Today is my husband's birthday, the big Four-One. I'll have the kids make him some pictures before he gets home from work, but otherwise we won't do anything, which is the way he likes it. I'll let him choose a football card on eBay for his present. He'd rather pick it himself, anyway. Hm, maybe I could make him his favorite dinner...
Yesterday I finished typing my scenes into yWriter, and today I'll print the list to figure out where the new material needs to go. I've never been an organizing writer and had put myself in the "seat of the pants" category, however, I think I've found the circumstance when using a system can help me. It's long since I pants-seated the original vision, and I have piles of scenes which need cohesion and a majorly-revised plot full of holes. I tried the notecard method, but it didn't work for me then. Writing the long synopsis at the request of an editor broke things loose for me, allowed me to fix the plot problems, and gave me a direction. Next time I won't wait so long before writing a long outline, and I won't turn my nose up at organizational tools. I will no longer put myself in a category, neither pantser nor outliner, because labels are so limiting! Damn it!
Another thing I need to do is read some new books. The f/sf section of my library has old stuff plus each book carries the deadly air freshener molecule, so that's out. I'm poor, so I can get just a few books off the bargain table, maybe. I thought about getting into one of those book-trading rings, but they'd smell like all the houses they were in before. I'm going to just open my mind to possibilities and see what comes up. One of the most limiting things I do to myself is to assume I know all my options, which makes me blind to others. My vision is wide open.
Friday, September 18, 2009
I like loose outlining, not strict, detailed outlines. I know using more detailed ones can lead to a nice synopsis though, so I get sort of torn about at what point -- or if -- I should do one. I think for me, writing a synopsis INSTEAD of an outline is the idea situation. Both can be adjusted as the writing flows, and I always start with a basic synopsis anyway, so why not? Like you, I'm going to start ignoring rules to get writing done.
ReplyDeleteyWriter is so cool, isn't it? I've been using Liquid Story Binder XE for a while now, and I love it, too. It's naming convention is weird (i.e., it calls things by strange names except "chapters"), but it's got a lot of great stuff in it. Sequencers for paneling out the story events; storyboard for laying the scenes out; dossier-builders for characters; a lot of stuff.
yWriter has a lot of those features too, but has the added bonuses of being free AND it allows writing in scenes (LSBXE does too but you have more hoops to jump through when you want to move them around). The only thing about yWriter is all the confusing things to fill out for each scene (which I generally ignore). Other than that it's a great word processor for storing individual scenes.
I like writing in Rough Draft 3.0, and LSBXE allows you to choose an external editor for doing the actual writing. Right now I use Word, but I could choose RD if I wanted to, which is a nice touch. And I don't have all the minutiae to figure out about each scene. I know, I know, I said I leave all that blank in yW, but it bugs me that it's blank because I'm slightly OCD.
Now that I think about it, just using Word and Text Tree (which Bryce gave me as a gift a while back) would probably work just fine.
Yeesh, y'know, maybe one of my bigger problems is choosing which software I like writing in most? Man. HA!
I didn't like yWriter in the earlier versions, but v.5 is pretty good. One thing I don't like about it is that it wants you to have scenes for all the chapters, but I'm not ready for that yet. I just made a new chapter for each scene, but you have to have a scene in order to add the content. It's a bit annoying. Otherwise, I think it's going to work fine.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I didn't like that either. I guess the logic is, you can't have chapters without scenes, but you should be able to write scenes without chapters and dump them into groups later. That would make it better. But it's pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday to R! I hope he has a great day. :)
ReplyDeleteOrganization is never a bad thing, not even for writing and the other creative arts. It's just a matter of figuring out which kind of organization works best for you - and it sounds like you are on your way.
If you got books off the bargain table, wouldn't they have the air freshener on them too? You're talking used books, right? Or do you mean clearance marked new books?
Here's a couple of links I found - browsing through the comments gives more tips and more links too. Maybe something in there might help you. :)
http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf000592.tip.html
http://www.occultcorpus.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7453
Thank you, Fal. I never thought about de-stinkifying the books. Too bad it takes so long, or I could do it to the library books, as well. And yeah, the bargain table I'm talking about is at the front of Waldenbooks, new books which tend not to smell like anything. They don't bother to "freshen" the air inside a warehouse.
ReplyDeleteRichard did have a great day, because I made him his favorite dinner, chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and white gravy. Yum.