The I'm Writing Thread.... Celebrate your pages written etc Part II.

[Ren]

Thanks for the input, I may have to look at re-setting my chapters down the road.  I usually aim to write 12-13 pages per chapter which is usually 3-4 days of writing.
Now I need to finish summarizing what I've written so far so I can get back to writing without fear of writing something that is obviated by previous writing, sadly I suffer memory issues so it makes it hard for me to remember details I've written...8P

[The Deposed King]

Thanks for the input, I may have to look at re-setting my chapters down the road.  I usually aim to write 12-13 pages per chapter which is usually 3-4 days of writing.
Now I need to finish summarizing what I've written so far so I can get back to writing without fear of writing something that is obviated by previous writing, sadly I suffer memory issues so it makes it hard for me to remember details I've written...8P

I make a separate word or text file for my novel length works.  I put down the names of any and all characters, primary, secondary, tertiary, etc as well as vital details.  Who are they, where are they coming from, what side are they on.  You just don't realize how tough it is to keep things consistent until you are scratching your head and wondering if it was Jeff from engineering you needed or if his name was Charles and was it Jeff or Charles that worked in environmental, cause you definitely needed the engineering guy for what the supporting character on this one!


The Deposed King

[Wordmaker]

Oh, yeah absolutely. I have a pretty solid memory for story details and I still rely on keeping an up to date record of who's who and such.

[Ren]

I have a word file of just my case and some brief descriptions/information. I also have all of the chapters, characters, places and things added into Scrivener as well...just in case I lose the USB key with everything on it...8P

[The Deposed King]

Yup, you can dink around with stuff that's 5-10k and keep most or all of it in your head and scroll rapidly back to any spots you missed but you get up over that amount and unless you've got some kind of photographic memory... well I certainly can't keep up with it all.  Its easy to remember the story.  But the name of some guy you mentioned 60k words ago?  Not gonna happen unless he's a primary secondary character.

I also like to save these things in as many places as I can.  Cause you never know when your computer is going to crap out on you.  I've lost three lap tops over here in the philippines.  Thank god for flash drives and curse me for not updating them as often as I should have.



The Deposed King

[Lanodantheon]

Yup, you can dink around with stuff that's 5-10k and keep most or all of it in your head and scroll rapidly back to any spots you missed but you get up over that amount and unless you've got some kind of photographic memory... well I certainly can't keep up with it all.  Its easy to remember the story.  But the name of some guy you mentioned 60k words ago?  Not gonna happen unless he's a primary secondary character.

I also like to save these things in as many places as I can.  Cause you never know when your computer is going to crap out on you.  I've lost three lap tops over here in the philippines.  Thank god for flash drives and curse me for not updating them as often as I should have.



The Deposed King

I started using Scrivener and it has worked wonders organizing my writing. I second TDK's advice in following the words of the late great George Carlin, "Write everything down.". In scrivener I make separate text files for each bit of pre-writing stuff. I have a text file for each individual character, each major piece of world-building and a file for the outline material. When I write scenes I'll have it splitscreened with one window open to where the chapter is being written and one open to either the character write-up, the outline or more commonly a reference photo of some kind to keep the tone and imagery I'm trying to evoke in mind.

I also use a flashdrive with my work Laptop but I recommend backing up your stuff a lot. Don't end up like me and lose a hard drive halfway through a quarter...


Meanwhile...

In my writing life recently I did something cool:


I was spinning my wheels too much on a major project in favor of the beginnings of a new project for a 200,000 word novel. I don't have the time, energy or brainpower to work on the new novel right now because of more important projects so I had to put it to the side.


But, being unable to get it out of my head and with my previous writing projects falling apart because I hadn't planned enough I did something I had never done before. I thought a Project Plan all the way through.


To explain, I am going to school for Project Management. A big part of Project Management is thinking the steps of a project all the way through to completion and beyond. I had never approached creative work this way before taking the classes so the other day I decided to approach novel writing with a little Project Management.
I wrote up Objectives, a Mission Statement and did a Work-Breakdown Structure for the lifespan of a Novel Project from pre-writing to final draft.
I also broke the work down in Microsoft Project into hours and sometimes minutes. I had to because I usually don't have a schedule and as a result I will get distracted and never get anything done. Now I have a schedule


I ended up with a Microsoft Project Template I will use for other projects that came out to 56.7 Days of work + however long it takes to get to 200,000 words in days.


It humbled me to realize that if I started on the project now full-time I wouldn't be done with it until Christmas...

[Wordmaker]

Man, back your stuff up, back your stuff up, back your stuff up!

I had an external hard drive wipe itself on me recently. It had been over a year since I'd backed it up and I lost every bit of music I'd bought (thank goodness for account histories that let you re-download!), along with some drafts of early versions of my second book, the notes for an entire RPG campaign, and even photos of my daughters. Though thankfully the photos were also still on my camera's SD card!

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I started using Scrivener and it has worked wonders organizing my writing. I second TDK's advice in following the words of the late great George Carlin, "Write everything down.". In scrivener I make separate text files for each bit of pre-writing stuff. I have a text file for each individual character, each major piece of world-building and a file for the outline material. When I write scenes I'll have it splitscreened with one window open to where the chapter is being written and one open to either the character write-up, the outline or more commonly a reference photo of some kind to keep the tone and imagery I'm trying to evoke in mind.

One of the reasons why I have not been particularly motivated to getting round to fiddling with Scrivener or the like is that organisation like this a) feels entirely natural and sensible to me (modulo that I sort my relevant input data pretty much entirely by where it fits in the narrative rather than by character or piece of world-building, because to my mind both of those are subordinate functions of narrative voice) and b) is something I have been happily doing in emacs for nearly two decades.

I also use a flashdrive with my work Laptop but I recommend backing up your stuff a lot. Don't end up like me and lose a hard drive halfway through a quarter...

The minimum safe number of backups is three, at least one of which should be in a different geographical location from you. I recommend a dedicated gmail account as a straightforward and thus far quite reliable form of offsite backup.

I wrote up Objectives, a Mission Statement and did a Work-Breakdown Structure for the lifespan of a Novel Project from pre-writing to final draft.
I also broke the work down in Microsoft Project into hours and sometimes minutes. I had to because I usually don't have a schedule and as a result I will get distracted and never get anything done. Now I have a schedule

I hope you find that useful.  I am disinclined to make overly detailed project plans myself, because they have the failure mode for me of realising during Chapter 4 that something new I figure out about characters or world while writing will actually seriously change Chapter 7 and mean I have to put a new Chapter 11 in between existing Chapters 10 and 11 and I end up spending non-trivial amounts of time revising the plan that I should be spending writing.  So my chapter plans now tend to be full of highly condensed notes like "where have you been, Caravaggio ?" and  "l'eucatastrophe, c'est moi" which mean a bunch of different things at different levels but don't pin me down too much on how they fit together to let the writing breathe when I get around to them.

It humbled me to realize that if I started on the project now full-time I wouldn't be done with it until Christmas...

Heh. Heh. Heh. 

I have completed nine novels in the past twenty years, and have several others in various states of development; there are projects there I do still intend to complete - that are about fourth on my current set of priorities - which are old enough to vote, if not yet to drink (in the US.)

[meg_evonne]

Celebration time! I finished my shitty first draft about a month ago and I'm finishing up my not-so-stinky 2nd of my YA contemporary mystery. It doesn't stink as much as normal! For the first time, I had DK's (and Greg's) excel sheets--too many to count on everything from plot to place to characters to lexicons for dialog and the writing itself.) I hear you Neuro, but I think I'm sold now on the project routine. I did write individual short character scenes to hone the characters first. Although my plot wasn't complete before I started, the villain timeline and motivations were.

And, drum roll please! I was honored with the YA mentorship from author Jill Blazinin by Iowa's Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI-IA). Not only was it humbling to receive the honor, it comes with $1200 of page review!

And please roll out the big marching band now: She chose my work because of my strong author's voice and because my character's voices were unique, exciting, and different from each other. As they say, you can fix a lot of stuff, but you can't fix voice. I think I'm proof positive that you can with a lot of hard work and time.

Thank you for this supportive writing community. You are amazing and dedicated. I'm sorry I've been in the writer's zone for so long and away from the boards. Take care and hugs.

[Wordmaker]

Awesome, congratulations!

[trboturtle]

I've spent the last week and a half rewriting/editing three stories that I hope to submit toBattleCorps by the end of the month.....

Craig

[The Deposed King]

Celebration time! I finished my shitty first draft about a month ago and I'm finishing up my not-so-stinky 2nd of my YA contemporary mystery. It doesn't stink as much as normal! For the first time, I had DK's (and Greg's) excel sheets--too many to count on everything from plot to place to characters to lexicons for dialog and the writing itself.) I hear you Neuro, but I think I'm sold now on the project routine. I did write individual short character scenes to hone the characters first. Although my plot wasn't complete before I started, the villain timeline and motivations were.

And, drum roll please! I was honored with the YA mentorship from author Jill Blazinin by Iowa's Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI-IA). Not only was it humbling to receive the honor, it comes with $1200 of page review!

And please roll out the big marching band now: She chose my work because of my strong author's voice and because my character's voices were unique, exciting, and different from each other. As they say, you can fix a lot of stuff, but you can't fix voice. I think I'm proof positive that you can with a lot of hard work and time.

Thank you for this supportive writing community. You are amazing and dedicated. I'm sorry I've been in the writer's zone for so long and away from the boards. Take care and hugs.

Go Meg!  Put that perfume on it!!!


And of course when it goes live, make sure to send up a link.





always follow the dream,


The Deposed King

[Wordmaker]

Chapter 16 down. Book 3 is past the 30k mark at 30,421.

[The Deposed King]

40k - Falon Half Blood

2.5k a day is keeping the strangers away but those goblins are haunting my dreams.  (I know I was actually forced to write an opening chapter to a goblin novel)  My advice to myself is that unless you want other stories setting up camp inside your head and roasting rock lizard or eating cave spiders raw, you have to pick the pace up to at least 5k per day!

(But its so much fun reading other books and watching TV, at 2.5k I can do those other things also, whines my inner muse)


The Deposed King

[belial.1980]

I did Camp NanoWriMo this year. Just finished. Final word count 80,042 in 28 days.

I'm actually pretty pleased because, while far from being perfect, I feel like the text reads like an average first draft rather than the frenetic-oh-god-must-make-words-now explosion on paper that my last Nano ended up being. I've even allowed my girlfriend to read it, in all its rough and unfinished grandeur.
Now it's back to the drawing board for the next project. No rest for the wicked.