Vampy Black Project: Organization

One thing I love about Scrivener 2 is the ability to cut up a chapter into subsections, group those together, and move them around. We ran into an issue at the end of Darthaniel's Vampy Black Project, which I am working on him with, where the end of the book did not feel like it flowed as well as we would have liked. There was nothing wrong with the text, it just seemed like the tension and drama could be increased and we just couldn't place our finger on it.

Last night I tried mixing things up. I split chapters up and combined them in a logical fashion where the action in each built upon each other. We had a structure where we had start-to-stop chapters, where a situation would begin and resolve all in the same chapter. They were great for blocking out what happened, but when they were placed together, they didn't flow together naturally, and I got the feeling I spent too much time away from one character while we read the next.

I don't like it when you get the feeling you need to skim to get back to the character you really care about, and that is what I felt was happening. Even though, yes, everything was great in the individual chapters, in the order they were, I just did not get that sense of urgency and equal importance.

So I cut the few ending chapters we were working on apart into logical chunks, and reshuffled them.

It worked very well. The same text was broken apart at logical breakpoints and pauses in the action, and then worked back together so the end of the book starts working very well as an interlaced, real-time story. Each chapter still has a single point-of-view, but the chapters flip characters rapidly as the end of the book draws towards a crescendo, and you get this sense of tension that I felt was lacking how the work was organized before.

You just don't get that organizational ability in other programs and traditional word processors, which is why I just love Scrivener so much for writing and these final editing phases. I can block out a rough draft anywhere, and preferably on a distraction free device, but when it comes time to layer, check, and craft structure - Scrivener is the place to go. Although I have written books in Scrivener from draft to release, and it does that well too.

So the next time you feel something isn't working right it may not be the story at fault, it could just be organization, flow, and presentation. If you cut things up, reshuffle paragraphs, and change the flow you just may see something you hadn't before. You may discover that the problematic feeling you had was just how things were ordered instead of the words themselves.

iA Writer and Narration Tense

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ia-writer/id775737590 

I love this app. If you have a Mac, iOS, or Android device, it is worth checking out iA Writer. It is one of those "distraction free" writing apps for the Mac and iOS (and they have a version on Google Play for Android), but with one incredible difference.

You can auto-highlight verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions.

You type, and all those pesky verbs are highlighted, and you can check things as you go against your little black book of rules. Now, I love Scrivener for its organizational magic, but when I am in the down and dirty of editing and ironing out verb tense, nothing else comes close to this app.

Nothing.

I narrate in two main styles, a present tense style which I call careful tense, and the standard novel-style past tense. My characters speak in all tenses, so they are free to speak as they wish. There is one overriding rule for careful tense narration, it is that all statements in regards to verbs and times must be true. I can thus narrate like this:

I walk down the street and enjoy the warm weather. Yesterday, I walked down this same street in the rain and got soaked. I will be walking down this street when he leaves tomorrow. I arrive at the bus stop.

Mixed tenses all in the same paragraph with a default present tense-narration, but all statements true in regards to the time they were stated. Some of the statements are in past or future tense, but they relate to facts the narrator is relating to that happened in the past or are expected to happen in the future. If you are doing past-tense narration, you would write the following:

I walked down the street and enjoyed the warm weather. The day before, I walked down this same street in the rain and got soaked. I would be walking down this street when he leaves tomorrow. I arrived at the bus stop.

Present tense assumed the narrator is speaking now, where past tense assumes the narrator is relating events which happened in the past. There is a good reason novel writers use past tense, because switching tense in your narration can be a tricky thing. It is easier to stick to the past tense throughout, and ignore the present tense unless a character is using it in dialog.

I am using traditional past-tense narration for my CLS Romance Project since it is a traditional fairy-tale type story, so I need iA Writer to double-check my verb tense. It helps a great deal, since I can zero in on my verbs and check each one to make sure it is using the correct form of past-tense, and ensure I don't fall into those "had been" and "have been" issues when I am supposed to be speaking in the past tense.

I love writing in the present tense though, or at least my careful tense style. I love the books written in present tense and how they feel, like 50 Shades and the Hunger Games, there is just this immediate and gripping style when a character-as-narrator says:

He grabs me and kisses me.

You are right there, and it is happening now.

Now I will say if you do any amount of mixed writing, where some of your books are narrated in the past tense and others are narrated in the present, you are setting yourself up for disaster. It is always the best to stick to the style you love and get used to that, because once you start switching narration modes, you will find yourself slipping past tense verbs into your present tense narration, and the other way around.

But if you are learning this stuff, trying to develop a past or present tense style, or find yourself constantly tripping over verb tense, get a Mac, iOS, or Android device (sorry Windows), and check out this app. If you need it for proofreading, cleaning up excessive adverbs, or just a double-check of your inner editor's sanity, check out this app.

Highly recommended.

A World Without Desktop Apps?

What value do desktop applications bring to the world?

I find myself sitting here and taking stock of the desktop apps I need, and the ones I really don't.

I like Scrivener and that brings value to my work and what I do. Photoshop is another. I am a creative professional, and there are some applications I prefer to work with and that make my life easier with what I do. Are there tablet and mobile replacements for these programs? Yes, there are. They are not as a capable, and they would make me change the way I do things, but I could survive as a creative professional without them.

For the general public, the answer to this question is much easier. You could survive without desktop applications altogether in today's world. There are mobile apps that create MS-Word files and Excel-style spreadsheets, and some that do so very well. There are image-editing programs that could put together a good-looking image or edit a photo.

And Scrivener and Photoshop have versions out or coming out for mobile.

Games are another huge desktop application, multi-gigabyte creations that reside on my hard drive should I find the time to spend with them. They are, really, one of the last reasons I maintain a desktop or Windows laptop.

Some of the most pointless desktop apps out there are primarily used to support other desktop apps, or somehow do something the basic OS should be doing for you without a major hassle. They exist just to perpetuate the desktop world, and they have no use or real function outside the desktop model. I don't need ZIP archive programs, FTP programs, file managers, or anything else of the sort on a tablet - I really shouldn't - but I admit they are once and a while nice to have things. On a tablet, I don't see the need, really, and there is always a desktop around for these types of files and functions.

Content. The future world should focus on content. The OS should be focused on a small space for running itself, and the rest should be content space. The OS should organize things and take into account whatever storage you hook up to it. Everything should optionally upload to the cloud, and things I buy from the same company should be stored up there for free.

I like devices that handle all the messy stuff for me. What app should open my books and movies? I don't care, they should just open. I expect a choice in some cases, and with other devices, I don't, but it is nice to have an option to set it.

As a creative professional, I cannot escape my desktop apps just yet. I feel that day is getting close though. In some ways, I will miss the old world, but in others, I won't.

Google has come a long way to replacing a lot of desktop apps with their online office suite. The minute Google makes a Photoshop replacement I will be one step closer to freedom. Yes, owning desktop apps is a huge benefit, but it is also comes at a huge cost. Not having to own install disks that are tied to a particular version, not having a hard drive and machine to install them on (which they get tied to), and not having to worry about a physical machine tied to one location is a huge benefit.

Things are changing again. While I like having the freedom of choosing how and where my data is stored, I also greatly appreciate the software as service model. This is a place where Amazon's model of how things are done falls way behind Google's. I love Amazon's content ecosystem, but I equally love Google's work ecosystem.

But...content. Our documents, images, and creations are the content we produce. To have an ecosystem that elevates our content on the same level as what we buy and consume is what I would love. To be able to click into an book cover I am working on as easily I can a movie on Amazon is my dream for how things should work. To be able to group things together in multiple ways, my stuff, their stuff, Noir, film, books, sad things, happy things, and be able to find them all, mine or theirs, is how I want things to work.