There are two weeks left before the end of the month. As of today to be on track with my NaNoWriMo novel progress, I would need to have written:
26,672 words
As of today, I have actually written:
2,557 words
This gives me a word deficit of:
24,115 words
In order to successfully complete NaNoWriMo 2017, I would need to increase my daily input of words from 1,667 words to:
3,388 words
This is actually not an impossible goal. It would require several hours of intense writing every day, though putting in extra time during the remaining four weekend days would help offset that a bit.
The reality is that’s not going to happen. NaNoWriMo has often been the tonic to cure my writing blahs but this year–even with the regular writing group I’ve been going to–it just hasn’t happened. November has been a busy and stressful month, I’ve exercised less, eaten more, and I now seem to have some kind of official fall/winter sinusitis thing going which is making me seriously consider one of those horrible “nasal irrigation” devices because thirty seconds of shoving this weird thing up my nose in exchange for being able to breathe normally has real appeal.
I’d prefer to just be able to breathe normally.
I’m still hoping to kickstart my writing before the end of the month, but I know the only secret is to just make myself do it and the fact that I haven’t is maybe underlining the fact that I just don’t care enough anymore. Maybe all the future holds is blog ramblings and funny cat pictures.
On Day 4 of NaNoWriMo I wrote zero words, going 0-4 for the first four days and leaving me with a deficit of 6,668 words–a positively devilish amount to catch up on (ho ho).
My plan today was to go to the usual write-in at Waves in sunny downtown New Westminster (where during the other 11 months of the year it’s known as, well, The Other 11 Months) and do a good bit of catching up by reviving my unfinished 2013 novel, Start of the World (definitely a working title).
Good news: I did indeed write, putting together 2557 words. This gives me a deficit after five days of 5778 words. If you divide that over the remaining 25 days, I would need to write an additional 231 words per day, which seems pretty easy when looked at this way. So I should be good as long as I keep up a slightly above average pace from here on out.
But here’s the surprise twist: I didn’t work on Start of the World. Instead, I continued work on my 2014 NaNo novel, Road Closed. I added 50,000 words to the current word count total, bringing it to 120,242 words, then started back on it.
I’m not sure if this is the right thing to do, a good thing to do or something else. It is clearly a thing to do because I’m doing it. Tomorrow I’ll decide if I want to keep doing it. I’m not sure there’s 50,000 more words in this novel but you never know. I could channel my inner Stephen King and just not leave out anything at all, writing a kind of complete and uncut edition right from the start. Smothering my inner editor with a pillow. Not killing my darlings, but nurturing them and encouraging them to procreate. And other assorted weird analogies.
Anyway, it was nice to write again.
We had twelve people in attendance, but the table (which mysteriously moves every week) only seats eight, so multiple people had to sit on the floor. I’m betting some of them will arrive earlier next week to indulge in the luxury of writing while sitting in a chair.
I still haven’t written anything but the weekend beckons and it’s my chance to get the proverbial ball rolling on this year’s novel attempt. One might say actually getting some words down at this point would be novel, ho ho.
I kind of wish weekends were three days long, though. It would help. Also helping would be if the goal of NaNoWriMo was, say, 10,000 words. I could churn that out in desperation on the final weekend if I had to.
Not that I’ll need to, mind you. No sir. This weekend (the first weekend) I’m going to catch up on word count (from zero to greater than zero) then keep flying through to victory by the end of the month.
But I’ve settled on an alternate plan, which is to rewrite my failed 2013 novel, which had the awkward working title of Start of the World. I’ll spend time tomorrow mulling and then tomorrow evening I’m going to start writing. I have some ideas.
I can’t say I’m confident in how this will turn out, but I am genuinely interested in tackling this particular unfinished project again, so I have that in my favor.
Also, while I’m not yet changing the description of the novel, I am probably not going to keep the title of Cosmic Tingles. That might work better…elsewhere.
It’s just after 10 p.m. as I type these words and my story progress stands at zero. I have written nothing. The previous two sentences are two more than I’ve written for my NaNoWriMo 2017 project.
If the evening ends with me writing nothing–and that seems rather likely at this point–I will need to double my effort to 3,334 words tomorrow to stay on track. Am I already doomed? Perhaps.
But perhaps not. Maybe in desperation I will find inspiration. Maybe I’ll dig out some old unfinished work and pick up where I left off, the words gushing forth like blood from a skewered artery.
It’s funny how something that only happens once a year can sneak up on you. Or how when you try to think of ideas your brain just seizes up and refuses to even offer up anything, even objectively terrible stuff.
But I will ponder tonight, evaluate my back-up plan and make a decision tomorrow on how to proceed.
Pays off in the sense that I have no idea what I’m doing. Which isn’t much of a payoff. The irony is I just finished a book a few weeks ago (Story Genius) that specifically lays out, in great detail, how to plan out a novel.
For NaNoWriMo 2017 I have made it as far as the “I think I may write a novel” stage.
I have gotten no further.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve set up Scrivener again so I’m ready to go with that if need be. But as far as what I’ll write…no clue. My success rate when going in and latching onto some plot device at the last minute is not terribly good. It is more terribly terrible. This means my effort will likely crash and burn.
Perhaps, though, something fantastic will come to me in a dream tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or maybe the first night of NaNo. After that it probably won’t matter.
Maybe for the eve of NaNoWriMo (tomorrow) I’ll try to inspire myself with another patented* list of lovingly handmade writing prompts.
In which I try my old technique of coming up with the title first and the story second. Since this is brainstorming and I rarely control my impulse to be silly this is not terribly likely to yield useful results, but stranger and more horrible things have happened.
Cosmic Tingles (this was actually suggested as the new title for my novel Road Closed, suggested by a co-worker; I just really want to use it somewhere)
Hatful of Hats
The Biomechanical Keyboard
Lost in Thought Experiment
50,000 Words in 50,000 Days
The Girl Who Could Write Better Novel Titles Than Me
National Novel Writing Month starts in two weeks and my current plan is non-existent. I’m still not entirely sure I’m going to participate.
This is probably not how best-selling novels are born.
Maybe I wouldn’t know how to handle the fame of being a best-selling author and it’s all for the best, anyway.
Or maybe I just need to come up with a title with the word “girl” in it. Current novels break down like this:
Self-published paranormal romances on amazon: 22%
The usual big names whose ebooks are always curiously priced higher than the paper versions: 31%
Books with “girl” in the title: 36%
Everything else: 11%
Most of the good novel titles featuring “girl” have already been used, since there are millions of these books out there, enough to form a new continent if stitched together and waterproofed.
But here’s a few from my five-second brainstorming session:
The Girl Who Wrote Novels About Girls
The Girl With the Word Girl on the Book Cover
The Girl Who Dated a Squirrel
The Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl
The important thing is I’m still trying to come up with something, even if inspiration has not only left me, it’s departed to another dimension.
Maybe I could write a novel about other dimensions. No, wait, I tried that last year and failed. 🙁
Maybe I’ll come up with more cockamamie ideas tomorrow as The Rains sweep through the area and the only choices are brainstorming or to stare out the window and despair. Yes, that’s it. Tomorrow will be a grand day of brainstorms! And real storms.
The “brain science” part in the title might make you think this is a dry, analytical approach to story construction, but Lisa Cron peppers this book with plenty of humor, often painting herself as the target, as she details a very specific approach to outlining and planning the story that will drive a novel. The brain science is basically recognition that humans are hardwired to enjoy a good story, due to how important stories were to the survival of early humans. Cron explains this better than my glib rundown would suggest, but don’t mistake this for a book about brain science. It’s not, it’s about writing a novel.
She comes down hard on so-called “pantsing” where a writer just grabs an idea and then wings it, hoping that over the course of 300 or so pages it all somehow works out (hint: most of the time it won’t and the writer will abandon the story. I can vouch for this by my amazing tower of unfinished stories, now in the running as one of the wonders of the modern world). Instead, she favors an approach where you, as the writer, are always asking questions about your story and its protagonist, the most persistent question being,”Why?”, followed closely by “And so?” The latter is asked at the end of a scene, to prompt the writer to explain how the end of the scene leads into the next. The questions prod the writer into thinking through the character’s actions and motivations before committing to the actual writing. No winging it allowed!
Cron is also an advocate of what she calls Scene Cards where each scene of the novel is explicitly detailed on a card (she recommends virtual over physical), with items like the Alpha Point, the plot (cause and effect), the consequences and so on. She rightly observes that writing software like Scrivener is pretty much tailor-made for the level of organization and planning she advocates.
You might think all of this planning would result in a story that is so predictable as to be rote and not especially fun to write, but Cron notes that there is always plenty of room for developments to grow organically and take off in one of several directions–as long as those directions continue to work in service to the protagonist and her motivations/beliefs.
I’m not sure I could commit to the level of planning Cron suggests, but I can’t deny that a writer who does is bound to come up with a story that is solid and able to pull a reader through to the end. In a way the approach reminds me of bestsellers that are derided for the quality of the writing (Shades of Grey, Dan Brown novels) but are successful due to other strengths, such as the storytelling (I’ll admit to never having read a Dan Brown novel, so I’m assuming there’s something other than the prose that compels people to read his books). Even if you don’t write deathless prose, following Cron’s method may still produce something people will enjoy reading.
Story Genius is made more entertaining as Cron enlists one of her friends and fellow author/writing coach, Jennie Nash, to follow Cron’s technique in developing a new novel. The reader gets to watch the development of this novel’s protagonist (a woman who refuses to get close to others for fear of getting hurt and ends up kidnapping a dog and, well, it gets complicated) and how all the parts of the story–background, supporting characters, motivations and so on, come together to create a compelling whole. I was a bit disappointed that the end result of Nash’s work was not made more clear.
All told, this is a meticulous approach to novel-writing and one that will likely bear fruit for the writer who is willing to commit to the techniques described. Heck, even only following some of the techniques, like always asking why, or compiling Scene Cards in the way Cron describes, will likely result in a stronger story. Recommended especially for people who love plotting.
Or what you do when your preferred writing application goes subscription-only.
I love playing around with software, so looking for a new writing program is kind of exciting in a geeky sort of way. At the same time it can be a convenient excuse for not actually writing, so I am determined to make a choice as soon as I can.
Now that I have eschewed Ulysses (see here for more) I need to pick another piece of writing software to use for all my writing needs and desires. The first thing I need to establish are the must-have features this software will have:
Must let you type words into a computer and save them to disk or “the cloud”
Must work on both a MacBook Pro and Windows 10 PC or more broadly speaking, it must work in both macOS and Windows environments *or* support a file format that is natively supported in both OSes without requiring magic or witchery to work properly.
Must please me in somewhat arbitrary and ill-defined ways
Must not require a subscription. Paid or donate to unlock all features is okay.
Now, let’s review the criteria:
1. Must let you type words into a computer and save them to disk or “the cloud”
This one is easy as literally any program except whimsical comp-sci projects will pretty much let you do this. This does not narrow the criteria down in any way whatsoever, so my inclusion of it here was simply to start the process with a little levity. A tiny smidgen, if you will. Moving on…
2. Must work on both a MacBook Pro and Windows 10 PC or more broadly speaking, it must work in both macOS and Windows environments *or* support a file format that is natively supported in both OSes without requiring magic or witchery to work properly.
This is where it gets trickier. There are some programs that work across both platforms and these are my preference. However, if I opt for a common file format such as text (.txt) then I can write in different programs and the actual work will be the same in each. The biggest downside to this approach is probably the mental shift required when switching off between programs that could potentially work very differently even as they ultimately accomplish the same thing.
3. Must please me in somewhat arbitrary and ill-defined ways
This category covers “nice to have features” that aren’t strictly required but in a way actually are. For example, the ability to set a writing goal is pretty essential for National Novel Writing Month and some of the major programs like Microsoft Word do not feature this, because they focus more on making the writing look pretty, rather than the actual process of putting the words down.
built-in support for cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive or others
and other things
4. Must not require a subscription. Paid or donate to unlock all features is okay.
This is pretty straightforward, unless the chosen program does what effectively amounts to a bait-and-switch by changing their pay model after you purchase the software (as happened with Ulysses, which went from a traditional paid program to subscription). There is an increasing move toward subscriptions (boo) but enough options exist outside the model to allow me to steer clear of it for now.
With the criteria set, let’s look at the pros and cons of some candidates.
Microsoft Word
Pros:
supports Windows, macOS, iOS
integrates nicely with OneDrive
offers web version in a pinch
familiar
supports indents
.docx format is widely supported
has a full screen mode
Cons:
no options for setting goals
no focus mode
no easy way to move scenes or chapters (it can be done, just not easily)
the WYSIWYG approach can lead to fighting the formatting
no built-in support for markdown, though it will auto-convert some markdown to formatting, such as using asterisks for italics.
about the complete opposite of a Zen writing program
WriteMonkey
Pros:
supports Windows and macOS (Mac version is currently beta-only and not feature-complete)
supports cloud services for saving
supports indents (Windows version 2.7 only)
can auto-generate backup files to a specific location
supports distraction-free/full screen modes
has focus mode
allows you to set both overall and immediate goals, with visual aids
word count is always visible
many options to customize the look and feel, along with theme support
supports markdown and in version 3 offers good visualization of markdown in the editor
saves in simple .txt format, making it easy to load its files in other programs (this changes a bit in version 3 but is still possible there)
Cons:
Mac version is in beta and lacks some essential features, such as indents, meaning cross-platform support is not really there yet. The workaround for now is to use version 2.7 on a Mac running wither in Bootcamp or through a VM solution like Parallels.
UI is a bit fiddly and can be difficult to work around (I’ve gotten past this particular hump, though, having used the program for several years now)
FocusWriter
Pros:
supports Windows, macOS and Linux
clean interface without billions of distracting options
can save to .txt format for maximum flexibility
supports setting goals
supports indents
shows word count
customizable themes, including different wallpapers and sound effects for distraction-free mode
can save to cloud services without issue
will start up with the last opened document to allow you to jump right in
Cons:
no real markdown support, though it offers one tag as a divider to separate scenes or chapters
maybe a bit too Spartan
Typora
Pros:
supports Windows and macOS
supports indents (awkwardly, as it has to be implemented by editing a theme file)
Cons:
doesn’t offer anything that isn’t also available in FocusWriter or WriteMonkey
focus is clearly on technical writing, not fiction
Scrivener
Pros:
supports Windows, macOS, iOS
supports indents
supports goals
offers focus mode
offers distraction-free/full screen mode
shows word count
highly customizable
allows for easy shuffling of scenes or chapters
excellent community support
can easily handle large projects
Cons:
UI feels dated and can overwhelm with options
offers poor cloud support due to the way it saves projects as collections of files. This can lead to corrupt projects.
Windows version perpetually lags behind Mac version in development (though files always remain compatible between the two)
weirdly forces you to name your project before you can start writing
No indent support
As mentioned above, supporting indents is crucial for fiction writing because a dialog exchange between characters woulds requiring hitting the Enter or Return key all the time and looks weird, as illustrated below:
“Hi John.”
“Hello Sally.”
“How are you?”
“I am swell, how are you?”
“I broke the Enter key on my computer.”
“Oh, that sucks. How did it happen?”
“My preferred writing program doesn’t support indents.”
Both John and Sally cried and bonded over this horrible tragedy.
It turns out that a lot of markdown editors lack support for indents, which was one of the things that made Ulysses so nice.
Here are programs that might have been considered but are ruled out because they lack support for indents or are platform-specific or both:
iA Writer
Bear
Editorial
Pages
MacDown
plus about a billion more
The Big Decision
In the end there are only a few reasonable choices.
Choice 1: WriteMonkey
My preference is to use WriteMonkey because I am familiar with it and it has worked well for me in the past, despite some rough edges on the UI. The main issue here is the beta version works well but lacks any way to use indents, so if I’m writing on my MacBook Pro I need to use a different program that saves to .txt format or I have to use Parallels/Bootcamp.
As it turns out, I’ve actually set up Parallels and while the Windows 2.7 version of WriteMonkey works well enough in it, something about the arrangement makes me nervous. Still, this remains a viable option.
One workaround is to use FocusWriter when on the Mac, as it has a native version of the program. I’ve tested and haven’t noticed any weirdness when switching between files created in WriteMonkey and then edited in FocusWriter and sent back to WM again. FocusWriter doesn’t support markdown but it also doesn’t do anything with markdown in the body of the document, either, so it’s still there in WriteMonkey.
Once WriteMonkey 3 is out of beta this should be a much stronger choice but it’s being developed by a single person, so work is not surprisingly proceeding at a slower pace (the first public beta came out in September after a private beta that ran most of the year).
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 indents
Choice 2: FocusWriter
FocusWriter’s strength lies in its simplicity and its native support for both Mac and Windows platforms. It doesn’t support markdown but perhaps because of this, it offers more fiction writer-friendly features.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 indents
Choice 3: Scrivener
I spent enough time using Scrivener, including writing NaNo novels with it, to learn most of its quirks and workflow. Then I stopped using it for long enough that I’ve forgotten most of that.
If you are simply typing words into the editor it’s pretty easy to use. It gets complicated as soon as you do anything else. The UI is bad.
The good news is its getting a major revamp to version 3. The less good news is that it’s not out yet, though the Mac version is expected by the end of 2017, with the Windows version coming in early 2018.
My biggest issue with Scrivener, though, is the way it saves files. By default it saves after two seconds of inactivity, which is nuts. This can be changed, but still, it seems like a recipe for introducing file corruption by invoking near-perpetual writes.
Along with this, the cloud support is very bad. It can work decently with Dropbox but people are actively told to steer away from OneDrive, iCloud and Google Drive. OneDrive is my preferred place to save things in the ephemeral cloud, so being told it’s not a good idea is a bit of a put-off.
I also lost a large chunk of a NaNo novel a few years ago when I botched the local/cloud saves while using Dropbox. This is mainly on me, but I felt it likely wouldn’t have happened in a different program due to the way Scrivener bundles projects into a multitude of files.
Rating: 3 out of 5 indents
Choice 4: Microsoft Word
The ubiquity of Word is probably the best reason to pick it. Its supported everywhere. You can probably run Word on your toaster now. But it offers few features for a fiction writer that are very nice to have. It lets you write the words and make them look pretty. It doesn’t do much beyond that.
Rating: 3 out of 5 indents
Darkhorse possibilities
There are some web-based editors that can usually work in offline mode if you lose connection (your work is automatically synced when the connection is restored) but I’m very leery of going web-only for my writing.
I could also just use a typewriter. No one ever lost a save file on a typewriter. The trick would be to find one. Plus I hate using typewriters because I’m not Harlan Ellison.
Finally, there’s always a notepad and pen. The very thought is causing my hand to spontaneously cramp, so no.
In the end it looks like the best candidates are:
WriteMonkey
FocusWriter
Scrivener
My plan, then, is to do some testing as follows:
Write a small project in WriteMonkey 2.7 (Windows version) and edit it on the MacBook Pro using both the same version in Parallels and through FocusWriter and see if anything screws up and also if the workflow actually works. I’ll use OneDrive for saving in a specially made folder for testing.
Create a Scrivener project in Windows and make changes back and forth in Windows and Mac. I’ll save in a specially made Dropbox folder (in theory OneDrive should work if the folder/files are set to be available in offline mode but I can’t be bothered jumping through this many hoops. I’m not a good hoop-jumper).
After the week of testing I’ll commit to my decision and go on to great writing glory. Hooray!
