I’m a bit off since I took Wednesday off, so this post is a Belated Scrivener Saturday.
Apart from planning, outlining and writing Julius in Scrivener, I also use it for this blog and for organizing the online content for HAND/EYE Magazine.
This is how my binder looks for the HAND/EYE Scrivener project:
I recently started to play around with the freeform corkboard. With this feature, I can place my index cards wherever I like and I can also customize the background.
To use the freeform corkboard, you can access it by clicking the icon that looks like stacked cards at the bottom of the page.
You can arrange them in any order that you like. You’ll notice that however the order is changed, the order of the folders remain the same. If you want to change the size of the cards, click on the icon to the right of the stacked card icon and from there window will open and you can fiddle with the size.
Once you’ve determined how you want to order the cards, click on the Commit Order and a window will open that provides options for how the program interprets your layout. Under Start click whichever option is appropriate (I chose “Top” and the same with under Order From (I chose “Right to Left”) You’ll see that your cards have been reordered in the binder.
If you don’t like the default cork board background or the font, you can change that to suit your sense of aesthetics. To make the change go to the file menu click on “Scrivener” scroll down to “Preferences” and select the corkboard icon.
You can customize the background by going to the “Freeform Background” select “Custom Color” or “Custom Background.” If you select Custom Color, the box of crayons will pop up or you can play with the color wheel option. For Custom Background, you can select any photo that you have on file on your Mac. Here’s how mine looks using a custom color.
Next week, we’ll learn all about stacked corkboards.
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Forcing the Story
by RS on January 23, 2012
Almost six years ago, I finished one novel—now deep in a virtual drawer— and started writing Julius for NANOWRIMO. The story was a a respite from writing a Holocaust story, but after researching the Rosenbergs, the Blacklist, the Spanish Civil War, and anything having to do with the Left, I realized that there wasn’t anything funny about any of these subjects. However, I still wanted it to be funny so I manipulated scenes, I made characters do silly things, but I kept hitting one wall after another.
With this current rewrite, Julius is a different beast. It’s still about a magazine, but the motives and the goals of the characters have changed and there’s more conflict right up front.
Once I decided to take on this massive do-over and outlined my scenes, questioned why my characters were acting a certain way, the writing didn’t seem forced. That doesn’t mean I won’t run into some problems, but now when I see that I’m approaching a wall, I ditch the scene that’s not working instead of forcing it and the story to be something it isn’t
I’m currently working on the seventh chapter of the novel, and I ran into a roadblock. I suppose I could take a detour and write my way out of it. Although I think I can make the scene work, this time I’ve chosen a different vantage point because I’ve learned (finally!) that the reader doesn’t need the minutiae or details of Corinne’s job as fiction editor. The chapter is about a chance meeting with three veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades and that’s what it should be about. Not her job, but how these characters will play into the plot.
Like so many things in life that you can’t force—love, career and friendship—you can’t force the writing either. If a particular element isn’t working—chuck it. Don’t fall into the trap of keeping it. Spare yourself the time and pain from all the head-banging when you discover that the 20K words you wrote to make that one scene work didn’t help one bit, but made it worse.
The next time you write 300, 400, or 500 words and you see your character putzing around in scene that has no relevance to the plot, subplot or theme, stop writing. Step away from the keyboard and rethink the scene. Don’t worry about making your daily word count, instead consider the story like a game of chess and try to be ahead by five moves. Think of how that chapter will portend a major plot twist in the book. If it doesn’t then it’s just padding to make your characters look busy and we all know the senselessness of that and not accomplishing anything.
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