How I write a novel… revisited at Tobias Buckell Online

Journal Entry

How I write a novel… revisited

April 7th 2008 at 7:26 am

One of the more popular items on my website is the article ‘how I write a novel.’ It was written in September of 2006. Plus, in my ‘Ask an question’ thread back from January/February this question was asked again. I was working my way down the questions and ran out of time to put this together to answer Christopher Weuve asking this question, as well as Ken McConnel.

So here is the answer, Chris, a month later!

Occasionally I get emails along the lines of ‘dude, you should totally check out X, it’s way better.’

Chances are I’ve tried and downloaded X (although I always welcome the comments, you never know…), but I’ve been pointing people towards my choice of writing tool for a year now, and it’s Scrivener. I’ve been playing with it since it was a beta.

I wrote Sly Mongoose on Scrivener, and I quite credit it with making the whole process a lot easier than normal, as I was able to keep all my various notes, outlines, and files together in one organic manner. It also, however, didn’t lock up my chapters in some strange format, they were saved as RTF, so I felt really comfortable about using Scrivener.

The initial stages of writing a novel are still the same as before.

We begin with this:

As I wrote, almost 2 years ago:

First off, I spend time lying upside down on the couch with a pillow over my head. This is called ‘plotting,’ although I understand that *sometimes* it can look like I’m actually napping.

Sometimes that does happen, but usually if the pillow is over the face that indicates plotting.

After that comes notes that I write on various scraps of paper:

This is the early stage of Sly Mongoose, scraps of various pieces of paper that I put the ideas down on.

As I wrote in ‘06:

Some of those pieces of paper are actually stacked (there is order in there, I didn’t want to randomly shuffle them for you all) and are usually laid out across my desk, not on the floor. It’s about 100 pieces of paper.

Next up comes compression. I take these pieces of paper and write a 2-3 page synopsis to capture the idea of the book and try and sell it.

Once I have the go ahead the next stage rolls out. Writing the damn thing.

Not much has changed. Until we get to these next few paragraphs, where I’ll indicate the change using the ’strikeout’ tag and inserting the new program I use:

I’m not much of an outliner, I’m what I call a ‘bucketer.’ I take all the pieces of paper and use a program called Omnioutliner Scrivener and retype all the bits of information into it. Sections are created like Setting, Characters, Thematic fun, Plot. All the writing gets dumped into a category.

I take the synopsis and paste that into the plot area of Omnioutliner into a top level area of Scrivener.

Then I split Omnioutliner’s Scrivener’s plot area into subsections by rough parts to help me figure out where the &*%^ to put the information.

By this time I have a very good idea of how the first 3-8 chapters will run, so I put in everything I can think about them into the first part subsection’s outline. I add a different color for each POV, and write a rough 1 line description of the chapter. Omnioutliner Scrivener will let me add another field that can collapse out from under it that contains detailed chapter notes if I want.

So then I start writing the first chapter. As ideas occur to me, I type them into Omnioutliner the appropriate areas of Scrivener.

For example if I write that someone picks up a gun to shoot someone later in the story, I’ll pause, click on that chapter in Omnioutliner and type “Y shoots X with found in chap. Z.”

So I have a rough outline, a place to slap ideas as they occur to me, and a nice balance between ‘by the headlights’ writing and the safety of an outline to keep me on track.

Some examples, using some screenshots of Sly Mongoose in progress, show you how I use the notes areas, the corkboard features, and the hierarchal sorting features to let Scrivener easily handle the complexity of a whole novel.

Smscriv

Smscriv2

Also of note is the full screen feature, where I let it take over my entire screen with nothing but text. Text in any color and a background in any color. It allows one to focus. Pretty slick.

And that’s the mechanical side of things. There’s a lot more going on in terms of the specifics of the outline, chapters, the day to day mental tricks, and so on.

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22 Responses so far

1. Ed Greaves on Apr 7th, 2008 at 9:03 am

Okay, the screenshots of Scrivner make me jealous that there isn’t as cool a package for Windoze.
2. Rob in Denver on Apr 7th, 2008 at 9:42 am

I don’t use it, but I’ve read that Liquid Story Binder is fairly close to Scrivener.
3. Ken McConnell on Apr 7th, 2008 at 10:05 am

Thanks Tobias, the update is very much appreciated! I so totally followed your last posting when I wrote my first mystery novel. But now I’ve moved to Scrivner and am loving it.
4. Erin Hoffman on Apr 7th, 2008 at 11:26 am

It’s good to see Scrivener actually in action with someone professionally producing novels. Looks very interesting, thanks for the screenshots. Not quite enough to buy a Mac, but definitely interesting.
5. Chang on Apr 7th, 2008 at 12:20 pm

OOOHH!!!

I’ve been looking for something that works like this! I tend to write in a similar fashion, less outlining and more working from scraps of notes that eventually work themselves into an outline. MS WORD doesn’t do this and I want to gut Clip-it and hang his entrails from my laptop. So this is a very nice alternative!

Have you seen Writeroom? Not exactly the same but an interesting no-frills word processor.
6. Dan on Apr 7th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

If anyone knows of something even close to Scrivener but in Windows, please let me know.
7. Scott Kennedy on Apr 7th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

I am once again made unhappy by the fact that I run Windows. That software looks lovely (and the old-timer in my really loves that it can emulate the old blue/white interface of classic Wordperfect). Sigh.
8. Rob in Denver on Apr 7th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

@Dan: See comment #2.
9. Maria Lima on Apr 7th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

SRSLY LOVE SCRIVENER

I used it for “Blood Bargain” and it’s brilliant.
10. Thomas M. Wagner on Apr 7th, 2008 at 6:58 pm

Dude, way to drop the spoilers with all those screengrabs! Awesome…

Dot Lin tells me she fired off an ARC of Sly my way today. Guess I’ll have that review up soon, then.

What with you and Stross and Scalzi and Jay Lake and Elizabeth Bear dropping the next two Promethean Age novels back to back, summer is shaping up to be pretty sweet.
11. Christopher Weuve on Apr 7th, 2008 at 10:01 pm

Okay, looks very interesting. Thanks for the follow-up article.

At Arisia, I showed Walter Hunt Scrivener, and he showed me Tinderbox. We were both intrigued. I’m planning on getting a follow-up Tinderbox lesson at the Arisia Relaxacon. I suspect that I’ll conclude that just using Scrivener for everything (research and organizing/brainstorming and writing) will be easier than using two apps.

Right now, I find myself using Scrivener in a couple of unexpected ways. Like, taking snapshots of web pages, and then using the annotation feature to add comments on why the page interests me. Or downloading ebooks (text or RTF) into Scrivener to annotate them.

Overall, a truly amazing app.
12. Kristi Wachter on Apr 7th, 2008 at 11:03 pm

Actually, the Scrivener folks have a helpful little note at the bottom of their main Scrivener page that says they suggest something called PageFour for Windows users. They also have a Windows section on their links page.
13. Lisa on Apr 8th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

Scrivener looks a lot like Storyist.
14. spyscribbler on Apr 8th, 2008 at 10:07 pm

Another Windows girl, here, who desperately wishes Scrivener would go Windows. I’ve tried Page Four, Liquid Story Binder, and Microsoft One Note.

Of the three, I LOVE One Note as a dumping/organizing station for my ADD mind. I have notebooks for my entire life, but it doesn’t work for me as a word processor.

SuperNoteCard by Mindola is brilliant. It’s clean, simple, and it stays out of your way, if you know what I mean. I write everything in there, and it sort of organizes an outline as I write. The cards are moveable-aroundable, and I can see the whole story at once, even though I’m a pantser.

I can say that I have seriously considered switching to a Mac for Scrivener and MarsEdit. Mac doesn’t have OneNote, though. I can’t live without OneNote.
15. Scott Rolsen on Apr 9th, 2008 at 11:14 am

Thanks TB. Cool post.

As a PC user, I’ve been tinkering with yWriter. I’ve managed to flesh out 17 chapters, and I like the storyboarding feature. But I’ve never written a novel, so take this post for what it is worth!

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html
16. Nalo Hopkinson on Apr 9th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

*Giggle* My plotting looks a whole lot like wandering about the city with a blank look on my face.
17. Tobias Buckell on Apr 9th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

Nalo: yeah, I have to have a something of a plan or I get lost in the woods But I feel free to change the outline as I go. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy!
18. Christopher Weuve on Apr 9th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

I tried SuperNoteCard (which has the advantage of being cross-platform, including file format). I even wrote a paper in it, but I found a lot of the limitations to be annoying. Basically, in a lot of ways, Scrivener is SuperNoteCard done right.
19. Gary Gibson on Apr 10th, 2008 at 2:49 am

I’ve been using Scrivener on the mac for a little over half a year now; most of my new book was written on it. It’s utterly genius software. I got recommended it by another Scottish author, William King, who used to write for Games Workshop. I must say your screenshot of your work looks … so … *tidy* compared to mine. You have nice neat chapters, where I have chapters split into sub-documents etc etc.

One thing I find particularly gratifying about Scrivener is the ability to import pdf’s, web pages etc for reference; especially within the context of being able to split the main text screen in two with, say, a diagram at the top and the text below (I sometimes draw up plans of star systems etc. in illustrator and save them as pdf’s, which are then imported into Scrivener).

This might also be of interest to some of the people who’ve commented here: there’s a suite of Windows-based novel- structuring tools called writer’s cafe (www.writerscafe.co.uk); the Mac version is free to download, last time I looked. I find the ’storylines’ software that comes with that bundle exceptionally useful for organising my notes and ideas into a coherent, structured outline, in conjunction with Scrivener.
20. How Not To Write on Apr 16th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

I love Scrivener too. I like the fact that you can paste images into the document notes section and keep the inspiration floating alongside the text.

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