Tag: Scrivener

Typing and Writing

On By griffinwordsIn Words OutLeave a comment

I write differently with pen and paper than I do with a computer. Maybe because I write more slowly than I type, or maybe because the visual feedback is different, or the tactile experience. Whatever the reason, there’s a clear difference in my output.

Even more pronounced than this, though, is the difference between how I edit using a pen, compared to how I edit on the computer. It’s almost as if a different part of my brain engages.

Lately I’m trying to get a handle on how to take advantage of these variances for different effects. Recently I work with pen and paper more and more. I still love Scrivener, and consider it my most important tool, but I’m shifting my stories in and out of Scrivener. To my mind it’s similar to an artist stepping back from a painting to get a look at it from too far away to actually work on it. When I’ve come to some kind of better understanding about the what’s different about my writing or editing processes when I write by hand rather than when I type on a computer, I’ll post about it again.

I’ve seen other writers who say they always do first drafts by hand and then type them in, or they always re-type every new draft from a new, scratch document (rather than editing into an existing document). I’m going to go back and forth for a while and think about hos the process is affecting what I’m doing.

It’s November and I’m Not Writing a Novel

On By griffinwordsIn Words OutLeave a comment

If you troll around on Livejournal this week (a blog platform used only by fiction writers and Russian revolutionaries, these days) you might think every writer who’s writing anything at all is writing a novel. It’s November. It’s NaNoWriMo. That’s what the cool kids call National Novel Writing Month.

I’m not writing a novel.

Waaaay back in my twenties I tried this “write a novel in a hurry” thing a couple of times. It worked out OK, and I might try it again some time. Maybe next November, even. But this November, I’m standing out from the crowd by NOT writing a novel.

I often tell people who aren’t using Scrivener that they really SHOULD be using Scrivener. Here’s an even better reason: There’s a Scrivener “NaNoWriMo” trial download here. You can use this free trial version during November, then if you write a novel with it and “win” NaNoWriMo you’ll get 50% off the purchase of a Scrivener license. Even if you don’t “win” you can use the “NaNoWriMo” code to get 20% off Scrivener, so why not give it a go?

Scrivener NaNoWriMo Trial.

Sometimes you have to tear down and rebuild

On By griffinwordsIn Words Out2 Comments

Posting yesterday about a couple of my writing tools got me thinking about how the right tool (in this case, Scrivener) can make the right creative choice easier, and thus increase the likelihood that you’ll make that right choice.

I’m trying to finish a story called “Secret Skin,” which I first drafted around the time I started writing again, almost two years ago. The early drafts were something like 12,000 words long, and the story itself didn’t really justify that kind of length, so I spent a ton of time cutting, re-writing, cutting, re-writing and eventually hacked it down to 5,000 words with all the magic gone. After a while, tired of worrying about this story, I set it aside and worked on other things.

I picked it up again recently, and realized it still needed… something. I was having difficulty seeing what some of the scenes were about, and how to sharpen them, even though the overall arc of the story still made sense to me. I had worked on the story in Scrivener for a long time, and eventually considered it close enough to a final draft that I moved it to a Word .DOC, and I’d been hacking away on that for countless hours. I started to feel discouraged about the story, even though I loved the main character and the dangerous female he encounters, and the strangers who cause them problems. I just couldn’t see clearly what it needed next. Where to cut, what to build up, how to restructure or resequence.

I decided to take a step back, import the story back into Scrivener, break it down into scenes again and do a “reverse outline” (a trick I frequently use, which is instead of making an outline you intend to turn into a story, take an existing story and reduce it down to an after-the-fact outline — a way of zooming out to take a wide view of your story). I realized, when I looked at the story this way, that several of the scenes were kind of muddy, because they were really several scenes run together. Sometimes it just makes more sense when scenes are clearly delineated. I turned a 5-scene story into an 8-scene story just by chopping some of the over-complex scenes into pieces that made better sense.

It wasn’t just a matter of breaking scenes apart, but once they were split into more logical segments, I was able to zero in on each scene and quickly assess what needed to happen, what the reader needed to learn, and what the point of the scene is within the story. In other words, jam two separate scenes together and you end up with this shapeless thing that’s hard to figure out. Break the pieces back apart again and it’s much easier to see how to improve the shape of each.

I might have been able to approximate this using MS Word, but Scrivener is built for this kind of thing. I love using it to evaluate structure, move things around, combine them, break them apart, and figure out what works. It’s harder to cut/copy/paste big blocks of text in Word, or to make multiple printouts and chop them up and edit that way, at least for me.

I give Scrivener a lot of credit for my ability to zero in on what each scene needed, and finally get “Secret Skin” close to ready to submit.

Writing Tools and Process

On By griffinwordsIn Words OutLeave a comment

I often find the processes of other writers interesting, though my level of interest in a given writer’s process and tools is not really proportionate to my interest in their work. Some people create brilliant stuff with a fountain pen and legal pads, and only type everything up at the last stage because editors can’t read their scribbles. Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the greatest living writer in the English language, works with a relatively antique typewriter. And the great majority of those writers who embrace the word processor content themselves with Microsoft Word, and maybe some kind of outlining, organization or mind-mapping program.

I scratch out ideas in several ways — lots of hand-written scraps, notes and outlines litter my desk at any given time, and I also make short voice recordings on my phone if I think of something while I’m driving — and I type these into Evernote. Evernote is especially useful to me because it’s available in versions for Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and others. You can type notes into it, store PDFs or JPGs from research, even save audio clips for later transcription. Each note can be tagged with multiple tags, so if I know a tag is related to a certain story, I tag it with that story’s name, and all that story’s notes are connected. If I’m not sure what story the note relates to, I give it some other tag like “character ideas” or “story seeds” or something like that, so I know how ti find it later. You can also search within Evernote for keywords, so if you want to find everything you’ve written or saved relating to “cosplay,” for example, everything containing that keyword will come up regardless of tagging. All your Evernote content is kept synchronized between all your computers and devices, so if you save a note at home and want to refer to it on your phone (assuming you have an iPhone or Droid) you can access it. I even save things like lists of books I’m searching for, or liquors I want to try, so I can refer to these lists when I’m in the store. I can’t say enough good things about Evernote. It’s even free, as long as you don’t need to upload enormous amounts of data every month, in which case there’s a paid option.

Once I’m in the process of starting a story, whether it’s in outline form, character lists, or if I just want to plunge right in and start writing, I use Scrivener. Until recently it’s been a Mac-only program, but they’re coming out with Windows and Linux versions which are (as of this writing) available in free public beta if you want to check them out. The beta versions are not yet feature-equivalent with the Mac version but the gap is narrowing.

Scrivener is much more than a word processor, and integrates several features for which writers might use different applications. The built-in outlining features are very useful. I love the idea of building my outline, deciding on a scene structure, writing a brief synopsis of what happens in each scene within the outlining format, and then going right in to start drafting each scene’s text (I use the full-screen mode for this, so it replaces such “distraction-free” writing environments as WriteRoom, ByWord, or Q10), with the option of popping-up a little “info” window which display’s the scene’s synopsis info for my reference. I can even drop in research or reference materials (such as photo reference for characters or locations) so they display where I can see them while I write. I find it really useful to treat each scene as discrete object, with its own notes and its own word count. In the outline mode, you can very easily drag the scenes around into a different sequence. It sounds like something that wouldn’t be useful very often, but I’ve been surprised at how often it’s helped my thought process to imagine events happening in a different sequence.

I do use Microsoft Word, but only at the final stage, when I’m absolutely certain all my story’s scenes are in the right sequence and in very nearly final form. I use the “compile draft” feature in Scrivener to output an RTF document, open this in Word, and make sure the scenes flow when read in sequence, and that formatting is just right. Since this is the final format I use for critique or submission, it makes sense to let the story exist in this form for a while before I let it loose. I could probably use Open Office for this, but I already own a copy of Word. If I had to re-purchase Word, I’d probably switch to something else.

If I had to get by with only a single tool for my writing, I’d get rid of my fountain pens and all the rest, and go with Scrivener. It’s flexible enough that it could be use for note-sorting and organization in a way similar to how I use Evernote. I’d probably spend a little more time fine-tuning the “export to RTF” settings, forego the final “check it out in Word” process, and go straight from Scrivener to submission-ready output.

As for hardware, I have an Apple MacBook Pro, the 17″ display version. When I’m using it at the desk I have it connected to a second monitor, a 23″ high resolution Samsung, so I have two desktops, and in this setup I also use an Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Quite often I cut loose all the connections and sit with just the laptop, as that 17″ display is extremely pixel-dense and displays even higher resolution than the 23″ monitor. It’s great in stand-alone mode like this, and just like I said I could get by with Scrivener alone if forced to simplify, I’d happily work on just the laptop, no peripherals at all. 

Links: 

http://www.evernote.com/

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

The Apple iPad As Writing Tool

On By griffinwordsIn Words Out1 Comment

It’s unlikely anyone reading this hasn’t seen or heard about the Apple iPad, which seems to have taken over the technology world this past few months. The device is portable and easy to operate, and uses a touchscreen interface so intuitive I’ve yet to find anybody who can’t figure the thing out immediately.

Much has been made in reviews of the device being better suited for consumption of media (listening to music, reading email, blogs and ebooks, or watching videos) than for producing it, but the iPad occupies an important place in my writing workflow. Most of my “real” writing happens in Scrivener, which is a Mac application with no iPad equivalent. But leading up to the actual drafting and editing in Scrivener, I do a lot of note-making, gathering and combining the various seeds and ideas that grow into the beginnings of a story. I keep all my notes centralized in Evernote, an application that I keep on all my Macs, Pcs and my iPad, but which I use most often on my iPad for the actual capture of ideas. During the drafting and revision of a story I often get ideas that I intend to apply to the story in progress, and these go into Evernote with a tag appropriate for the story. When I’m ready to work on a given story, I first check Evernote for any ideas tagged with that story’s title, and it brings together every scrap or idea or name-change I may have come up with since I last worked on it. Once a note has been incorporated into the story (or discarded), I delete the note from Evernote.

There does not yet exist for iPad a word processor or text editor application without a lot of flaws. Apple Pages is a pretty nice program and only costs $10 but there are some serious weaknesses regarding how you get your work into and out of Pages, so I don’t use that program at this time. If I wanted to draft a story scene, I’d fire up my bluetooth keyboard (the onscreen keyboard works fine for shorter bits of typing but I wouldn’t to type hundreds or thousands of words with the thing, unless I had to) and type the text into Evernote. Then next time I was at a “real” computer I could collect any such scenes, again using Evernote’s tagging feature to designate written drafts to be incorporated into Scrivener, Word, or whatever application you use to write your storise or novels.

I love my Macbook Pro and if I were to travel for any length of time with the intention of doing real writing, I would probably take that along. But for a short trip, I could definitely imagine taking just the iPad and getting all kinds of work done. I’ve always believed a lot of the work of writing isn’t just writing drafts, but creating notes, sorting through them, combining ideas into an interesting brew and then starting to outline, sketch characters, and brainstorm. All this kind of activity is perfect for the iPad, and Evernote is an absolutely essential tool for this.

Hello Strangers

On By griffinwordsIn Blogging2 Comments

This blog doesn’t get too much traffic, normally. Somewhere between zero hits in a day, if I haven’t posted anything new for a while, and maybe 12 of 15 or 20 on a day when I pick something with tags that are interesting to a greater number of people.

So far today, my latest blog entry has something like 100 hits, so I’m trying to figure out where all these eyeballs come from. Probably people interested in Scrivener or Writeroom or something.

Anyway… hello, strangers!