Category: Organizing

And Away We Go

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On October 6, 2012

In Organizing, Revision

I think a week’s long enough to wait before starting editing, don’t you?

I’m curious to know how people work with their document to edit it. Organization isn’t my strong point. I have a single Open Office document with my entire first draft written in it. Obviously I’m not going to edit directly onto that. I’m thinking about copying it in one- or two-chapter chunks into new documents and revising from there. Or maybe this is a good time to get Scrivener, since it chunks up your work for you? Maybe use the smaller two-chapter docs to edit and then paste those into a new, complete second-draft doc so I can see it all together?

The first two chapters present an additional dilemma because I’m planning on deleting 90% of them and starting from scratch. Maybe I’ll paste them into a new doc, and then start writing fresh below, pasting in the bits that I want to keep as I go. I’m starting to wish I had two monitors so I don’t have to keep going back and forth between the new and old versions all the time…

***EDIT***

Almost forgot I bought that highly recommended book on editing. Maybe I should read it and it will give me some tips. I’m really awesome sometimes.

Adding to my Shelf

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On September 6, 2012

In Learning, Organizing, Planning for the Future, Revision

I guess I’m going back on my no-advice-books rule again. I’ve seen Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print mentioned on three blogs in as many days, so I thought I’d take a look at it. While I’ve got many great tips on editing after the first draft is complete, this looks like it might be useful as well. For $13, it’s worth a try, I figure (I also bought yet another canning book – sshh, I’m just going to hide it on the shelf with the others and hope no one notices).

I’m not going to read it until I’m done my story though. I don’t like the spectre of revision hanging over my head while I write. Even now I sometimes look at my freshly-typed-out work and wonder if I’m just going to cut it in the end, and that’s depressing.

I’m also thinking about trying out Scrivener. It’s another thing I see praised often by writers for its ability to organize everything. Thoughts, anyone? It sure looks pretty. Makes me wonder why I spent so much on coloured index cards and post-its when I could have had them all on my screen. Right now I use Open Office, which works fine, but because I have everything in one massive doc, I do find myself scrolling through my 180-ish pages of single-spaced text looking for a specific reference in a chapter I can’t remember. This happens at least two or three times a day. So getting organized might be nice. I hear it also helps with outlining, my new favourite thing. Did you know, I’m through 1.5 bullet points since the other day? So great.

I guess what I want to know is, is there any point in getting it this late in the game, three-quarters of the way through this book? Will transfering everything over be a giant pain in the ass? Or should I keep it in mind for when I start Book Two and stay the course for now?

I’m buying roughly 200lbs of tomatoes to can tomorrow. I imagine one of two things will happen with respect to writing in the next week: either I don’t do any at all, or my keyboard will be stained red and speckled with seeds while I cram in a few paragraphs in between canner loads.

OMG Outlines

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On September 4, 2012

In Big Ideas, Just Keep Writing, Organizing, Planning for the Future, Things That Are Awesome

My brain apathy wasn’t lending itself to making words that fit nicely together tonight, so I decided to bang out some point-form notes on everything I wanted to have happen before writing THE END (or TO BE CONTINUED I guess, technically).

What a fantastic fucking idea that was. It’s, like, all right there. In order. And even while I was writing it out, some parts that were just vague notions – “they’ll find this thing, somewhere, somehow” turned into well-thought-out, logical scenes. There are layers. There is conflict that I hadn’t even considered. And while it’s too late tonight to get started on any new words, tomorrow when I sit down I can look at my little outline and say “BAM here’s what you’re going to write about tonight,” instead of twiddling my thumbs for twenty minutes wondering how things should progress.

And I am so excited about this. I do love the spontaneity of leaving some things to figure out as I go, but having a basic beginning-to-end map (in this case, a halfway-through-chapter-17-to-end map) to refer to is solid gold for my overfilled mind. So thank you, everyone ever who said outlining is important. Also, thank you everyone ever who said outlining isn’t important because you gave me the confidence to write 17 1/2 chapters without one and that went just fine too.

Tomorrow my fingers are going to be nimble and my brain is going to be sharp and I’m going to tackle the first of my 11 bullet points. November isn’t that far off but now I feel like I know how to get there.

Umm, Whoops

By

On July 18, 2012

In My Failings As A Proper Novelist, Organizing

I realized randomly today that I forgot to include a fairly important detail somewhere around chapter 8 or 9. It’s not going to change what I’ve written since significantly, but now I’m stuck with the task of finding the right spot to include it after the fact, in a way that seems natural and without disrupting the narrative flow I’ve already established. And no, I can’t add it into what I’m about to write – it’s time-sensitive and should’ve have happened a couple story-days ago.

Again, this is where outlining might have aided me. That’s two strikes against me – one more and I might have to actually write one out.

Anyway, I have a couple ideas. Might as well get that done now, instead of waiting until I’m revising. It’ll only be a couple paragraphs I think. But it definitely falls under the category of Really Important Later so I can’t leave it out.

In other news, at around the 63,000 word-count mark, I’m starting to wonder if maybe this isn’t the halfway point, not 50,000. There’s still so, so much to happen. So much. Holy crap.

Chapter Breaks

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On July 9, 2012

In Learning, Musical Interlude, My Failings As A Proper Novelist, Organizing

Something that I’m not so great at is where to end one chapter and start a new one. I like to cut them off at a point where there’s a little bit of suspense, to create a bit of incentive to turn the page – the best books for me are the ones that I can’t just stop reading and put down when I reach the end of the chapter, as I so often promise to do when it’s very late at night, because that chapter ending totally leaves me hanging and wondering what the hell is going to happen. So then I just read one more page… and the next thing I know it’s 4 a.m. and I’ve just read an entire book in a day.

But I’m off track now.

A lot of times I have a preconceived notion of where a chapter should end before I’ve actually written it. I don’t know if that’s a good idea when it comes to plotting or not, but that’s the direction my thoughts usually go when I’m thinking about structure (which is seldom). But then I’ll check my word count and realize my one chapter is actually about 12,000 words, which is just way too long any way you look at it. A 40 page chapter is just not reasonable in my mind. So then I have to split it into two smaller ones. My orginal ‘chapter 3’ was actually close to 24,000 words. True story. It ended up splitting into four. But then it’s kind of cool, because it’s way better to be able to say “I’ve finished six chapters so far” instead of a fairly measly three, and you feel like you’ve accomplished so much more. Anyway, I’ve been looking forward to getting to be able to write “Chapter 10” because, hey, double-digits, that’s kind of a neat milestone, right? And then when I checked my word count for chapter 9 I saw it was around 11,000 words, because once again I had this idea stuck in my head of where it had to end. Oops. I bisected it rather successfully, I think, and got to write both “Chapter 10” and “Chapter 11” tonight. See? I didn’t even know I was that far along.

I wonder if it would be better to just write the whole thing without worrying about where the chapters end, and add that all in afterwards, when it’s done?

And now for a musical interlude. The overly large section of the book formerly known as Chapter 9 was brought to you by the following songs, which have given me some inspiration and/or insight into a few of my characters’ motivations and emotions. One’s newer, and one’s an oldie but a goodie:

Thanks, iPod. Once again you have served me well.

Chapter 11 is going to be SO MUCH FUN to write.

It’s A Start

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On June 18, 2012

In Distractions, Learning, Organizing

In a tiny, tiny first step towards some sort of future organization, I made a doc called “Things for Later” that I put a couple of minor ideas I didn’t want to forget – snippets of dialogue, actually – that I hope will grow to be a more comprehensive list of plot points for this series. I’m not sure how to organize it, and I may not even try, just write them down as they come to me with some sort of note at the beginning indicating where it might fall in the timeline.

It’s kind of a big deal for me, she-who-does-not-outline. And after my tremendous efforts yesterday, it’s a good way for me to take a bit of a break from the book without being entirely unproductive. I think I’ve got the next week’s worth of writing set up nicely in my head anyway, so might as well focus on something different tonight.

***

Or I could just play Bejeweled all night instead. Whatever.

Ideas

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On May 22, 2012

In Big Ideas, Organizing, Routines

Where a writer gets his or her ideas is apparently a hot topic. Obviously, fiction writers need to have a good imagination and creativity to spare, but the source of the inspiration is pretty varied. Dreams, true events, childhood experiences, even a mystical muse, can all get a writer working on a project.

My ideas mostly come from music. My entire concept for these books came to me because two songs played back-to-back on my iPod one day driving my daughter to school. It was as simple and straight-forward as that. In the first chapter I talk about how sometimes Callie gets an idea for a song all at once, like a high-speed download into her brain. Well, that’s basically what happened to me. The first song gave me the idea for Callie herself, and the second created the scenario for the plot and built more on her as a person and introduced the second main character (who I JUST got to write about for the first time – FINALLY! – the other day and I’m so pleased to start getting into his head at long last). In about eight minutes, I had a whole new world in my head and all these people started talking to me.

The rest is minor details, and like I’ve mentioned before, some stuff I’ve written doesn’t occur to me until I start working through a scene. Other parts have come after copious amounts of research. But the basic story arc all came about because of the whim of the shuffle algorithm.

With that I started looking to some other songs I like to fill in holes or describe relationships or certain scenes, with interesting results. Usually it’s a matter of just listening and waiting for the right song to come up. Sometimes it’s as little as one line of lyrics, others it’s the entire song from beginning to end. And there are definitely specific songs that I think about when I’m describing some of Callie’s work – a detriment to me because eventually I’m going to have to come up with some original lyrics for her, and that’s hard to do when you’re already fixated on something someone else wrote as your inspiration. Nothing beats the car for letting new ideas come to me, although now that it’s getting warmer out, I’m hoping walking can replace a lot of that.

When I’m writing a scene that has a song that inspired it, I usually put it on repeat – like I described in my last post – to keep my head in that emotion I’m trying to convey (I’m often prone to distraction, sadly). The second song of the original duo I’ve listened to over 250 times since I started writing, according to iTunes, and I have a nice little playlist built up with a bunch of songs that have triggered something for me.

Everything else comes from idle daydreams, but without those two songs coming up one day in February, I wouldn’t be on this adventure today. It may not be a typical path for a writer to take, but I’m going to run with it and see where it takes me.

Organization

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On April 17, 2012

In Organizing

Before I started writing I decided that this time, after my disastrously unorganized by-the-seat-of-my-pants NaNoWriMo 2011 novel, that I would get my thoughts in order and plot out a few things so I’d know what went where. I’m planning a series of three novels and the entire storyline was just stirring around in my head. Which is great because on one hand, when you simmer something for a long time the flavours become concentrated and the thinness boils away, but on the other hand, sometimes stuff slops over the edge of the pot and gets lost.

So I went shopping and bought about five colours each of cue cards and sticky notes and a little box to keep them stored in. Each book would have its own colour card and sticky, with another colour for character notes and a final one for uncategorized ideas. I labelled everything nicely and that box is currently sitting on top of my bookshelf collecting dust, without a single mark on any of the cards. The ones I tucked into my purse for ideas on the go are also blank, other than the ones that were turned into colouring sheets for the kids.

I had a bit more luck with my No Plot? No Problem! book until I got to the part where it started asking me to describe all the characters in detail. That makes no sense to me, because how do I know about them until I write about them? Back to the bookshelf it went too.

Now I’m considering writing out the pivotal scenes already in my head in detail, even though that will mean writing out of order. I tried it a bit with chapter one two but I found it awkward to seam together the pre-written scene with everything else I wrote later that built up to that part. The feedback I got about that chapter said the same.

I don’t want to rely on my less-than-infallible memory to keep everything straight – things are already slipping away and I’ll find myself running through a scene in my head and forgetting some of the dialogue, or why that part was even happening in the first place. Maybe some point-form notes typed out and saved in a separate document? Or give the cue cards another try? I really like the idea of them, I just can’t seem to translate that into actually using them.

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