Writing in chunks

[dragonimp]

This is my scriv file looks like for Now and Then, in case anyone's curious. You can probably guess that most of the scenes were named on the fly. This was the first fic where I really started to use Scrivener, and it was interesting. It was still written mostly in order, with the exception of a couple of the flashbacks and two scenes I kept flipping back and forth between. One of the best things, though, was being able to easily chop off part of a section without deleting it, like those three section down there at the end. I'm always paranoid about deleting, and in the Word doc I'd have it sitting there at the end. Staring at me.

I'm still sort of testing out Scrivener's capabilities. Now I'm playing with creating "index cards" for scenes before they're written, as a way of outlining (I just did this for Mother Arc to try to figure out if I'm on track with the plot or not). I'm trying to break myself out of the restriction of writing linearly, since gods know I don't think linearly. It's also really fun to be able to flip back and forth between pieces easily, and to have multiple pieces open at once. Scrivener will also display images and PDFs in the "Research" section, so I have several manga pages, the official height chart, and various other things right at hand.

Anyway, I just thought people might be interested in seeing the scene breakdown, since it's kinda amusing.

Comments

[pandoraculpa]

That looks so cool. And good lord, would it help some of the monsters I'm working on, to be able to organize it in that manner. But Scrivener is Mac software, isn't it? I think I looked into it before, but couldn't use it. Which makes me sad; even sadder, having seen this.

Instead, I'm making due with lots of OpenOffice documents and html Indexes. And wishing I had a storyboard (dry erase or cork; not picky). Hell, wishing I had an office, while I'm at it. ;)

But that's very cool, very cool indeed. I'll be all over it in a heartbeat, if they make it work for my system. *wants*

[dragonimp]

It is Mac only, unfortunately. The "company" is just a guy who wrote the software he wanted to use, and he doesn't program on the Windows platform. The web site (www.literatureandlatte.com, I think?) has recommendations for PC software that's supposed to be similar, though, and I've seen programs called yWriter and Celtx recommended. I don't know how much any of those cost, though.

I previously had everything in I think 3 or 4 Word files, one of which got to be about 60,000+ words long ^^;;. It was such a pain to scroll up to previous chapters to find something I needed to reference. And I never could get myself to write out of order before. So this has been really nice.