↓
 

The PolyBlog

My view from the lilypads

  • Home
  • Life
    • Family (all posts)
    • Health and Spiritualism (all posts)
    • Learning and Ideas (all posts)
    • Computers (all posts)
    • Experiences (all posts)
    • Humour (all posts)
    • Quotes (all posts)
  • Reviews
    • Books
      • Master Reading and Review List (by Author)
      • Book Reviews List (by Date of Review)
      • Book Reviews (all posts)
      • PolyWogg’s Reading Challenge
        • 2023
        • 2022
        • 2021
        • 2020
        • 2019
        • 2015, 2016, 2017
    • Movies
      • Master Movie Reviews List (by Title)
      • Movie Reviews List (by Date of Review)
      • Movie Reviews (all posts)
    • Television
      • Television Premieres (by Date of Post)
      • Television (all posts)
      • Master TV Season Reviews List (by Title)
      • TV Season Reviews List (by Date of Review)
  • Writing
    • Writing (all posts)
  • Goals
    • Goals (all posts)
    • #50by50 – Status of completion
    • PolyWogg’s Bucket List, updated for 2016
  • About Me
    • About ThePolyBlog.ca
    • Privacy Policy
    • Subscribe
    • Contact Me
    • WP colour choices
    • PolySites
      • ThePolyBlog.ca (Home)
      • PolyWogg.ca
      • AstroPontiac.ca
  • Andrea’s Corner

Tag Archives: organize

Playing with Scrivener

The PolyBlog
September 6 2021

As an aspiring writer, I confess there’s a certain degree of desire created in me when I see these flashy programs that are designed to help the new writer. Just as books about writing are great ways to procrastinate from actually writing, so too are these great tools ways to pretend you’re writing without actually writing.

Lawrence Block’s take on early writing mirrors some of my own experience. When you’re starting out, and finding the idea of a novel a bit daunting, it isn’t uncommon to turn to tips and tricks, and there is no more common myth in writing than that of the “correct way” to get organized. Whether it is a novel or a screenplay, there is a lot of advice out there that revolves around index cards.

Generally speaking, what this means is that you are going to do an outline of some sort for your novel or screenplay, prepare lots of little index cards around various scenes or perhaps character profiles, and as you go, you’ll likely want to put them on a bulletin board with pushpins so you can move them around at will until you’re gotten to a point where you say, “Eureka! That’s my story!”. Then you sit down and start writing.

Tools like Scrivener and others are designed with these “plotters” and “outlines” in mind, particularly as they frequently include extra tools that allow you to create similar outline cards or even a whole separate outline, move scenes around, adjust entire orders to novels by chapter, if you want or need to do so. Sure, you can do it in Word manually, but how efficient is THAT? Right?

Enter the software solution. Basically, the various tools out there including Scrivener are essentially wordprocessing programs tweaked out the wazoo to be of use to the writer. All of it seamlessly pulled together into a single program. As noted, you can write your manuscript in Word, but lots of people like a single tool where you can store your research, tab around to various tools, etc. Others prefer separate collections of tools, like Word for writing, maybe OneNote to keep their research, maybe something like PowerPoint for outling, etc. Scrivener’s approach promises that in addition to the “single” file for your work-in-progress (WIP), you can also “group” a bunch of files together like a project manager / file manager. If you open the project, you open the files all together. You can keep separate docs for all the chapters, or a single doc for the whole doc but separate ones for research. Up to you. It’s a bit more like a database interface in front of your wordprocessing interface. Word doesn’t do that — while you can group files together in a single folder, Word treats them as generally single unrelated files.

I don’t think I particularly NEED Scrivener, but there are some tools I want to play with in a physical form and I’d rather have it all available electronically in the short term. It looks a bit like the classic index card / bulletin board / pushpin model, and I found a discount code for the software, so here we are.

Starting the tutorial

I know, I know, I’m losing all credibility here. I’m actually going to do the formal tutorial. Almost as bad as reading an instruction manual instead of just winging it. Sheesh.

I also confess that I really like the approach of the tutorial which is that instead of a series of videos or separate documents, the tutorial has you make the changes directly to the tutorial materials. The same doc you are reading is the same doc you are editing. If you want to undo, you easily can; if you want to start over, you can do that too with a fresh document.

The three areas of Scrivener seem pretty straightforward, similar in many ways to working in Microsoft PowerPoint. The left side is the navigation for the table of contents with folders and docs that can next; the main screen is for editing; and there is a collapsible third screen that lets you write a simple synopsis or notes for each doc you have in the navigation window…more or less, it gives you two windows to add fairly basic meta information for that file/section. There are other sub-pages to the meta sidebar, but not sure how much of it that I will use.

Overall, going through the binder features, there are some nomenclature issues that I bet a lot of new writers end up agonizing over, such as the ability to convert between folders and files i.e., convert a file into a folder or a folder into a file. Neither sound particularly useful in the tutorial, so I probably won’t use any of them. And perhaps that’s part of my advantage. I already know what my writing process generally looks like and what looks useful or not.

One limitation I see, the inability of the “draft” folder to have anything other than text files, seems a bit annoying. I can see a situation or two where it might be nice to include a research file or two, such as a PDF or image, and just have it dump out when working. Sure, I can embed it in a text file, but if you can add them to other sections, why not here too? Perhaps it’s a safety net to prevent people from having multiple pieces that mess up a final manuscript. Personally, I’d prefer a warning if/when the final manuscript is done that those files can’t work in the final version rather than banning them as you go. Minor, but a bit annoying.

Some other random thoughts in the tutorial

I tried the rest of the sections, some were interesting, but most weren’t.

  • Inspector options to get to the various meta data was of limited use in the sample. It does have status elements and labels that might be useful at some point, allowing you to “tag” your docs or create your own “to do” list basically, but otherwise, seems more like a single use function.
  • Bookmarks seems like a useful option though simply because it also gives you a preview of the other doc…so, for example, I could bookmark the three character profiles I have for Able, Baker and Charlie and be able to quickly reference them on screen without having to go back to the other section of the doc to do it.
  • Snapshots seems good for being able to manage editing versions, but the power also reflects a high degree of complexity. Instead of “auto snapshots” or autobackups, it is doing it when you manually think to do it. In other words, you obviously have to remember to do a snapshot before making lots of changes. Not sure there’s a better way, but it’s also not as convenient as some other tools out there.
  • I like the composition mode, i.e., the distraction-free mode. I changed the colours to a simpler background, I find black way too harsh to type against.
  • I’m a bit surprised the corkboard doesn’t seem more intuitive. I’m not sure if I’m not seeing the tools I was expecting, or the workflow is simply different since I’m reviewing an existing document as opposed to starting with a blank doc and doing outline, but I expected simpler colour coding and a bit more ability to do things like add arc indicators, thematic scenes, or well, “beats”. But there is a screenwriter mode I haven’t seen addressed yet, so maybe I’ll get more in that.
  • While compiling seems relatively straight-forward, I’m WAY far away from that need yet. I’m a little worried that, as with Word, you’re better off getting your formatting structure right from the start so that you don’t mess it up later and have to try and OVERRIDE settings, likely leaving a lot of crud behind. Word is notorious for that. But I don’t see an alternative for now. It seems like the compiling allows settings to handle everything, I’ll likely figure out more incremental usage as I go (early formatting, mid-process formatting, and final formatting).
  • I’m fascinated by the targets, but not for the reason you might think. I work in performance measurement in my day job, and as such, I’m often curious about how writers measure their “success” or just performance. Lots of writers talk about wordcounts as their target, and that is certainly the case with the annual NaNoWriMo desire to complete a novel in a month. But that’s not the way I’m wired for writing. As others have suggested, often they go by scenes or pages, not words. And never characters. It’s nice to “have”, but I don’t know that I’ll “use” it. Not even for session targets, I don’t think. Hard to say.
  • Ah-hah! I figured out script-writing mode. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, although it should have been obvious. I was looking for the corkboard layouts similar to the Beats approach from Save the Cat and Syd Field. Of course, it was more about actual writing than the outline method. Doh!
  • I like the name generator tool, although it may take some time to get used to it! I gave it a test run with the parameters I already have for one of my characters, just to see if it came up with the name I’m using, and it did. So I guess it works. 🙂

And that’s it. I still have lots of work to do to get it set up for my various works-in-progress, but it’s a start. Oh, and I have to test it to see what it gives me for backups to the cloud.

But it seems decent so far. I might want other themes though…

Posted in Writing and Publishing | Tagged computers, goals, organize | Leave a reply

Today I choose to reboot my to-do list (TIC00056f)

The PolyBlog
September 21 2020

If you’ve read my blog more than once, you probably tripped over posts of mine about goals. Including the goal of TODAY I CHOOSE, which is about making conscious choices each day and recognizing the effort of doing so rather than simply drifting along. All the way back to the late 1990s, I’ve been anal about goal-setting, tracking, performance, making progress, etc. I’ve worked my way through Harvard Daytimers, personally-designed schedulers and to-do lists, bullet journals. I have tried dozens of electronic tools for tracking tasks, from the best one ever (Palm Pilot Task Manager) to some pretty awful ones … Continue reading →

Posted in Goals, To Be Updated | Tagged goals, organize, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

My Latest Posts

  • Deadlines, dominoes, and delaysJanuary 30, 2023
    As most people who have read this blog from time to time already know, I’m big on time management techniques, various options for to-do lists and tracking tasks. I like to set ambitious annual goals, and then monitor them throughout the year. Some years turn out better than others. Whereas many people set resolutions and … Continue reading →
  • Curated: We Need To Talk About Professional Jealousy – Electric LiteratureJanuary 20, 2023
    I occasionally like to share online articles that I like, and you’ll see sporadic posts entitled “Articles I Like” throughout the blog. But honestly, Curated is probably a more accurate title. I recently found an article by Benjamin Schaefer on the website Electric Literature, although I was led there by ThePassiveVoice website. The article is … Continue reading →
  • Schrodinger’s computer purge (part 1 / 3)January 15, 2023
    So, I’m a techno-wannabe-geek with elements of hoarding in my DNA. I find it hard to dispose of working computer parts, long after I’ve outgrown the need for them. Some “saves” are practical and some are not. And like Schrodinger’s cat, my computer purge is both real and theoretical at the same time. A. Network … Continue reading →
  • Some more reading ideas…January 15, 2023
    Chapters/Indigo has their Reading Challenge for the year too. They do it up like a bingo card, but the headings are: I’ll have to go through some of the links to see if there’s anything I want to add to my long list. 🙂
  • 11 years, a gig platform, and a chequeJanuary 13, 2023
    Somewhere in this universe, if life after death exists, my father is rolling over in his grave. Or rolling his eyes, shrugging his shoulders, throwing up his hands…whatever the ghosts do when they see their descendants doing stuff that they think is ridiculous. And it is NOT my father’s fault. Let me be clear. He … Continue reading →

Archives

Categories

© 1996-2021 - PolyWogg
↑