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marydell[warning: cussing and petulance!]
I keep testing different writing software, and it all SUCKS, because none of it matches my process, which is, admittedly, weird, but it's not THAT weird. See, I can perfectly well organize scenes and chapters using anydamnthing. So can anybody who learned outlining in grade school. I have MS-Word, which has a lovely outline mode that's served me for years for short stories. Why must every writing-organization-notebooky thing be just another model of the apparently amazing concept of the outline, for fuck's sake? Yeah, some of them have nice add-on tools and helpful things, but they're all just variants of chapter/scene outliners.
Damnit, software people, I need to organize the fucking story*, not the fucking plot!** I can't start plotting until I figure out WHAT HAPPENS to everybody. And how things link characters together. A character-notes page with an embedded picture is not helpful, because it never connects to the other characters or events, and I'm not writing a goddamn RPG. Surely someone else has complex chains of events to map out? (Some of which are backstory that will never actually make it onto the page?) And has come up with a nice software proggy to do it in? THAT RUNS ON A FUCKING PC???
Argh. I have a whole group of major characters, some of whom have lives that span generations of normal human lives, and some of whom live normal human lifespans. And there's a war, and people move around from planet to planet, and the whole series of events spans about 150 years, with the primary focus of the plot following characters through a particularly hectic year or two. Maybe a really big whiteboard would help?
I guess I can take a crack at it in Excel. If I give each character a column, and each year a row, and write what happens to each person in the appropriate cell, that might actually work. Hmmm. Will try it and report back. FUCK
*Story=what happened, in chrono order
**Plot=the way you tell the story
I keep testing different writing software, and it all SUCKS, because none of it matches my process, which is, admittedly, weird, but it's not THAT weird. See, I can perfectly well organize scenes and chapters using anydamnthing. So can anybody who learned outlining in grade school. I have MS-Word, which has a lovely outline mode that's served me for years for short stories. Why must every writing-organization-notebooky thing be just another model of the apparently amazing concept of the outline, for fuck's sake? Yeah, some of them have nice add-on tools and helpful things, but they're all just variants of chapter/scene outliners.
Damnit, software people, I need to organize the fucking story*, not the fucking plot!** I can't start plotting until I figure out WHAT HAPPENS to everybody. And how things link characters together. A character-notes page with an embedded picture is not helpful, because it never connects to the other characters or events, and I'm not writing a goddamn RPG. Surely someone else has complex chains of events to map out? (Some of which are backstory that will never actually make it onto the page?) And has come up with a nice software proggy to do it in? THAT RUNS ON A FUCKING PC???
Argh. I have a whole group of major characters, some of whom have lives that span generations of normal human lives, and some of whom live normal human lifespans. And there's a war, and people move around from planet to planet, and the whole series of events spans about 150 years, with the primary focus of the plot following characters through a particularly hectic year or two. Maybe a really big whiteboard would help?
I guess I can take a crack at it in Excel. If I give each character a column, and each year a row, and write what happens to each person in the appropriate cell, that might actually work. Hmmm. Will try it and report back. FUCK
*Story=what happened, in chrono order
**Plot=the way you tell the story
