I just completed five chapters of my novel. Completely. Well enough to submit. What I need to do now is commit time to write and organize the time line. I just got the Aeon Timeline program, which syncs with Scrivener. I can’t wait to use it! That, plus post-it’s and large paper. I am a visual person. How do you map your stories?
The Letter Vy
Writing the world one line at a time
Wow, good for you! Congratulations! That’s an achievement. How many words are you into your story? Chapters are a good measuring stick for your own personal progress, but word count is the ultimate rubric.
Personally I don’t use any of those programmes, I’m wary of trying something new and figuring out how to use it. I just have literally dozens of different word documents to record all my different information about my story, and I keep track of it that way. I’d be curious to know more about those programmes though, an awful lot of people like them so there must be something to them.
Anyways, good for you, that’s really exciting for you! I hope you keep up your momentum and carry this story to the end =)
Thanks for your comment! I use Scrivener for Mac because Word is very slow and hard to use. I like the way Scrivener helps with formatting and organizing.
The chapters are actually revised from the novel I already completed. I have 50,000 words and I need 30,000 more. I was able to organize it into chapters, so I did a little more than10,000 words. Gotta keep going.
I see your profile pic is of you playing violin. I play too! Thought not well. It is so awesome, but hard. It boils down to the instructor i adore mine. Hew long have you been playing?
hahaha yes another violin player! =) I’ve been playing for a little over a year, I’m not bad but still have a ways to go lol. And yeah, having a good instructor is important, but I think what’s helped me most is just having a lot of genuine interest in learning how to play. I actually really enjoy playing and so spending time practising is fun, rather than a chore. I feel like a lot of people I talk to, that isn’t the case. It’s boring or hard work or they just don’t have fun with it, and that’s going to make learning a lot more difficult lol. How long have you been playing? And what’s your novel about?
I have been playing since August. I love it. It’s so hard and yet rewarding.
My novel is about an uptight guy that finds himself in Vietnam trying to get his brother to see through a (seemingly) gold digger, yet he falls for her American cousin. She tries to help him understand the culture he looks down on. It’s a love story but has a lot of culture differences worth exploring.
Fascinating. What’s your experience with the topic? Have you ever been to Vietnam? That’s a great place to write about. If you are interested, there’s a story on my page about Vietnam I wrote while I was living in China. You might like it, might not. Just seems like we have a thing or two in common so I thought I’d recommend it. =)
What kind of pieces are you practising on your violin? What kind of music do you like to play?
I’m Vietnamese-American, so it hits home. Went there in September. I’d love to read your story. Lead me to it.
I love playing classical. Love Canon in D right now, but I play contemporary because we do jam sessions at work with coworkers. We are playing On the Dock by the Bay right now. You?
It’s called “On A Little Road In Vietnam”, it’s on my main page, I’d love to know what you think.
Canon in D… haha that can be a really tricky piece. Do you happen to have the sheet music for it? I’ve tried playing by ear and I can’t quite nail it. That’s pretty cool you play contemporary, I’d love to hear a violin take on On the Dock. I really like Celtic and traditional folk music, I’ve been playing a lot of Celtic music, working on “Tonight my sleep will be troubled”, which isn’t hard but is very pretty. I don’t think there’s a version online.
I just finished mapping out my story…now that it’s done (bad , I know)… using MS Excel. Staring at four pages of words wasn’t really helpful for reviewing my plot and deleting useless scenes though, so now I’m marking the important points on flash cards – one for each chapter.
Next I’m going to spread them out on a big sheet of bristol board… like a kids project. I need to do this to see it for myself. I’m more of a visualizer too. Post its are my friend.
I can’t wait to read it!
In general I follow the Robert A Heinlein method: know the beginning, know the end, let the middle sort itself out as you go. But, I mostly write short stories and novellas; RAH got more than a few dozen novels out of the method, though.
I have used hand written formal outlines before, to good effect ( for both fiction shorts and non-fiction books)
I agree with that method! That’s what I did for NaNoWriMo. I’m revising, aka, filling in that stuff in the middle! I wish I could write better short stories. That is definitely on my to-do list: write short stories.
Bullet points in Evernote is my usual method, along with a ton of scattered thought paragraphs on a variety of elements in whatever order they come to me!
I’m going to schedule myself a visual planning day. Lay everything out and map it out. Although Aeon is rather cool to keep clean notes.
Good deal; planning days are super useful!
Useful as long as I commit to writing. If I waste it away, all I will have is another angry blog post.
Hehe. I suppose so. (>^-’)>