Tag: writing

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Almost Like Writing

The outstanding looking Scrivener software for the Mac stumbled into my Internet surfing yesterday. As a result I began googling ‘scrivener for windows’. Most of the hits were people wishing there was such an app, but a very few proposed candidates. I installed and played with three contenders: yWriter, Liquid Story Binder XE, and Celtix.

I’ve been aware of yWriter by Spacejock Software for a number of years. It hits every time I search for writing software. The most recent addition, version 4, shows maturity and a better thought out design than I recall earlier versions sporting. If I were only needing subtance and practicality, I think this would do the trick, but I’m a little bit of a gloss whore. yWriter, the best of the three, is not chrome-tastic.

Celtix is chrome-tastic. It’s also focused on script writing with the ability to handle plain text—you know, for mere mortals. The link I followed didn’t make it out to be so industry specific, so maybe it’s unfair in this line up. Most of the bits can be coerced into use for novel writing and probably serve just fine. The rest of the bits just hang out there screaming let’s write a movie. For me that is distraction enough to avoid further use.

Liquid Story Binder XE comes the closest at a glance to Scrivener. Once I installed it and poked around I discovered that it’s not flexible and complex, but a mess. Some dude cobbled this up to his own specific writing needs. If your specific writing needs and his are parallel then great, you’re set. Mine aren’t.

What do I need you ask.

I’m not entirely sure. Since I haven’t written a novel or long piece of fiction I can’t say for certain what I need. What I want though scans out something like this:

  • Foldering to organize the chunks of writing
  • Character sheets
  • Location sheets
  • Prop sheets
  • An intuitive way to inventory characters, locations, and props across the chunks
  • Word count and task duration statistics
  • Integrated submission/rejection tracking
  • Looks cool
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Speaking of Coupling

Yesterday was not what I’d planned.  I meant to write about the dialogue of Coupling.  Watching Star Wars: Episode II last night reminded me.  It turns out that no matter how much glamor you throw up on the screen to dazzle the audience, you can still fail big because you can’t get the right words into an actor’s mouth.  Hell, in some case back out.  In some cases those three movies were like a high school musical with a sixty million dollar budget.

Coupling’s conversations remind me of a writing trope: an essay should be like a skirt; long enough to cover the subject, short enough to maintain interest.  In the case of this program I’d say they were cutting the hemline to something more like a thong and a pair of pasties.  Or maybe more accurately in the style of Benny Hill simply having a naked person walk through a scene and be strategically and timely covered up with fitting props.  However one might try to imagine the dialogue it’s good.

I hear many writers complain that they can’t write speech well.  Maybe they agonize over making men sound like men and women like women.  Or maybe they miss the mark when it comes to teen slang.  Or maybe all their Elizabethans sound like Valley Girls–or worse Victorians.  It’s a common sticking place for many writers.

Any book about writing creatively contains a chapter on dialogue.  Listen to speech in the wild.  Record and transcribe a conversation.  Go to the mall or the park.  Read good dialogue.  Don’t clutter your speech with stage direction or clumsy backstory, but still propel the story forward.

I’ve never thought much about my dialogue.  I suspect I should.  It stands to reason that not having written it much, I don’t know how to it well.

A brief exchange on a recent episode of New Amsterdam on Fox made me realize how much you could put into a scene with just the spoken word.  An exchange in the servants’ quarters between the master and the coachman quickly uncovers a history of rape and a hint of coming justice.  It wasn’t the first scene in the series of flashbacks, but it could have stood alone with very little more added.

Next time I will be employing the Five Times technique to some dialogue to explore what I can come up with.

Word count: 932
Day 192

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The 200 Day Hump

It is fair to say that a fourth daughter is taking it’s toll on my daily writing habit. When I haven’t been writing short things or bad things or reworking old things, I’ve been writing nothing. While the first three styles don’t conflict with what I do here at 1000 Days that last one directly opposes my goal to write every day. Incidentally I’m not normally pleased by short, bad, or reworked writing.

I didn’t assign this new habit to any particular hour of the day. Initially I wrote in the mornings with the occasional effort falling late in the evening. My longest runs and most interesting content occurred in the early stages when I focused in the morning. Not all the encouragement on the Internet insists on a specifying a time of the day along with their admonishment to write daily. Those that do, put such specifications on par with frequency as part of a successful strategy to form a writing habit. I’ll rededicate the 8 o’clock to 9 o’clock hour to this purpose in order to get over this hump.

Let me make explicit what I feel my be only implicit to some readers. This morning hour isn’t just a range to start in, it will be a duration to write for. Stick around to see what part fails first.

Word count: 221
Day 190