It's In The Cards

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Tried to do some editing last night for my stories--both the OGYAFE and the ongoing and scattershot Hobbits Doing Awesome Things In Standard Fantasyland. There's a certain point in a story where you've got all the major components, but arranging them together is about as easy as making a rubber duckie mosaic in a bathtub--the darn bits keep floating away and never keep their shape.

It's embarrassing to find that one helpful thing there is goddamn INDEX CARDS. Back in my youth, when there was far less in my brain, I could hold onto details of a story world with encyclopedic precision. Now I am using flash cards to remind me what parts go where in a story. And it's SO NICE. I can go through a checklist and figure out what I have to put in or take out!

Probably it'd also help at the moment to fix this Critical Spoon Error I seem to have hit. Might make my writing WAY more coherent, and less likely to be a complete word salad. I don't know about you, but I like my storiesto at least make SOME sort of sense.

Therefore, I will be off today taking a spoon-recovery nap. Sleep: I do it for the STORY!

Comments

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

I have the opposite problem. As long as I'm theoretically still working on a story (and, often, well after then), I can remember most of the details pretty easily, though they sometimes become skewed over time. Meanwhile, I keep forgetting the names of people I see every day.

[alicetheowl.livejournal.com]

Have you tried out Scrivener? It looks way too complicated to me, but it has a notecard setting that apparently makes keeping track of outlines and scenes much easier. Also, less clutter.

My husband and several people in my writing group use it, and swear by it. I am way too seat-of-my-pants for it to look like anything but a distraction to me.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I love Scrivener to pieces, but partly because I use something like 2% of its options. It has so! many! things! it can do!, but pretty much I'm just sitting there going 'Heeeeey, I can arrange chapters into separate tabs so I can find where they start easily, and then make little folders for things like details about individual characters/nations/plot threads for quick reference! Keen!'

It's possible my copy cries itself to sleep every night because I've done the equivalent of buying a Ferrari just to get me to and from the grocery store on Sundays, but by god, it gets me there and back well.

[alicetheowl.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what I'd use it for, too. So when my husband extols the virtues of Scrivener, I just smile and nod and make a mental note to pass it along to people who do outline and are organized about their writing.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Weirdly enough, one of the things I love the most about it? Super-easy wordcount. It gives me a constant wordcount for whatever tab I'm in, always visible right at the bottom; and if I highlight a section, it gives me the wordcount for that highlighted bit too. It's like it was designed by people who know how much writers obsess about that...

[alicetheowl.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Useful!