MS Word? I prefer not to.

Just wanted to give a big thank you to my friend Sean Sakamoto, (aka flojin) , fellow writer and nerd, for turning me on to Scrivener - a writing program that beats the crap out of writing in Word, or any other word processor I've ever worked with. For me, its strongest point is the way it helps you organize the story. You can write an outline, and it will automatically link up with the chapters that the outline refers to (with a little formatting on your part). I really love the bulletin board view, too - what that does is let you view your outline as a series of index cards that you can label, and move around - again, just click on a card, and you can work on the chapter that its linked to.

It's really helped me alot with planning - I essentially have the whole book split up into chapters in the outline, and when I am ready to go, I can just jump in and start writing where I left off. Its great, because it keeps the chapters as discrete subdocuments, collected in a draft folder. I'm sure you can do it with Word too, but as with most things Microsoft, they sure dont make it easy or intuitive.

There's also a whole research section of the program that I havent really delved into, but its apparently an easy way to keep all of your research documents and reference photos in one place, kinda like a big clipboard.

So anyway, thanks again to Sean, and if you're a writer looking for some software that really does help your workflow, check Scrivener out - its a free 30 day trial, and after that its only $40.

Oh, I forgot to mention, it's Mac OSX only, so suck it, Windows peeps!

Meticulously Planned Chaos

I was playing Burnout Paradise the other day, and weirdly enough I started to think about novel writing. A huge part of the game is smashing your car up in new and interesting ways. You'll be tooling along, another car will cross an intersection at exactly the wrong time, and bang. The physics engine takes over and you are treated to a slow motion spectacle of your car disintegrating into a million little pieces. The crashes happen often enough that you start to wonder whether the game is making your life difficult on purpose.

I recently added some characters into the narrative. I won't call them secondary, because there are major subplots that revolve around them. There are basically 4 different sets of characters, whose stories are all happening concurrently. As the novel progresses, their individual plots will converge, until at the end, everything gets thrown together in a spectacular orgy of violence, action, and bedlam (that's the plan, anyway). It's a pretty standard structure for novels like this, because it works well, and flipping around between the plots moves the story along and keeps readers interested.

So, car crashes. It occurred to me that in order to have a truly spectacular car crash, a lot of things need to go right (or wrong, depending on your perspective). All the cars involved have to be moving at such and such speed, hit each other at a certain angle, etc. Just think of how much effort it must take to plan a car crash for a movie, if you want it to be just so. Everything from the road condition, to the weather is a factor, but once you know what you're going for, all you can do is set the cars up at their starting points, let them go, and hope for the best.

It's kind of what plotting a novel out this way is like. I know where I want the characters to be, I know where I want them to start. A lot of the work plot-wise is figuring out how they get from point A to point B, so they can collide at the proper moment to give appropriately spectacular results.

The trick with with video games or movies, is making sure that its "realistic". If the crashes don't obey the laws of physics, they are just cartoons. In Burnout, the crashes look like real car crashes, because they use an amazing physics engine. In a novel, its not so much about realism as it is internal consistency. Not only do they have to get from point A to point B, it has to make perfect sense why they're at point B... why it was utterly inevitable that they arrive there, given what we know about them and the situation they're in.