January, 2010

The Pale Ones are now in Scrivener and I’m faced with the task of organising the scenes and getting to grips with the story again.

Since the end of nano I’ve done very little fiction writing. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I picked up quite a bit more ‘work for hire’ than I normally do and that kept me busy with nonfiction.

But the Pale Ones are nagging. They want their story told and I want to tell it. So I need to get back on track and figure out where we go from here.

Scrivener does make the task of importing a WIP easy. Previously I was using yWriter, and while it’s a great writing tool, it doesn’t quite do what I want or present the work in the way I want it. So the first task was to get the POs out of yWriter and into Scrivener. Simplicity itself. Both programmes behaved perfectly. YWriter exported neatly into .rtf, and Scrivener picked it up effortlessly when asked to do so.

I ended up with a very long single file in Scrivener, which seeing as I’m working in scenes, was no good at all. Scrivener promises that breaking up long files is a simple matter, and it is. Just put the curser in the file where you want to the break and tell Scrivener to make the break. Everything before the break is put into into its own little scene section, and everything beyond the break stays together in the long file. You can select text at the beginning of the break to use as the scene title which makes later identification much easier. In a matter of minutes I’d run through the whole 60k odd word count and recreated the scene sections.

My next task is to organise my Scrivener index cards on the corkboard. I have scenes out of sequence, scenes I no longer need because of changes further on in the story, and scenes which, frankly, just aren’t doing the job they were supposed to do.

I’ve got to pin down my ‘sentence lites’, (Think Sideways jargon), or should that be ’sentences lite?’ and relearn/rethink my story arc. I’ve been away from the story for long enough to have forgotten a lot of what I’ve written which is both good and bad. Good because I can read it back with a fresher eye, and bad because it feels jut a bit like someone else’s story and I’m half afraid that when I try to get reacquainted with it I won’t like it anymore.

Hopefully Scrivener is going to make my task easier. Apart from the normal frustrations of learning a new programme, (and an irrational fear that by clicking buttons and experimenting I’m going to break either my story or Scrivener) my first few days with it have only made me more glad to have it.