the case of developing characters, using full descriptions can be so much more telling than simply summing up what the character is feeling.  For example, let’s say I have a character who is nervous while a conversation is taking place around her.  I could just write, “She was nervous,” and move on from there.  But that would be telling my readers the character is nervous and not showing them she is nervous.  You may be asking yourself why I would want to show the details of being nervous; my answer is that by showing the details, I can better build my characters into round characters (thus touching on one of my other weaknesses).  We all have our own bad habits when we’re nervous–it is up to me to build those habits into my character.  Compare the following two excerpts and judge for yourself what sounds better:

 

Excerpt 1

She was so nervous that she couldn’t concentrate on the interview.

 

Excerpt 2

She tapped her foot.  The sharp click from the tip of her new pointy-toe heels meeting the concrete floor beat out notes with staccato precision.  She tried to focus on the words coming at her, but cotton filled her ears; she instead watched his mouth move around the words she couldn’t hear.  When he glanced down at his notes on the table in front of him, she quickly turned her wrist to see her watch.  She raised an eyebrow in surprise and flicked her eyes to the clock on the wall to her left to confirm the time.  Something is wrong, she thought as she looked at her interrogator and realized his mouth had stopped moving.  It was her turn to talk, and she had no idea what she was supposed to say.

 

Which one would you rather read in a story?  Excerpt 1 tells while Excerpt 2 shows.  Notice that Excerpt 2 doesn’t even contain the word “nervous” but still portrays the feeling of nervousness.  When I read through my rough draft I wrote during NaNoWriMo, I already know I will find many instances of excerpts like Excerpt 1; my job then is to figure out how to take those excerpts and turn them into something more informative and interesting.  If you, too, share that weakness of mine, one thing you might consider is asking yourself the age-old journalistic questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?  Decide which question(s) best fit the scene you’re trying to better describe and then answer them.  In the case of the examples above, I already had the who and what, but I was missing the how.  How did her nerves affect her?  Once I answered that question, I could fill out the excerpt to make it more appealing.  If I wanted to add a bit more of a back story to the excerpt, I might explore the “why” angle.  Why is it that she was so nervous about this interview?  Had she been out of work for ages?  Was it going badly?

 

How would you work the “why” into Excerpt 2?  I’d love to read what you come up with; if you feel inclined, leave your version in a comment to the post so we can all share in on the fun of revisions.