ROW80 – Page 9 – Linda Nelson

For the past few months, I have been trapped in the block writers dread. No matter what I did I couldn’t come up with a single word for my work in progress. I tried stepping away from the file. I threatened to bury the file. Neither of these offered me any peace of mind. Nothing was working for me. The only thing I could do was fret about staring at a blank page before me.

Then one of my comrades from my NHRWA group, Lisa Olech said, “Linda, why don’t you do some plotting. Did you plot your world out yet?”

My answer was no.

So I tried to plot the world. But then it dawned on me, maybe I need to do a lot more research before I can even start the world. I have to get back to the basics of writing what I know.

But I don’t know anything. Or so I thought.

I have a series that is waiting to be finished. I know the characters, I know – sort of – the world of this series (which is more than I know about the other work in progress). And, I know what the inciting incident is to get the next book off the ground floor.

Nope, I still don’t have any kind of word count to report. I have been doing as Lisa O suggested. I’ve been world building with setting sheets and character sheets.

In the meantime, I was sort of wasting my precious writing minutes while browsing around on Amazon, and I couldn’t help but notice Scrivener. I’ve heard a lot of nifty things about this program, but I had never used it before now since I have a windows machine and not an apple. Last year, as far as I knew, Scrivener was only for Macs and not for Windows, but alas, it is now available and I took the trial version.

The plotting Gods have answered my dreams!

Once I loaded the program I immediately found myself being prompted to check out the tutorial. Good Idea!

I had heard Scrivener being complicated to use, and I have to agree, it is. There are so many different features found in this program that I don’t know where to start. I think the best feature is the cork board followed close behind by the note cards. The way the program allows you to have multiple windows open for, say your plots and character cheat sheets without having to move the word processor around to accommodate the extra windows.

The other neat feature this program offers is the fact that when they say you have a 30 day trial they mean it. Trial days do not count the days you do not open the program. It only counts the times the program is opened. The creator of the program must feel pretty confident we will purchase the key code when our time is up.

Do you know what?

I will be getting mine. (Two thumbs up for Scrivener)

ROW80 Check In:

Lisa O will be pleased with me. I have most of the next Orgarlan Saga book plotted out and then some. I scoured through the first two books so that I could make a list of every character appearing in the story, even if they had a very minor part. Then I gave them wants, wishes, and fears.

The neat thing about Scrivener is how you can write in scenes, leaving a short synopsis of each scene on a note card. Then, when you are in the editing mode, you can rearrange these scenes just by click and drag to where you want it to be. Pretty nifty. No more cut and paste while editing. I like that.

With a little bit more of brainstorming, I should be good to go and get writing this story.

How are you doing on your work in progress?

Have you ever tried Scrivener?

Did you like it? Tell me what you did and did not like about the program. I’d love to hear about your experiences. Did it do what you were hoping it would do?

Original image via Bing Creative Commons, courtesy of jobike.it

I like Idioms. I always have. Before now I honestly never gave them much thought and never quite noticed how they can be difficult for a person not from our country to understand them. Some of them, if you took them word for word you would be left wondering, what’s that supposed to mean?

Have you ever twisted them up?

I’m a NCIS fan. I miss seeing Zeva David on the show. She used to mess up the idioms we use all the time in our country. Some might find it annoying, but I always got a big kick out of it. In fact, I like this more than Tony’s constant quotes of movies. These are quirks of character that I have found myself paying attention to more and more since I have begun writing. Some of the best character quarks can be found in the weekly TV series we watch.

For example, Zeva tried to use the haystack idiom. It didn’t come out quite right. This is an example of what she might have come up with; the cat lost its tongue?

When I want to add a little bit of humor to my stories, I try to switch up idioms with my characters. I believe I did this more so in Witch Book than any of my other stories.

In the future, I will be attempting to do this even more.

ROW80 Check in:

Kait is calling for us to look at our goals once again and adjust them if need be.

I think my goals are going to stay somewhat the same.

I need to write as much as possible. It does not matter as to whether it is my blog posts or my work in progress, just as long I am working on something that has to do with writing.

I’m not making word count goals this time around. Instead, I want to make writing time goals as in 90 minutes a day. This can be either plotting, writing, researching, or editing. My words per minute, when it comes to typing, has gotten pretty high since I began in 2010. So, if I’m spending the right amount of time working on the work in progress, I’m sure my word count will reflect this.

I will log my word count on my blog counter once a week instead of daily. This is so I will stop focusing on word count and more on the actual doing of the writing. I’m hoping for a longer novel this time around that will be slightly influenced by The Game of Thrones. Why?

Because I like how in that story, everyone wants something, they all have some sort of secret, and I want to use the secrets and wants for the coming book. Enough! I can’t tell you anymore, or it will spoil the story, besides the part where I will be trying to get most of the cast in this book, even if it is in the mode of a guest appearance.

As you can tell, the plot is pretty much set in motion. I have my inciting incident that has carried over from Witch Book and Aaron and Keja. I even made a rough draft of a map to help me out.

Witch Book was written in 90 days as a first draft. It had a strong plot outline for me to follow. This is one of the most crucial things I need to have in order to write fast.

What about you? How do you go about your writing? Do you plot or punster? Do you use maps or charts? Cast outline or Character sheets or both?

Please share, I’d love to hear about your writing habits.

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