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I use a combination of programs. Currently the workflow includes Liquid Story Binder, yWriter5, Scrivener, and Yarny. I did not deliberately craft this system I just kind of stumbled into it. It works for me but I’m not sure it’ll do anyone ELSE any good.
When it comes to writing I use Liquid Story Binder, because it lets me be all over the place. If there’s a tool I need to hash out a snarled up scene and move on odds are good LSB’s got it. I use it for all re-writes as well.
Now, that’s the writing process. Once I get past complete rewrites the mess I leave in the program is rather terrifying and not useful when my brain clicks into analytical mode. From there I move things into yWriter5 (this is a new step, it used to get shuffled into scrivener and vain attempts to make myself organize in LSB were used.) I strip out the world-related information that isn’t needed and put it into Scrivener for consistency checks and other referencing and use yWriter5 to do the analysis and in depth revision. I’ll work back and forth between yWriter and LSB, rewriting sections in LSB and then switching back to yWriter. (I’m in this stage of the process right now with one story.) I can useually do a scene in yWriter, but not a complete section.
While doing the above I’m also building my references in Scrivener. I can’t compose readily in Scrivener, something about it slows me up too much, and I haven’t isolated what I’m tripping over enough to elaborate on it. I have found the program priceless for world building and even more for world TRACKING. My worlds tend to be very detailed and my inner consistency nut is rather mean and aggressive, so having these details readily accessible once I get out of the mad drafting rush is critical. I haven’t found anything to beat Scrivener for actually FINDING my information again.
Yarny is my go to ‘I need to jot something down and am away’ location.
@Linda Adams: Many of the people I have encountered who ask about organizational things are at the point where they’re using something similar to your steno pads and it’s not working for them. They’re ready for that to be a part of the answer not the complete answer, so when they encounter that as a complete answer the response, emotionally, is ‘I do that already and it’s not working’. Most of the ones I’ve met haven’t really made the leap to the fact they need to cobble together their own bits and pieces to work for them.
I believe the phrase someone from the Nano site used is this: Rights should revert before banckrupcy can be filed.
That way they’re not assets of the publishing company at the time of filing. I am not lawyer so, bucket of salt and all that good guff.
There’s a (free) little program called Inspiration Pad Pro from a company called ‘NBOS’ that has a very simple scripting language (basically you just have to build the table if you don’t want to do anything fancy like weight things.) They’re a gaming software company, so it’s geared towards varying levels of code savvy from “This is a computer it will not bite you.” to “yes… alright… cool, you rewrote our program would you please just upload that nifty 9 point adventure tables thingy you did so other people can use it?” The kinds of things that are useful to Dungeon Masters are also useful to authors I have discovered. Except characters are more cooperative than players.
http://www.nbos.com/products/ipad/ipad.htm
Note: When I say simple I mean simple. There’s a one line call to learn then Table: Name followed by a ‘list of things you want it to roll from’ each on their own line.
First I’d like to apologetic, I didn’t mean to start a debate of this magnitude. It seems I, also, must clarify what I intended. For me very rarely have I been able to forget that, in the end, I am writing to communicate my ideas to someone else. It shapes, at some level, what I write from the word go. I understand that this is a different process than most people here follow. I wasn’t trying to convince anyone, I was simply attempting to explain my view.
I am a bard and a storyteller. It affects how I approach writing, and very often what advice (the topic of conversation) that is useful and not useful, and what I can offer others. My apologies for the confusion.
I’m rather different in view than many here. I am a storyteller at heart, writing is the medium I most commonly use to tell my stories though I use others from poetry to music to art to actual live storytelling. I mention it because storytelling seems to have a rather different outlook than writing. The biggest difference this makes to me is this: I do not understand the ‘I write just for me’ attitude and ‘write for yourself’ advice. Yes, I, myself, have stories to tell; however, telling them is an act of communication. The purpose of these stories is to convey an idea from one person (me) to another (the audience). Everything I do is crafted around achieving the impact I desire and accurately conveying the concepts I’m attempting on the person with whom I am communicating. They may like what I did, or not. That’s a different issue. So in one sense I deeply understand ‘the audience is everything’ attitude. The greatest concept in the world, with the most perfect structure and best plot points is worthless if its intended recipients cannot understand what is being told to them. By the same token I do the audience no service by telling them a story other than the one I intent to tell them.
Perhaps I am too steeped in the historical reasons for story telling (to convey history, law, culture, and moral lessons). My hobby is medieval recreation which is where I do the majority of my verbal storytelling.
In the end all advice breaks down to three things.
1) have I properly understood what the advice is intended to convey.
2) Was the advice actually given in an accurate context?
3) Does it actually apply to what I am trying to do?Any piece of advice will be worthless. It will also be priceless, the question is when.
Actually I think I can see what they’re saying. I don’t think they’re saying ‘have an equal amount of each’ rather ‘have an appropriate amount of each’. If a story is all dialogue you’ve got people talking in a white box room. If it’s all exposition you lack the interaction. It may seem obvious but there are people who leave you wondering who the heck these people are, why they’re talking, what world they’re on, and why we care. And there are others who leave you wondering when they’re going to get on with the story and why they didn’t just write a wiki about the world instead (You know… the authors that do 4 pages on the nifty technology that all you need to know is its fast and it goes boom because well… high pace battle sequence. Or do 11 pages on the background of a minor character you never see again). As you say, what that ‘appropriate amount’ is depends on the story. “It’s slow here do I have too much exposition?” “This section keeps confusing my Betas, do I need more exposition and where?”
Most of the ‘bad writing advice’ I’ve run into is usually soundbyted out of the original meaning. “Write what you know,” is another one that is routinely abused. When push comes to shove it’s something we all do and need to do. “Your brain has knowledge… make use of it.” No more no less. The problem is less the actual advice, but people parroting advice they don’t understand. Murphy’s Law takes over from there.
I am a story teller by nature, in the old school sense, where stories were intended to teach. (Or as they said in ‘Brave’ “Legends are Lessons”.) I have tales in my head and sometimes I don’t know what the legend is, much less the lesson until it is down in front of me. Sometimes those stories are songs. Sometimes they are drawings. Sometimes they are poems. Sometimes the lesson comes first and the tale unfolds around it. If I do not tell them who will? And I enjoy it. I enjoy the craftsmanship. I enjoy when someone remembers a tale I tell, whatever the medium. I enjoy verbal story telling because I can see the impact my words have and adjust the story as I go for greatest impact. I enjoy the written word because it allows more scope than a spoken attention span usually manages. I enjoy getting better at it each time.
I am a professional Geologist (currently working in Seismic Processing). What kinds of things would people like to know about geology? or would a general overview be a good start point?
~Amber
When I was there, (Left in ’08) there wasn’t a limit per say, but that’s because none of the units I dealt with had skype officially. If you were somewhere that there was internet (a big if) and had your own computer with you (another big if) and the bandwidth wasn’t hosed (the biggest if of all! There were times when bandwidth was so low on base you couldn’t open two text based web pages at once without getting booted for exceeding bandwidth limitations and 20kb/second was fast and rare.) You could skype as long as you weren’t on duty.
The bases in Bagdad would have had more resources than most places elsewhere. Later in the Iraq War there were more resources available than earlier in the war. The unit would have more bandiwidth than the individual but the tended to prefer to hand out phone cards by the gross or let you use the unit phones than skype because computers were more limited than phones. I don’t know what arrangements the field units had. It was STRONGLY encouraged that soldiers have no pattern to how they called and that they NOT call home every day, because it was too easy for something to happen and communication to be cut to back home for days on end, even if nothing had happened to the individual in question, and being too habitual about it would freak the family back home out when the expected communication didn’t come.
