Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: novels (Page 2 of 2)

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.

A Place for Everything (and everything in its place)

January 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments

In this final week before I embark on a new novel, I’m working to lay out a trajectory—get a sense of where I’m going and how I’m going to get there. Problem is, in ways, I don’t have much.

This project is different from others in that it’s grounded in place. Setting has never been a strength of mine, although I can’t claim I’ve given it due attention. Typically my settings amount to “nondescript city,” and outside passing references (to the weather, or traffic patterns at rush hour, or the bar where all the underage kids go to drink) it doesn’t come up. This, though … this is (literally) another story.

Several months ago, I read China Miéville’s The City & The City. We follow Inspector Tyador Borlú, a resident of the fictional European city of Besźel, which is mixed in with the city of Ul Qoma. Both occupy the same geographic space, more or less, with areas that are wholly one or the other and areas that are “crosshatched” blends of both, but they are politically separate, complete with a sort of border security and a customs office one must pass through to legally cross into the other city. Without this setting, the story (a murdered girl found dumped in a lot) becomes generic; with it, the story is deepened and complicated. Enriched. The City & The City could not take place in Anytown, Midwestlandia, or be transplanted to London; its development is predicated upon the complexities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, to the point where the cities become more than a simple backdrop.

So what of my upcoming project? Without going into details—something I don’t like to do before getting a first draft down—I can say that the story, like The City & The City, relies on location in an active sense. At least, it will, once I come up with it.

A Novel Idea (because nobody has used that pun before)

December 8, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I call myself (i.e., have come to accept being called by others) the tiniest writer, but my writing tends not to be tiny. (I have talked about this some in the past.) Most of the projects I take on with excitement are novels, as opposed to short stories, and a few years ago when I experimented with screenwriting, I did much more with full-length screenplays than shorts.

I’m not a novel-writing expert. I’ve never sold or published a book, and although I’ve finished several drafts—both first drafts and revisions—I’ve never felt like a project was really and truly complete (although from what I hear, it’s possible I never will). Still, I have finished several drafts, so that bumps me a step ahead of other aspiring novelists who have shoe boxes (or, I suppose, computer files) full of first chapters and nothing else.

I’ve been talking to a writer friend recently about doing our own -NoWriMo—the write-a-novel-in-a-month deal. She’s made a couple novel attempts in the past, but she always loses direction/momentum/something part way. She asked about my preparation process, which got me thinking about it in specific terms, trying to articulate it.

One difficulty I have in explaining this is that my drafting process is often sprawling, in a sense. I can finish a draft in relatively short order, but I often find a deep structural or conceptual flaw with it during the revision process and end up setting it aside for anywhere from months to years. My most recent project is a reworking of one I first drafted in 2008, and perhaps four years is the magic period, because in 2010 I re-envisioned a novel from 2006. This is how a lot of my writing goes—I go through multiple iterations before settling into a final form—and as a result, it’s hard for me to point to one outline or preparation process, because I draw from multiple processes.

I was able to point to a few techniques I’ve used, sometimes in combination, that have been useful in helping me develop direction so that I can progress through the first draft without losing momentum. I find that this—momentum—is the most important factor for me in determining whether a novel gets written or not.

I need to start coming up with a concept for our small scale -NoWriMo, tentatively slated for February. As such, I think my next several entries will be dedicated to presenting each of these approaches and testing some of them out.

Transitions: felonies, decomposing corpses, and love

June 10, 2012 / / 1 Comment

This March, I had the opportunity to attend the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Chicago. One session was called The Long and Short of It: Navigating the Transition between Writing Novels and Short Stories, featuring Bruce Machart, Hannah Tinti, Melanie Thon, Erin McGraw, and Kevin Wilson. While some of the panelists’ remarks were less helpful than others (as a writerly friend points out, if trusting our instincts was enough, we would be successful writers already), some had interesting perspectives. Wilson, for instance, suggested a short story is stealing a car and crashing it into a tree, whereas a novel is stealing that same car but resisting the urge to crash it.

This transition—novel and short story—has always vexed me. I remember becoming serious about writing in fifth grade, coming home from school every day and sitting down at my family’s computer, listening to the same Dar Williams CD on repeat and eating Gardetto’s and writing for some indeterminate span of time, and even then, I was writing an eleven-year-old’s version of a novel. It ended up around two hundred pages, give or take. I entered it in our local 4-H fair’s fiction category. The year after that, they instituted a ten-page limit (at which point I took the first chapter of my new novel project, single-spaced, and shrunk the font down until it fit in ten pages, thus driving them to institute further restrictions).

I have, as far back as I remember, preferred novels to short stories, as a reader and a writer. Sometimes I think I know the reasons for this, and sometimes I don’t, but it’s pretty consistent.

The problem is, short stories are a practical form. Looking ahead to MFA programs, I recognize that stories tend to be stronger samples than novel excerpts, and it’s much easier to publish in journals than it is to publish a novel, making short stories a faster way to begin building a writerly resume.

This transition, then, is one I would like to learn to navigate. I can appreciate a good short story, but I have never fallen in love with a short story the way I have with select novels. Even the best short stories don’t have the same payoff for me, which I suspect is why I have trouble getting really excited about them.

Right now, I’m between projects. I have a loose concept for a possible short story collection, but I don’t yet love it like I’d hoped I would (though this could be due to a lack of clarity about the project as much as anything else). I got coffee with a friend today to discuss my paralysis. At one point, I remarked that I had once known how much force it takes to bite off your tongue but couldn’t remember.

“That,” my friend said, “is what you should be writing about. You know all these weird things—you should have a collection called Weird Fucking Shit.”

The title might not be a winner, but it’s a fair point. We each have a unique set of interests and passions and perspectives we bring to the page (or keyboard) with us, and we do ourselves no favors when we don’t take advantage of them.

I don’t know what I’m going to write next. This friend suggests a story about a body farm, so perhaps I’ll follow that. I want to be able to love short stories to the point I honestly want to write them, as opposed to viewing them as a necessary exercise, like an audition tape or application essay; I just haven’t found out how to develop that. Maybe body farms are the way to go. After all, who doesn’t love a good body farm?

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