Today and yesterday proved surprisingly productive in that I was not expecting to produce anything, so what I did put out was completely unplanned.
Yesterday's work came thanks to a fortuitous double nap that the boys performed in the middle of the day. I had the tickling of a scene--nothing truly developed, and, because of that, nothing truly remarkable--that I had considered as being worthwhile adding in. I decided to provide a flashback for Nicomachus that stretched back all the way to when he and his brother, Dalinus, were young. Because I hadn't planned on writing, it wasn't rendered quite as well as I would have preferred, but I squeezed it out and slapped it in. Fiddling with yWriter 5 (my writing program of choice; see below), I dropped the flashback into an already overloaded chapter, thinking that it wouldn't make too big of a difference. After doing that, I immediately regretted the choice: The chapter was over 6,000 words.
(I know giving a word count is counterintuitive to a lot of people. This I know because every time I tell people how much I've written, their follow up question is "How many pages is that?" The problem with this question is its answer: It depends. Are we talking manuscript pages? Those are double spaced, so the length is greater. What about a trade paperback? That's like taking my 10 pages of my manuscript and converting it into 6 or 7 pages of a regular paperback book. That also means that I'd have to do math to do the conversions, which I'm not okay with. So, how many pages 'is that'? If we're talking double spaced action, it's about 300 words per page. A 6,000 word chapter, then, would likely be over 20 pages. Single spaced isn't quite halving the calculation, though it's close. I fit about 500 words per page, on average, which would still make for a very beefy 10-12 page chapter. If that doesn't sound like a whole lot, note that most of my blogs are between 1,000 and 1,500 words. If you were to copy, paste, and format them as they'd be on a typical word processor page, you'd be looking at about three pages.)
Still, I couldn't see how I'd fit in the flashback, so I just left it as it was and assumed I'd figure it out later. For pacing purposes, I find that a 2,000 word leeway is pushing it, though I only use that as a general rule of thumb. I refuse to have a chapter shorter than 2,200 words, and some of the chapters lately are in the 5,000 word area, so one that was over 6,000 was just ridiculously out of the question.
Today, I wrote the next part of Nicomachus' story, and, since I was at the school working with some students, I was hungry, and I had to go to the bathroom, I was only able to get one part of the main story written. Slapping yesterday's flashback onto today's main chapter gave me a more modest--and better paced--chapter, clocking in at just over 3,300 words. That's not quite the sweet spot--I'd prefer 4,000 at the end--but that's pretty darn good for someone who was expecting 0 words done this week.
The Glory of yWriter 5
I mentioned this program in my first blog about the writing, but I thought I'd document the way I use the program, since recording my writing process is part of the reason for writing this blog in the first place.
The program has myriad features, a great many of which I ignore, but what I refer to the most frequently is the running word count. As I mentioned above, the word counts of the individual days of writing are pretty important to me. Since pages can vary not only on formatting but on what's actually written (thick pages of exposition or internal narration--also action sequences--tend to be really dense, while I have some pages that are dialogue exchanges, a practice that greatly increases the page count without really increasing the word count noticeably), I've come to really value how many words I've produced in the story. The yWriter 5 program automatically tracks my additions--and subtractions--to the overall story, giving me an at-a-glance reference to grand total, daily work, and individual chapters.
This is pretty nice, but, if you'll notice the small "Ch" boxes and the chapters next to it, you'll see that every chapter is itself broken into its total words. This is what I was talking about earlier--the program lets me look at each chapter holistically. Then, inside of a broader window, there are the actual contents of each chapter, broken into portable scenes. For ease of use, I place poems and faux sage sayings from Meleah in a small section called a bumper. Beneath the bumper comes the 'main chapter', which is followed by a flashback, an interlude, or nothing at all, depending on the length of the 'main chapter'. Occasionally (read: once so far), I will do a bumper followed by a flashback.
Yesterday's work came thanks to a fortuitous double nap that the boys performed in the middle of the day. I had the tickling of a scene--nothing truly developed, and, because of that, nothing truly remarkable--that I had considered as being worthwhile adding in. I decided to provide a flashback for Nicomachus that stretched back all the way to when he and his brother, Dalinus, were young. Because I hadn't planned on writing, it wasn't rendered quite as well as I would have preferred, but I squeezed it out and slapped it in. Fiddling with yWriter 5 (my writing program of choice; see below), I dropped the flashback into an already overloaded chapter, thinking that it wouldn't make too big of a difference. After doing that, I immediately regretted the choice: The chapter was over 6,000 words.
(I know giving a word count is counterintuitive to a lot of people. This I know because every time I tell people how much I've written, their follow up question is "How many pages is that?" The problem with this question is its answer: It depends. Are we talking manuscript pages? Those are double spaced, so the length is greater. What about a trade paperback? That's like taking my 10 pages of my manuscript and converting it into 6 or 7 pages of a regular paperback book. That also means that I'd have to do math to do the conversions, which I'm not okay with. So, how many pages 'is that'? If we're talking double spaced action, it's about 300 words per page. A 6,000 word chapter, then, would likely be over 20 pages. Single spaced isn't quite halving the calculation, though it's close. I fit about 500 words per page, on average, which would still make for a very beefy 10-12 page chapter. If that doesn't sound like a whole lot, note that most of my blogs are between 1,000 and 1,500 words. If you were to copy, paste, and format them as they'd be on a typical word processor page, you'd be looking at about three pages.)
Still, I couldn't see how I'd fit in the flashback, so I just left it as it was and assumed I'd figure it out later. For pacing purposes, I find that a 2,000 word leeway is pushing it, though I only use that as a general rule of thumb. I refuse to have a chapter shorter than 2,200 words, and some of the chapters lately are in the 5,000 word area, so one that was over 6,000 was just ridiculously out of the question.
Today, I wrote the next part of Nicomachus' story, and, since I was at the school working with some students, I was hungry, and I had to go to the bathroom, I was only able to get one part of the main story written. Slapping yesterday's flashback onto today's main chapter gave me a more modest--and better paced--chapter, clocking in at just over 3,300 words. That's not quite the sweet spot--I'd prefer 4,000 at the end--but that's pretty darn good for someone who was expecting 0 words done this week.
The Glory of yWriter 5
I mentioned this program in my first blog about the writing, but I thought I'd document the way I use the program, since recording my writing process is part of the reason for writing this blog in the first place.
The program has myriad features, a great many of which I ignore, but what I refer to the most frequently is the running word count. As I mentioned above, the word counts of the individual days of writing are pretty important to me. Since pages can vary not only on formatting but on what's actually written (thick pages of exposition or internal narration--also action sequences--tend to be really dense, while I have some pages that are dialogue exchanges, a practice that greatly increases the page count without really increasing the word count noticeably), I've come to really value how many words I've produced in the story. The yWriter 5 program automatically tracks my additions--and subtractions--to the overall story, giving me an at-a-glance reference to grand total, daily work, and individual chapters.
Four of the chapters' word count, the total, and added today
This is pretty nice, but, if you'll notice the small "Ch" boxes and the chapters next to it, you'll see that every chapter is itself broken into its total words. This is what I was talking about earlier--the program lets me look at each chapter holistically. Then, inside of a broader window, there are the actual contents of each chapter, broken into portable scenes. For ease of use, I place poems and faux sage sayings from Meleah in a small section called a bumper. Beneath the bumper comes the 'main chapter', which is followed by a flashback, an interlude, or nothing at all, depending on the length of the 'main chapter'. Occasionally (read: once so far), I will do a bumper followed by a flashback.
This is the organizational screen.
Note that the 'Viewpoint' column has the 'bumper' and 'Nic' categories; this lets me know easily who's in the chapter. This becomes more useful during interludes. The poem itself is arbitrarily numbered (sequentially based upon when I composed them) while the 'Scene' column can have more specific descriptions of the chapter if I bother to compose one. I did at the beginning, but as I've moved on, I've just relied on the description box (in the picture above this one) as letting me know what happens in each chapter. The flashback (indicated with the creative title "FB"--which always makes me think 'Facebook') is likewise numbered based upon chronology within the story: This is the eleventh flashback of Nic's in the book. This is the one where he talks to Phrastus about forgiveness.
Also there are Project Notes, Characters, Locations, and Items tabs. These are beautifully useful tabs, with an automatic addition capacity included. That means that, after I invent a character in my story, I add the new character's name into the Characters tab. From then on, the program automatically tracks whenever the character shows up. It then automatically creates a catalogue that is easily compiled, printed, or searched. Finding a character in my book--or seeing how many times a character/item/location is used--is a breeze.
My process is pretty simple: I draft the story sequentially (now that I've written Chapter 61, I'll work on 62 next), then I draft a flashback or interlude depending on how the chapter ends. This is done inside of OpenOffice's Writer program, which I prefer over Microsoft Word. Part of the reason for that is because there's an easy to access and, in my case, already well filled in autocorrect feature. Names of all of my main characters, all of the locations, and many of the important words that I use frequently will auto-populate, letting me fill in long names (like Nicomachus) with the stroke of a key. This speeds up my writing (which, unassisted, tops out at about 90 words per minute), and lets me focus more on the story and less on the mechanics.
The chapter is automatically saved (via a custom preference) as an .rtf, the type of file that yWriter 5 recognizes. I drop each segment into an appropriate folder--chapters, flashbacks, poems, bumpers--and then import it into the newest chapter inside of yWriter. Sometimes I've only written a flashback, so I don't include it into the project until it fits in--hence the reason that the day that I got so many words 'written' counted as my overall production. I do this because, so far as I know, nothing I write out of sequence is actually going to make it into the book. So, rather than counting words that I might or might not keep, I save out-of-sequence components of the story in the (sometimes vain) hope that I'll utilize them later.
Once the scene (main chapter, flashback, or interlude) is imported into yWriter, I'm free to move it around in whatever chapter I decide. The real glory of this is, though the original drafts are numbered on my hard drive (well, my Dropbox account...if you don't have Dropbox, repent and change your ways), I'm able to renumber (which I've done a couple of times so far) chapters, reorder scenes, or generally manipulate the flow of the story without having to go through and manually change all the chapter numbers. It's so glorious I can't express it. Double plus good? The original documents that I drafted remain untouched, so any changes that I do for edits--currently, minute things like typos or one or two small phrases--remain inside yWriter. After I've finished my story, I will be able to export the entire book to my word processor, format it, and save it as a full-fledged first draft. Any and all changes that I choose to do will happen inside of yWriter, which, after I've read the first draft, will house the new edits. Because of the fact that all my original chapters are preserved, if I make a major change that I want to revert, it's easy to go back to what I wrote previously and insert it where it was omitted or changed.
The program does much, much more, but if you've read this far (and why would you have done that?), you're either intrigued or bored. If you're the former, go visit the linked website above, download it, and love it as you ought to. If you're bored, then, again, why have you read this far? I have nothing to add.
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