Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Author: Alice Thomsen (Page 6 of 10)

Scrivener: Worth It, Worth It, Worth It

July 12, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Scrivener. What can I say about Scrivener?

Well, in short, it kicks the collective ass of the other word processors I’ve used.

I first learned of Scrivener in October of 2010. I had come across a glowing review of a program called Liquid Story Binder and was intrigued enough that I decided to download the 30-day trial. This decision was followed by the Mac-user heartbreak of Windows-only software. Dejected, I searched for a Mac-friendly version and stumbled upon Scrivener. I was still hurting from Liquid Story Binder’s rejection; I downloaded the Scrivener trial, prepared to be disappointed.

Only then I was not.

I consider myself a novelist at heart, and from a purely logistical perspective, Scrivener makes it much simpler to get a handle on, and then keep track of, that sort of long project. In a traditional word processing program, I’d end up with a couple hundred pages all in one chunk, and if I wanted to navigate between scenes, I could scroll back and forth—or search for “Chapter Three” or a unique phrase. With Scrivener, though, I could organize it differently:

Along the left side, I have different levels of inclusiveness. If I want, I can select “Draft” and see the entire thing. Or I can select a specific chapter, or even a specific scene within a chapter. At the top right is another tool that helps with organization: the index card. This allows me to write a short summary of what occurs in that scene, so that I can look at a cork board visual of a multi-item section:

In that shot, you can also see the colored tabs in the corner, which come from the next box down from the index card editor: labels. In this particular project, I have multiple viewpoint characters, so labeling scenes with their narrator helps me see how that balances out and, if I want, view only the scenes from one character’s perspective. In the box below that are any notes I want to make that don’t need to show up on the index card.

Back on the left, below the actual draft text, is the research folder, where I can take notes and import PDFs, images, video and audio clips, and more:

Essentially, what this all adds up to is one document in one application that does everything I would do in several files in several applications in several levels of folders.

(All those features, by the way, made it very useful for taking notes in class, writing multi-part papers, and organizing my graduate school application materials as well.)

In case you’re wondering, yes, I can import Word documents. And what’s more, I can save my own writing as a Word document—or PDF, rich text, Open Office, and several eBook formats. With Scrivener, I can take a novel and format it for Kindle, including everything from a cover image and author information to a hyperlinked table of contents. This feature does require a bit of trial and error at first to get all the different formatting options set, but it’s worth it.

That’s my rating of Scrivener as a whole. Absolutely 100% worth it. At the moment, it’s $35–45, and it’s worth it. There is a learning curve, and although I’m not someone who typically does tutorials, I recommend the Scrivener one, which is worth it. If you’re part way through a project, or even working on revising a completed draft, transitioning to a new format takes time, but it is—you know where this is going—worth it.

On that repeated note, I’m off to my current novel in progress Scrivener.

Trapped in the Pages

June 5, 2013 / / 4 Comments

In 1973, John Platt published an article called “Social Traps” in American Psychologist. The idea of a social trap is simple enough. From the abstract:

[Platt] Uses the term “social trap” to describe situations like a fish trap, where individuals, organizations, and societies get started in a direction that later proves unpleasant or lethal but difficult to back out of; actions or inactions prompted by self-interest create long-range effects that are to almost no one’s interest.

The easiest illustration is on a personal level (what Platt calls an “individual trap”) where a short-term gain comes with long-term loss. Let’s say I smoke a pack a day. I recognize that my habit has costs—it costs money to buy cigarettes, it costs time to step out and smoke, it costs health, etc. The trap comes in when I realize that, even if I might one day be rewarded for quitting, right now, if I go too long without a smoke, I’ll be punished.

It’s a little like telling someone, “If you walk across the room, I’ll give you fifty bucks,” and then punching them every time they take a step.

Through individual and social traps, we get stuck in all sorts of inefficient, counterproductive routines. It can be small things—the sort of things we might not give much thought. Maybe it’s as simple as taking a long route to work because figuring out a better one would take more time and energy than just going the way we know. I, for instance, have been a Mac user as far back as I can remember, so when it comes to word processing programs, ClarisWorks/Appleworks/Pages have been an individual trap of mine.

How much time and hassle could I have saved over the years if my files were .doc, like everyone else’s? How much easier would it have been to read other people’s work if I could open their files on my computer without worrying about formatting losses? How much better would I be at working with the ubiquitous Microsoft Word if I had learned it from the start, rather than becoming proficient in a less useful, less prevalent program?

Of course, there are costs with pursuing Word at a later stage. The Office Suite costs money, for one, and there’s a learning curve—for a period, I would be less efficient than I am in Pages. Pages is, in its way, sufficient.

Still, I’ve been working on investments. I started using a program called Scrivener a little while ago, and I’m experimenting with other programs. I’m trying to find the most effective, efficient way to go through the different stages of writing, and I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’ll pay a price up front. This is what it takes to break out of the individual trap.

In the next few posts, I’ll be discussing first my experience with Scrivener (spoiler: I love it) and then my explorations into a few other programs: Scapple, for idea mapping, and Aeon Timeline, for timeline tracking. Learning to work with new programs designed for unique functions comes at a price; I’ll aim to decide if these are worth it.

Stay tuned.

The Future

May 26, 2013 / / 1 Comment

So. Let’s do it. Let’s talk about …

Two days ago, with the help of my family, I loaded my old apartment’s contents into a truck and then drove three and a half hours to Muncie, IN. I signed a lease for my new apartment and, with further help, unloaded everything again. Since then, I’ve been unpacking, arranging and rearranging, and making repeated trips to Meijer to buy a new shower curtain (free of claw marks), floor lamp (that doesn’t wobble back and forth), a silverware drawer divider (because my drawers are now wide enough to fit one). That, and frequenting The Cup, because I don’t have internet at home yet.

But there are more important things a few months off.

I’ll be starting in Ball State University’s two-year graduate program in creative writing. Although I was accepted to a couple other programs as well, I picked Ball State for a few reasons:

  • Cathy Day. Last year, I saw her on an AWP panel about midwest gothic as a genre, where she also read a story from The Circus in Winter. Both the story and her thoughts on midwest gothic captured my interest, and my discovery that she was on Ball State’s faculty was the primary reason I applied there in the first place.
  • Funding. Unlike the other programs, Ball State offered me a funding package that gives me the ability to pay for all my expenses without having to take up an outside job. My tuition is covered, and I have a stipend that will give me enough to live on comfortably.
  • Teaching. I earn my funding with a graduate assistantship. My first semester, I’ll be working in the university’s writing center, as well as taking a course designed to help prepare students to teach freshman composition. The next three semesters (and over the summer, if I want) I’ll teach two comp classes of roughly twenty-five students. As much as this intimidates me (given my something-short-of-outgoing nature) I do want to try teaching. It’s one of the obvious day jobs for someone with a creative writing degree, but I figure I should probably find out if I like it before I stake my future livelihood on it. That, and it will give me an appropriate place to correct people’s grammar.
  • The Mascot. While I can’t claim the cardinal is much more innovative than the eagle of my undergraduate institution, I can say this: Charlie Cardinal’s eyes have that special manic look that makes a seed-eating bird as intimidating as it can hope to be.

University events begin August twelfth, so I have some time to get acclimated, get oriented, and, if I’m lucky, even get the gas for my stove turned on. That box mac and cheese isn’t going to boil itself.

I’m going to hack my brain (but I’m not qualified to instruct you as to how to do the same)

May 2, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Not so long ago, I claimed that I would finish out the semester and then give an update on my plans for the future. I still intend to, but for now, a brief digression.

I graduated last Sunday, with a double major in creative writing and psychology. And here’s the thing about undergrad psychology students: we have a tendency to feel more knowledgable than we actually are. This can be handy—if you want something in your life framed in terms of rats in a behavioral psychology lab, for instance, I am your girl—but also dangerous. It’s not so unlike the pre-med student who decides to diagnose friends or go Charlie Bartlett and open up an amateur psychiatry clinic. There’s a sweet spot between total ignorance and sufficient expertise where you know enough to really mess things up, if you’re not careful (even if you try to be).

This is why I say that, when I discuss how I’m going to use psychology on myself in the coming paragraphs, I am not encouraging anyone else to do the same. This is not I earned $50,000 last year working from home, and you can too! (Although really, you should probably be wary of that, too.) This is also why I call it brain hacking. I’m not a qualified life coach or motivational guru, just someone trying to break into somewhere with security about at the level of password1234.

So, with that disclaimer, here’s my plan to hack my brain.

We all know Pavlov and his dogs: ring a bell before you feed the dog and eventually the dog will start to salivate when the bell rings. (Sadly the set-up was not nearly as pleasant for the dogs as one might hope an experiment centered around food would be.) Classical conditioning is all about stimulus pairing.

Something similar to this is useful in setting up routines. Writers talk about their Writing Place, or their Writing Notebook, or their Writing Sweatpants—whatever it is, it’s something that has become linked in their mind to writing, so that the simple act of going there/opening it/putting them on/etc. kicks their brain into writing mode without any conscious effort on their part.


Photo credit: Maria Brundage

This is why I’m very particular about pens, for instance, and having different pens for different situations. I have my general purpose pen, my writing pen, and my revising pen, which is purple rather than the standard red. It’s also why, whenever I embark on a big project, I make a project-specific playlist. Even now, I think of my tenth grade novel whenever I hear A Perfect Circle’s “The Outsider”—but only the version that was on the Resident Evil: Apocalypse soundtrack. If I’d seen the movie first, perhaps that would be different, but as is, that song comes on, and there I am, perched on a window ledge before class, off-brand Discman tucked next to me, working on that old, terrible novel. I can’t claim it makes me drool with desire to return to the project, but there’s still that instant association.

Without applications or final projects tying up my writerly energy, I find myself with time to write on my own terms … and struggling to really commit to it. There’s time to write, sure, but it’s not Writing Time, and I struggle to get “in the groove” in that sense.

The key, I think, is those associations, those triggers. Those things that make you feel, in your gut or salivary glands or whatever, that it’s time to write.

Now that the term and my undergraduate studies are done, I’m wholly responsible for making my schedule. With that and Pavlov in mind, I aim to maximize it. Find all sorts of ways to trigger the “It’s writing o’clock!” impulse. Maybe I’ll even get a bell. Who knows? The future’s full of surprises.

[insert card pun here]

April 13, 2013 / / 5 Comments

After doing months of research, using up all my print credit and then some, submitting thirteen applications, and wishing I at least had some pins and needles to wait on so as to be a little more comfortable, my graduate school plans are taking shape. This fall, I’m going to begin working on a master’s degree in creative writing at Ball State University, home of the cardinals (a.k.a., the cards).

This plan, of course, is predicated upon me completing my undergraduate degree, and that is why this post is so brief. Once I’ve finished my end-of-term work, I’ll go into more detail about where I’m headed with all of this.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Alice Thomsen

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑