A writer's look at the writing industry and the Internet.

Tried new software to
write more productively, but
it ate all my work!

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Spring edition of a magazine that I’ve been interested in submitting something to for a while now, called The First Line, as mentioned in an earlier post. I nearly chose not to write something for this edition, as I’m not a big fan of writing on religious themes, but I found a way around it and decided to give it a go.

As I had all afternoon and evening available, I decided to try out a new piece of writing software I bought this weekend that’s designed to make you more productive, the desktop edition of Write Or Die! (US$10). It’s written in Adobe AIR (familiar to most Twitter users) and — along with the expected text input area and ability to save as plain text — it will give you a progress bar if you specify the number of words or the amount of time (or both) that you want to write in that session, and it has a few options that will first prod you or even punish you, if you want. Not a bad motivational tool, as you find yourself typing continually to avoid the flashing and noise, while avoiding self-editing, and it’s easy to churn out words with little effort.

Or so the theory goes. Cutting a long story short, after using it to write a story that I was quite pleased with, I saved it over a file of the same name (no big deal, the operating system should ask me if I’m sure, etc, and do it seamlessly), exited the program and opened the file in an editor to discover that the save I’d just made didn’t happen. I don’t know what went wrong, but none of it got saved: 1200 words and 45 minutes flushed away.

I was not a happy bunny at all. I’m not pointing my finger at the software, as I really don’t know what went wrong and where. It could have been the software, it could have been AIR, or it could have been me, I just don’t know. Besides, it’s not like it was a novel.

So after making a cup of tea to regain my composure, I set about to writing it again, with as much of it from memory as possible. This time I used another piece of software that I’ve been meaning to use properly for some time: OmmWriter (watch the demo video, it’s stunning). It’s currently only available for the Mac, it’s free, and it uses a Zen-like atmosphere to stop you from getting distracted. It’s a beautiful looking piece of software and does the job very well.

The story has now been fully written, imported into OpenOffice.org for formatting, edited and improved, saved as a Word document (per their submission guidelines), and submitted for their consideration. Now begins the waiting game…

Borrowing an idea from a friend’s website, here’s a bit of fun to sum up today’s writing:

Among the many the things I’m striving to achieve in my writing career, I am currently trying to get my head around the concept of pre-planned writing. As a lifelong pantser, an instinctive technique that has served me well in all my short story writing, this is coming as something of a shock!

To aid with this, I’m making use of Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, which essentially sees you start at the logline of a book (the one-sentence summary of what it’s about that also doubles as your “elevator pitch” when you try to sell it) and then gradually expand into paragraphs, pages, character sheets, etc, until you’ve done all your plotting, design and preparation and only then do you begin writing the first draft. As someone with a technical background, this makes a great deal of sense intellectually: you wouldn’t build a house without architectural plans, and I do outline my technical writing. Just not the fiction.

This method is at least notionally similar to the concept of mind mapping,* where you write a single word or concept in the centre of a page, draw annotated lines out from it representing major points, draw annotated lines out from them, and so on and so forth. Which in turn is similar to the idea of lists of lists, as found in productivity systems such as Getting Things Done. Essentially an hierarchical (or structure chart) representation with few high-level bits at the top and increasing numbers of lower-level bits as you go down. Very logical to anyone who’s studied Computer Science!

However, all my fiction to date has been achieved by pantsing, and I suspect it goes back to the creative writing lessons we did in English classes at school. They always gave us a writing prompt consisting of part of the opening sentence and told us to go nuts:

Forcing open the door of his mangled car, John staggered away just as…

Now tell me you couldn’t write ten pages from that prompt? I could, always have done and fast. I love it. This is what “writing fiction” has always been for me. But I don’t want to have my writing career defined as “great flash fiction writer — shame he never wrote a novel.” What’s worse, many prompts and ideas come to me in the same way. It’s rare that I remember my dreams, but when I do they either stick or I write them down in a notepad I keep beside my bed, or in the 14x9cm Moleskine I carry with me everywhere (it doubles as my To Do list, so it’s not all about writerly appearances).

The most recent dream-generated prompt I remember is simply, ‘You’re dying…’ From that I’ve somehow decided that this is the start of a science fiction mercenary story (I’m thinking Babylon 5 meets The Jackal), and I’m 5,000 words in and on the second scene. From here I could take this story in a thousand directions and could just continue writing it ad nauseum, but without structure, logic or a compass. In its own perverted way, this has led to indecision that has resulted in a kind of writers’ block: I have plenty of ideas but, because I don’t know where to go from here, I’m stuck!

This is where I’ve realised that this story has the potential to become a novel and I want to do it properly. Hence the Snowflake Method. Although I’m currently in the process of studying my first creative writing short course with the Open University, I don’t want to sit still. There is no rush, but I know the danger of allowing yourself to feel as though you’re never ready or that the timing is never right. I’ll finish this course first, then I’ll just do that course before I start. Besides, if this course does show me a better way to do this, I can always start again.

Right now I’m at Step 3 of the Snowflake Method — building the character summaries with name, one-sentence summary, motivation, goal, conflict, epiphany, and a one-paragraph summary based on all that — and I’m already beginning to see a way out of the pit of indecision. It may simply be the enthusiasm for a new methodology, but it seems that the characters are starting to take on their own lives and motivations, which in turn determines how they’ll react to given situations, and how those situations will resolve.

It’s too early to tell, but I have a sneaking suspicion that by doing all this preparation and design, you effectively end up with the writers’ equivalent of Choose Your Own Adventure: the characters will react in specific ways to any given circumstance (the rowdy guy will always choose the fight option, etc), and it effectively writes itself. I can’t wait to find out…

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* If you want to give mind mapping a try, I’m a fan of the free multi-platform software, FreeMind. I don’t buy into the “tap into the unused 99% of your brain” pseudoscience that you sometimes see surrounding the technique, but it does seem to be an effective way of gathering and recording thoughts.