Apparently Ray Bradbury advised beginning writers to try writing one short story per week for a year, rather than trying to tackle a novel first. The idea was that while you might write a bad novel on your first try, it was unlikely you could write 50+ bad stories in a row. I mean, you could, but you’d probably have to make an effort in that direction. And writers hate making that sort of concerted effort. At least I do.
And now I am intrigued with the idea of writing 52 short stories in 52 weeks. In fact, I’ve tried variations on this in the past, with varying degrees of success. I think what appeals to me here is that with only a week per story, I know I’m not going to write something particularly complex or grand, and I like that.
If I decide to go ahead on this, I’ll make an official™ announcement post. I could always end up just playing more Bejewelled 3, though.
When it comes to writing fiction (and specifically fiction), there are two things I like that both Scrivener and Ulysses offer that, perhaps surprisingly, very few other writing apps do. One is nice to have, the other I consider more essential.
A list of scenes that can be re-ordered. Both programs show a list of scenes to the left of the main writing window, acting as containers for scenes/chapters. You can move them around in any order that you want. I rarely move scenes around, but having them visually laid out next to the main editing window helps me get a visual overview of a novel, a case where technology really does offer something you can’t easily replicate going old school with pen and paper (or typewriter).
Indents on paragraphs. This might seem trivial, but hear me out! When I write blog posts like this one, I hit Enter (or Return, for Mac purists) and a new paragraph begins. This can work in fiction, too, though you’ll never see a book printed this way (it would add many more pages and drive up costs on paper books, for one). In paper books and their digital brethren, the first line of each paragraph is indented to distinguish it from the one before. If you use a typical markdown editor, hitting Enter will only start a new line, it won’t add a blank line (WordPress does not use Markdown and is coded to add the blank line automatically). You need to hit Enter twice for that. In fiction, you can have a lot of short paragraphs, such as when there is a back-and-forth dialog between characters. This means you are constantly having to hit Enter twice to properly separate paragraphs and avoid getting what looks like a wall of text. Ulysses cheats by using a modified version of Markdown that allows indents on the first line of a paragraph. Scrivener avoids this entirely by adopting a Word-like WYSIWYG approach.
I could, for example, use Obsidian, a free Markdown editor I am using for notes, to write a novel. There’s even a community plugin called Longform made just for this purpose. But there’s no support for indents, so I’d be doing the double Enter thing, and in my experience it breaks flow just enough to be consistently annoying. Maybe I’ll try again as an experiment on a short story or something, because there are aspects of both Scrivener and Ulysses I don’t like, so finding an alternative to both would be nice.
And for the extra-curious, here are some of the things I don’t like about each:
Scrivener:
Does not handle cloud saves well at all
Cumbersome, ugly and unconventional interface (yes, even on the Mac)
Ulysses:
No Windows version
Requires subscription (I think it’s a great example of how a subscription is great for developers while being a poor value for the user)
Again, both of these things may seem relatively small, but together they add a lot to make the experience of writing fiction a better one for me. And I really can’t think of other writing apps that offer both, which is kind of weird!
What better way to conclude an evening of spamming posts to my blog than to provide a summary of my current state of writing or SOW as I like to call it (starting just now).
I have divided my writing into four categories, each more daring and fancy than the previous!
Category 1: Blog and forum posts Status: Firing on all cylinders
I do this sort of writing every day, without effort and often without thought. Whether it’s posting the latest online gaming bargains on Broken Forum or lamenting my inability to float in water on this here blog, this is the one category that is never wanting for output. Each in its own way helps improve my fiction writing, too, by either simply exercising the writing muscles that may atrophy otherwise or through communal efforts like National Novel Writing Month.
Category 2: The Ferry (2009 NaNoWriMo novel) Status: Like a slow ship steaming along a lazy river
I am slowly working through the second draft of my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel The Ferry. My intention is to do some work on it every day and have it self-published with a decent cover before the end of the year. I will start work on another novel sometime this year, as well.
Category 3: Short stories olde and new Status: Like a car that sat all winter and you wonder if the battery’s dead but hey it’s not, so you may actually get somewhere
On the olde side I am working on cleaning up 30+ short stories with the intention of putting them together into a single volume to self-publish. I have no set timeframe on this and the stories vary in terms of work needed from minimal to ‘maybe this should be buried in the back yard if I had a back yard’. I am also working on new stories as I think of them, as long as they don’t distract from my novel writing. Unless the stories are so super-awesome that they simply must be written. Yeah.
Category 4: Writing exercises Status: Uncertain
I have participated in writing exercises on and off since my days as a callow youth in college when I wrote bad poetry (my specialty) right up to having my own website devoted specifically to the task (which started out nicely but collapsed when I could not keep up the silly pace I had set out for myself). As my last few attempts to gather like-minded people to participate has met with middling success I haven’t done anything of late. I’ve decided on a new approach, which is to semi-regularly challenge myself with a particular exercise, complete it, then invite others to do the same and if they do, more to share and if they don’t I’ve already done my bit on keeping myself challenged and engaged.
Since it was just recently reprinted ans I missed it back in the day, I read Majestic, Whitley Strieber’s ‘true fiction’ account of the Roswell Incident. It’s partially epistolary in nature, as some chapters are told directly from the memoirs of the (fictitious) character of Will Stone, an ex-CIA officer who was deeply involved in the Roswell crash recovery and subsequent cover-up and who ultimately confesses the secrets of what happened to a reporter for The Bethesda Express (in 1989, the year the novel was originally published). The remaining chapters are told from the first person perspective of the reporter as he recounts the stories he is told and the material he uncovers in his research.
The story starts out fairly grounded (ho ho) but as it moves beyond the initial discovery of the crashed disk it gets progressively weirder, with Strieber projecting the behaviors of the ‘visitors’ from his book Communion onto the aliens. Said visitors go on to seriously screw around with the minds and bodies of several people, some of them actual historical figures. The government stuff is handled believably, with everyone up to the president appropriately freaked by the potential an alien invasion could have — and the orders to both shoot first and cover up the whole thing not only works perfectly for conspiracy theorists, it’s plausible as something the government would probably do in such a situation.
My biggest disappointment with the story is probably in regards to the details of what is found. There are several scenes with scientists and military men gathered to discuss findings and propose strategies but the emphasis is clearly on the military side of things, leaving a lot of potentially interesting bits on the alien technology only hinted at.
Still, this is a short and breezy read. For those looking for a (fictional) take on Roswell, it may be worth checking out. Just be prepared for more emphasis on trippy happenings and less on government shenanigans as you get further in