Hey guys, I was hoping maybe to get some ideas on what I can do to minimize some of these issues I have when I write. I'll list a few of the more annoying ones: 1) I can't hold a scene in my head long enough to get it down. By the time I begin to flesh everything out, it has skipped out of my head, and when I bring it back, it has changed from my impression of what it was before. 2) While I consider myself a fair writer of dialogue, transition scenes are damn near killing me. Getting a chapter underway, or finishing it up to move on to the next keeps causing me trouble. 3) Descriptive passages are also kicking my ass. Trying to find where to judiciously edit, and where to let the story keep playing is something that I've struggled with for some time. Any ideas on what I can do? Maybe tips on what you do to get around those problems?
1.) Find an intermediary medium to jot ideas in. Notepad, recorder, post-its, something, anything. Write on your flesh if you have to. 2.) There's always "meanwhile". 3.) So many popular authors nowadays LOVE to fucking ramble about every fucking woodgrain swirl on every piece of furniture, but, not me. I think they're just cheating their word count, myself. And it's not a special fucking rule. I've read books by great authors that keep it minimum, and focus on the people. Think of it this way, imagine a scene on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower. Do you really think you have to describe that? People can Google photos. Or, they've seen it in movies. Shit, how many Trek novels describe the bridge of the Enterprise? You've seen the fucking thing. Right? Give 'em Lego blocks of things they've seen. Then, stage constructed, get right to the killing and fucking.
By the way, is it normal to wonder why there are people who like what you write? When I write my stories, and I get feedback like "I love reading your stories!", it makes me think I'm a fraud or something.
Don't get me started. It's a wonder I ain't in a rubber room. There's no magic answer, you just come to a point of "fuck it".
2&3: Make sure you write to your own strengths. You don't have to do what everyone else does, and in fact everything is done somewhere. If dialogue is what you do, find a way to tell your story with dialogue. One way is to do a montage of dialogue that does away with the need for transition scenes and lengthy descriptions. Another is to have your whole story being told by a participant in a dialogue; if you can imagine their voices, perhaps you have an easier time imagining how they would transition and how they would describe stuff in that situation and towards that audience or interlocutor. Indeed, look out for the way people tell stories in real life and in the spoken word: The possibilities are endless, and you'll find a hundred variations and substitutes for transitions and descriptions. As for 1, I'm not so sure, but it might help to consider what exactly you're losing when the scene changes while you work. It's quite possible that the end result is better, of course. But if you feel that it is worse, what exactly have you lost? If you can pinpoint that, perhaps it will be easier to make anote of that quality before your imagination evaporates, rather then jot down the whole thing.
Not much to add to what others have said, except this: Write for yourself first. If you're pleased with your work, others' opinions or expectations needn't put pressure on you.
Exercise your brain so that you can keep a scene longer. It's possible. Keep thinking about it, working it out in your head, so that it doesn't just get dumped from your short-term memory. Until then, figure out how to get as much of it down as possible. Figure out how to leave yourself telltales that will remind you how the gap you skipped over is supposed to go. Even if it's just the equivalent of a string around your finger, that will also help details from departing your memory completely. I'm dialogue-oriented as well, after writing mostly in script form during high school. Packard's suggestion of telling your story through dialogue as much as possible is a legitimate tactic. As for transitions or other gaps, sometimes the rest of what you've written will tell you what you can put there. It's an opportunity to change, cement, or add to tone or character frame of mind or whatever else you haven't got enough of.
Thank you all, very much. There's some really solid advice here, and I'm going to use it to my advantage as best as I can.
By no means am I an expert, but here's a few thoughts: 1. Think about what your scene is intended to accomplish. Something should come out of the scene: a character is developed, a question is raised, some exposition is delivered. A scene should move the story forward in some way; think about which way you want your scene to do that. 2. When you start a chapter, start it in an interesting place. Don't tell me about Jake's drive to the bank to ask for a loan; start with the banker denying it. And when you end a chapter, try and leave a question in the reader's mind. If you view your plot as a series of escalating complications, you might end your chapter with a new complication. 3. Scene description? My advice is be more Elmore Leonard, and less Cormac McCarthy. Give only the description needed to evoke the setting.
The one thing I would suggest that would take care of damn near all of the problems you listed is structure first. Outline your story, scene by scene. Then outline each scene. Yes, at first it's going to feel like painting by numbers. But if that's what it takes to prevent your material's tendency to evaporate before you get it written, then that's what it takes. I will also take this opportunity to advise that you use Scrivener (as I always do) rather than Word. A writing project, particularly anything over, say, 500 words, is best composed, and certainly best revised, when you can edit each scene as if it was a self-contained document. Word won't let you do that. Scrivener will. It's well worth the investment.
Until Saturn’s Child, I wrote every first draft in long-hand. Typed subsequent drafts on, over the years, a manual typewriter, a Selectric, a memory typewriter and, finally, a series of word processors. Bought my first computer in ’99. Saturn’s Child had to be written onscreen (on the second word processor, which had a separate monitor) because of deadline pressure, and that’s how I made the transition. Oh, and the software on that first computer? WordPerfect 5.1 first, then Corel. Didn’t transition to Word (kicking and screaming) until about ’03. Used to write each chapter as a separate document. Didn’t string them all together until I was finished printing, rewriting, printing, rewriting again. (Always have to read the various drafts in hardcopy, because the eye tends to skip over your own errors.) I think it was probably midway into my second stint in Trek that I made the leap to saving the entire manuscript as a single document. For me, it makes it much easier to make sure I’m not repeating myself. If a particular sentence or phrase (or, rarely, an entire scene) starts to sound too familiar, I can search the entire document in one swell foop and find out that, yeah, that particular line of dialogue on page 357 is almost identical to the one on page 112, and do I want that character to sound like a complete idiot? I understand the need for something like Final Draft if you’re a script writer, and I haven’t used anything like Scrivener, so I don’t know what it’s supposed to do, but then I come from an era of carbon paper and White Out and running to the print shop to shell out for photocopies, so I find Word does everything I need to do. Still miss Corel, though.
Awesome. By damn, I'll get this story going yet. I had never heard of Scrivener, so I went to take a look, and it seems like an excellent program for the way I write. I may have to save up and get a copy. $24 isn't bad if it really can do what it claims to do. So thanks, John Castle, for the recommendation. Also, garamet, I found a great, lightweight word processor that's free, but it also handles other documents like Microsoft Office documents. It's called Kingsoft Writer, and it is fantastic.
I used to have to print my work to seriously proofread it as well. The Galaxy Note 10.1 has done away with that: Loading a "printed" pdf on its screen and working on it with the stylus feels and works exactly the same, only better. (I love that tablet.) I very much second the "structure first" advice, though I've worked with writers who produce excellent, long and complex texts while doing the opposite, and who prefer it that way. I have no idea how, but there it is.
It does just exactly what you were talking about. Each project is presented in a "binder" paradigm, with separate chapters or scenes presented as individual documents within the project's binder. I took a screenshot of it and highlighted the Binder for ya. By the way, the page and text colors aren't the ones you see in the screenshot by default. The default colors are the usual black on white, but I changed mine for aesthetic reasons.
I've just started writing a whole book rather than short stuff for the first time in a decade. I think I'll give scrivener a try. How easy is it to export doc/x and import files with Word comments and traced edits for collaboration? (That's what has kept me away from open source word processing: I need to stay compatible.)
It will compile to .doc and .docx, as well as import from them. One other neat thing it does is, if you have a Word document with detectable chapters or scene transitions already, you can "Import and Split", meaning that Scrivener will import the document, then automatically split detectable chapters into individual documents within the Binder.
It definitely can be, but doesn't have to be. One of my favorite things about it is how much, or how little, I can choose to see of it at any given time. But everybody's got their own bag. The best solution is the one that works, right?
Thanks. You probably haven't had any call for experimneting with importing docx comments and traced changes yet? OpenOffice, for instance, says it imports all of that, but actually gets the details wrong, which breaks a strict workflow between editors.
I wish I could answer that, but I can't -- my workflow never incorporates collaboration. I did find this, however; it may have the answers you're looking for. ETA: Scrivener is also available for Windows, not just Mac.
I'm showing my age here, but what's a memory typewriter? I wish someone had made E.L. James do that before retitling "Masters of the Universe" into "50 Shades of Gray." that was a chore to read because it was so dryly written and grammar mistakes all over the fucking place. And her editor should be blacklisted and never work in the publishing industry again. But rant aside, this is good advice.
I do appreciate all of the advice. I've hit a small stumbling block, but I'm working through it by writing nonsensical words on a notepad. Something will eventually trigger and I'll be off again.
If I'm thinking of the same kind of machine garamet's talking about, a memory typewriter was a very basic word processor -- basically, you would type your document, and the machine would let it buffer in memory, then you could print the thing later.
Yes, it would hold a small amount of text in memory so that you could go back and edit it, then print it when you had it right. You weren't going to do a novel that way, but IIRC a memory typewriter could hold a page or two.
