Tag Archives: fiction

Working with Scrivener

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I was new to Scrivener for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November last year. I had previously written in Word, however that had a tendency to make it hard to keep all the folders and files together. Scrivener changed all that. Suddenly I could write a novel, a short story and keep character sheets and notes all in the one place. I could add images and place notes in much the same way I’d done in one-note, and then decide what I wanted to export later.

It didn’t come for free or without a learning curve. That’s where the course on using Scrivener came in handy. It’s called “Learn Scrivener Fast” from Joseph Michael . Why learn it all on my own when I could take a tutorial to learn how the experts did it. Now this isn’t intended to be a push to buy the product, though I do think it’s great. If you think you can intuit your way into the best method on your own, knock yourself out. Personally, while I like to make how-to stuff, I rarely follow the directions exactly. So yes, there’s bits in the course you may not want. I encourage you to skip around and only do the bits you want to use. Sooner or later, the other bits will be there for you. All I want to say is that it saved me oodles of time and headaches.

The main thing I do with a Scrivener project is determine what the overarching world is.

  • Start with the project name
  • Change the name of the Chapters to the Sections I want
  • Start a side ‘section’ for related stories (which I inevitably have)
  • Make a bunch of text files inside the sections for scenes I know I’ll want to write
  • Then add text scenes before and after those known scenes
  • Make a set of character files
  • Then start making notes to myself over in the right
  • I use a corkboard to see the scenes all together – and drag and drop them into a different order

Then I start writing just about anywhere, sometimes at the start, though usually it’s the first scene where the action is. Then I just keep adding scenes as I go. Sooner or later, I’ll pop back out and make an outline – that means more scenes get layered in, though those are just a ‘stub’ with the outline of what will happen in them. I leave the stub in place until that scene gets written. I’ve been known to just stub in a scene and then keep going onto the next thing. I can always come back to it later or lose it if it’s not needed.

In November, I found that I was writing short stories that are back story for the main character, at the same time as I was writing book two. It should bother me to be writing at two very different points in time but it was fine. Each day, I’d just decide what I wanted to write and the variety made it less likely I’d get stuck. On days when I didn’t want to write anything in the stories, I spent my writing time outlining or building character sheets instead. When neither of those appealed, I edited something my partner wrote in his stories or wrote blog posts for one of my other blogs. That way I generally got 2000 to 5000 words a day some way or another.

I’d love to hear some of the ways others use Scrivener. Go ahead and use the comments section to add thoughts.

Happy writing – Ria

Remembering character information

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By the end of book 1 – Library of Time – I had about 30 names to remember. It helped that I picked most of them with a botanical theme in mind as that gave me some clues to remember the names. However, what really helped was creating character sheets in scrivener.

There’s a location in scrivener, down at the bottom left part of the screen, that says ‘Characters’. Inside you can add a page for each character, or group of characters, by location, and fill in some information about them. This is super helpful when coming to write the next chapter or even the next book. Some of the things I add for each character are:

  1. Name of the character
  2. Their nickname, if any
  3. What they look like – I try to find a stock photo, illustration or actor who looks a bit like them
  4. Where are they from?
  5. Where are they living?
  6. Character sketch
    What motivates them? Their character (solemn, quirky, tricky, mischievous, lazy etc)
  7. What do they bring to the plot?
  8. How do they act when startled? When angry? When challenged?
  9. Their favorite color (shows up in colors they wear)
  10. Special abilities and role in the story

For what they look like, I don’t intend to cut and paste descriptions; that would be tacky and repetitive. However, I do want to know their hair and eye color, skin tone, general appearance and wardrobe. A friend said that characters need an ‘eye patch’, that is a particular element that identifies them to readers. Remember the ‘cigarette man’ from the X Files? James Bond’s tuxedo or his martini – shaken, not stirred? It can be subtle, but needs to be there. I remember reading a Kay Hooper novel back in the 1980’s – even now, I can tell you about the contents of a character’s purse, including the large-animal leash and tranquilizer gun.

Where a character comes from informs me about how they will act in a situation in the future. I want to jot down what they love, what they hate, what riles them and the kind of music they like to listen to. I may not use all of it in the story now, but in subsequent tales, those elements get sprinkled in to make the character more real.

What do you add to your own character sheets?

Writing process – top 10 ways of finding grammar errors

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Grammar errors are one of the most pesky things to eradicate in the writing process. Scrivener doesn’t find grammar mistakes, and while MS Word is pretty good at finding normal passive errors, it fails to recognize idiom. Language is changing. Sentences can and often do start with ‘and, but, or, though’ in colloquial use.wordsForBooks

If you’re like me, when you write the first draft you don’t pay any attention to the rules. Well, truth to tell, rules are hardly ever my best thing. I tend to think in fragments; that means some of my characters share this trait. Enough said.

Even in a blog, the sentence construction is not a slave to the Oxford English way of writing. Be a bit boring if it was. However, the unintentional grammar error is the bane of a writer’s existence. It’s just fine to break rules on purpose, so long as you know your purpose. Richard Morgan stood the grammar rules on their collective head in Altered Carbon. His more stream-of-consciousness writing included sentence fragments much of the time. None of that made it difficult to read. Instead, it made his protagonist much more sympathetic. So how do I find those errors in the editing process? I have a few tips and tricks to share.

  1. Walk away from the writing for a couple of days to give yourself some distance
  2. Print it out and keep a highlighting pen handy to mark the pieces to come back to
  3. Read it out loud to a friend. The tongue will trip over phrases that aren’t quite right
  4. Do an editing pass with track-changes on
  5. Try turning it upside down – for those of us who can read that way, the comma and grammar errors jump out
  6. Do an editing pass just for dialog.
  7. Use Find / Replace to fix issues like quote plus period (“. wrong) rather than period plus quote (.” correct)
  8. Write with a manual of style handy – look up stuff that you know you get wrong
  9. Replace instances of passive voice (often uses words that end in y) with active voice (often ends in ‘ed’)
  10. Relax about it. No matter how many times you edit, someone will disagree with your choices

I hope some of these prove helpful. Please share the tips and tricks you have found work for you.

A writer exploring her medium

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It is an exciting time to be living in as an author, exploring the medium of fiction in multiple formats. The electronic book feels so ephemeral, while the trade paperback feels more lasting and tangible. Both have their charms but I am struck by how different the same work can feel in the two different mediums.

Print will always have my heart I think with the feeling of the pages, the smell of the ink, and the whole experience of interacting with an artifact. Yet my kindle has made it possible to keep a whole library with me; as long as I have a power charge, I can visit with old friends any time I like, no matter where I am. I no longer run late for work in searching for a book to add to my bag before I run out the door; it’s sad to admit how many buses I’ve missed over the years just because I couldn’t bring myself to leave before I had a book in hand. As an author, each of print and ebook is satisfying in its own way – both get into the hands of readers and that’s a happiness.

Fiction is a new departure for me and I’m as happy as a kid in the candy store. For the past twenty odd years, I’ve been focused on technical writing and non fiction. I had no idea fiction could be so rewarding! The characters are about as noisy and demanding as a screech of lyrebirds in the Australian bush. Those pesky creatures are mimics who love to make the sound of squeaky playground swings. My characters keep up the racket in my head until I get their words and stories out.

I must admit to experimenting with the novella format more than a bit; Child of Time is a story in three parts that could be considered three separate short stories. Thematically, it moves through time and explores a single protagonist as she grows up and grows into her magic. It is a single story, yes. It is also a set of stories about a character at different ages. Will be experimenting with the novella form more as time goes on. I already have ideas for another sequence of three stories, threaded together through time.

For me, it feels like around a hundred pages, or around 20,000 words is a good chunk of story. I hope that the readers agree as it means publishing is feasible as soon as there is a sequence to share in ebook and print. Less than 100 pages doesn’t feel print-worthy to me, but other folks mileage may vary.