Home / 2006 / November

Nov

13

Open Office to yWriter

Posted by : E.v.R. | On : November 13, 2006

Category: Resources, Tools


yWriter
During the slog known as NaNo, I’ve been writing each scene as its own Open Office Writer .odt file. Some months back (could be a year now) I had tried out yWriter and loved it. Except, at the time despite my preachyness here on the blog about structure and organization, for some reason I never really got to using yWriter as a force of habit. It was just another tool I had collected in my arsenal, but didn’t use as often as I should–a bit like Mind Manager. I’m silly like that, I know.


yWriter
Tonight as I was working on a new scene, I got to thinking about this story folder full of scene docs, and I realized that it was starting to get difficult to manage. Yes, I could just have everything all in one text file but then that defeats the purpose of breaking things out into chunks. I’m all about this modularity scene-by-scene groove these days, the only problem being it makes a new task out of organizing the modules. Then I remembered yWriter. “Oh yeah,” I thought. “That tool I already have and was already toying around with a few times here and there is something perfect for my NaNo story.”

So I fired it up and started transferring my Open Office files to yWriter. It didn’t take long before I started to appreciate some of the finer points of yWriter:

  • Wordcounts Per Scene
  • Wordcounts Per Chapter
  • Draft view
  • Outline view
  • Status markers ‘Outline, Draft, 1st Edit, 2nd Edit, Done’ for each scene.
  • Character viewpoint tab for each scene (drawn from a list of characters you enter).
  • Spitting out all your separate scenes and chapters as a text file or HTML.
  • Exporting of a synopsis based on your outline notes.
  • Export scene descriptions (outline) only.
  • Fully customizable daily wordcount targets; Think NaNo’s progress reports and graphs.
  • Find Problem Words feature, for catching all those nasty ‘Suddenlys.’
  • A Word Usage counter to see which words you use too often.
  • Print by Chapter or Scene.

The list goes on and on, and I’d be writing this post all day to give you a full feature list, in which time you could just download it and try it for yourself. yWriter is THE novelist’s tool to keeping track of everything in one program. I can see why Simon Haynes whipped this little tool up. If you can get beyond a little of the confusion of learning the interface, there’s no other tool like it.

NaNoWriMo just got a whole lot better.

Nov

10

The 7 Secrets of Writing Scene By Scene

Posted by : E.v.R. | On : November 10, 2006

Category: Creative Process, Story Structure

  1. Make It Managable. Instead of worrying yourself sick over one giant blob of narrative, you can instead worry yourself sick over scene 15, or scene 24. Your story becomes managable.
  2. The Bad Things Are Small. If you write something terrible, you don’t have to feel bad. A large pain becomes a small pain. A bad bit of writing is only one scene. It doesn’t mean your whole story is bad.
  3. Templates of Greatness. If you write something great, you know that scene can serve as a model for others. It’s a ‘template for greatness’ that you can duplicate across your story. If one of your scenes works really well because it has a strong beginning, middle, and end, and it has a main point of conflict then you’ll intuitively know that you should transfer that same framework to your other scenes in order to make them better.
  4. Wordcounts Are Easy! A scene is usually 1-3 pages in Hollywood parlance. For a novel, it can certainly be longer. But identifying a page count per scene is helpful. One page is about 400-500 words. This makes your typical ‘Hollywood sized’ scene anywhere from 400 to 1700 words, a managable daily goal for anyone. “A scene per day.” is one of my writing mottos. Maybe it will work for you too!
  5. Dramatic Units Are Everything. Make progress on your story happen in dramatic units. If you’ve completed a scene, you can say “I completed a scene! Jimmy had a fight with Sarah in the lobby of the hotel, and now they hate each other! See, I got something quantifiable done!” Instead of just saying, “I wrote a little bit, but I don’t know how little or how much that is in the grand scheme of things. What am I doing?” Scene completion is simple feedback for the writing process–results delivered.
  6. Love The Rewrite. Yes, I said love. We all hate them but did you know it was possible to like them, or even love them? It’s easier to rewrite a bad scene here and there, one at a time, than to look at your story as one big endless train track and say “This is trash. What should I do?” Okay I admit maybe this won’t make you love rewriting, but it’ll certainly make it less of a headache!
  7. Structure Without Even Trying. Some people aren’t big on plotting or planning. That’s fine. Without any plotting, organizing, or planning, writing scene by scene will mean your story will be naturally more organized, better structured. Your story slices can be thick, or they can be thin, it’s up to you. Maybe you like short scenes, maybe you prefer long ones? Maybe it depends on what drama you’re trying to convey, and how much time it needs to develop. The simple fact is working scene by scene brings these pacing issues into focus. And every writer, and I mean every writer including the greats, could improve the pacing of their stories.

Writing scene by scene allows you to focus on the quality of those dramatic units, instead of the giant blob called “My Novel” or “My Screenplay.” You can’t make a novel good all at once. You can’t rewrite it all at once. You can’t improve it all at once. Everything happens in baby steps, so by figuring out what those baby steps will be, you increase your chances of success for completing your work, and delivering a quality story.

Break your story into scenes today!

Nov

08

Dreaming Is Story

Posted by : E.v.R. | On : November 8, 2006

Category: Creative Process

With all the writing this month, my dreams have amplified and taken on intense story form. There’s a quality of dreams that I’m always trying to capture in writing and it is this; Dreams reveal the emotional truth in everything.

In Dreams…

  • …everything is like a faded memory–places and people shift and blur with the passage of time. Like real life, only compressed.
  • …there is a focus on the critical, symbolic, or absurd. A lot like good writing.
  • …everything is cinematic. You see things happen, rather than being told something has happened.
  • …our greatest joys and our secret fears are multiplied. You meet a beautiful person and fall in love, have amazing sex, or the entire world conspires to murder you and your loved ones. Dreams are vehicles of extremes in human experience–everything fiction aspires towards.
  • …you are not limited to the people or places you know. Your mind can synthesize a city from several you know, and create new people from bits and pieces of those you know. The mind’s creations are endlessly combinatorial, as evident in our greatest fiction.
  • …everything is justified. The dream provides a context for any action, and if it doesn’t, it is only a dream. This is the true freedom of expression in fiction. You can provide a context to justify anything you want to write, and if not, it doesn’t matter because it’s only a story.

It’s a great thing for fiction to capture power of dreams. Do dreams influence your storytelling?