Comments | skellington1: Know thyself: Writing Process Edition

skellington1

Know thyself: Writing Process Edition

May 08, 2013 09:09

I have figured out A Thing!

I figured it out while using the trial version of scrivener, luckily, because it means I haven't dumped $40 on it yet ( Read more... )

know thyself, writing

Comments 6

elialshadowpine May 9 2013, 01:38:21 UTC

I have similar issues. There is a point where I get well and truly stuck, and the only way, for some reason, to work through it is to write longhand. I'll do probably 80-90% of the work on the computer, but that 10-20% is huge.

(This is especially sucktastic as I have serious joint issues, finger subluxations, fucked up thumb joints, and writing longhand is dreadfully painful. ARGH BRAIN.)

I do find Scrivener incredibly useful for organizing everything, though, even if it doesn't all get written there. Being able to have one manuscript file with ALL my eleventybillionths of prewriting, rejected scenes, stuff that didn't go the right way, multiple drafts... it is amazing for that, and it was worth the money simply for the convenience of not having twenty Word documents open at once. ;)

skellington1 May 9 2013, 01:48:21 UTC

ARGH, the pain aspect interfering with long-hand must bite. My sympathies. Body shit is the worst when it's interfering with something you love ( ... )

elialshadowpine May 10 2013, 01:59:53 UTC

Yes, it really does, especially because for some reason, longhand counteracts the infernal editor. I have written a good portion of a novel longhand just to get away from that shit, and I can't do it anymore without causing severe, lasting pain. (Too much, and I fuck up my tendons too. JOY.)

There are LOTS of ways to organize via Scrivener, and I would perhaps suggest that you might look at YouTube also to see how people use it. I've seen a number of people posting different guides for how they use it. It's quite interesting.

sinvraal May 9 2013, 15:39:56 UTC

Readings things like this makes me atrociously disorganized with my almost complete lack of outlines. I know I'm going to have to do it more as I move into original stuff (since I don't have a game to act as a basic structure) but yikes, I keep way too many things free-floating in my head.

padparadscha May 10 2013, 02:07:18 UTC

Hee hee! Yeah, I haven't even TRIED doing outlines and lists on the computer, for exactly that reason.

I keep hearing about Scrivener, though, and have yet to bother finding out what it is. What do it do?

stasia May 12 2013, 04:22:41 UTC

I have Scrivener and I ... have mixed feelings about it. The fact that it's bad about copypasta formatting (from all other programs) is very frustrating. I like the way I can stick all sorts of information into the one Story File.

I also don't know what my Buckets should be, but what I've started doing is using actual physical notes for preliminary outlining and formatting, and then I put those into Scrivener as ... cards? for "scenes", which I then write out.

It's not perfect, and I do still sort of prefer the wild white page of Word/Open Office, but I do like that Scrivener will format my document into saleable ebook formats, which, well, is my end goal here.

Stasia