Thursday 18 August 2005

Pic of the day: "Life is not so easy that you can survive without any planning" says Tamami-chan from the cute and innocent anime Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~. Neither is NaNoWriMo that easy.

Tools for plotting

Even though November is indeed very far off, I have been looking at a couple tools for plotting, outlining and keeping notes for a book. (Not plotting world domination... yet!) The NaNoWriMo forums never sleep... or at least not for long. (More like a colicky baby, I guess.) The forum, more exactly "Nano technology", is where I first heard about these two programs.

One is the electronic equivalent of cards, on which some people write quick notes and later shuffle them around. This is supposed to cause great creativity. Some famous person called Holly Lisle wrote an interesting article about this, which I found rather inspiring in that it explained a scene as any portion of text where there is at least one change. This made me think of programming. So basically all I need to do is define a variable and assign a new value to it, just like in programming. I can do that. If you write, you owe it to yourself to read the article about notecarding. Hollylisle.com also has many other interesting pages. I am amazed that someone would give away so much trade knowledge for free. Highly admirable.

The notecarding program is called Writer's Blocks 3. I tried it but didn't like it that much. It is very expensive, but it does include a full-featured text processors, so it is more valuable if you don't already have a favorite writing tool. For just outlining the price hardly seems justified. On the plus side, it allows you to do the note card thing with far more options than physical note cards, and most of the benefits. If you are really addicted to note cards, this could be it for you. And if you can sell a book you should be able to pay it easily. (Or at least deduct it from your taxable income.)

Personally I am unlikely to ever sell a book. I still intend to write, and to write so well that others may want to read it. But I'm not planning to quit my job to live off my writing. Not everyone who can cook a yummy meal needs to become a cook, chef or some such. Sometimes you just want to make something good for people you like, right?

So the good news is that there is free software that is very good. For the actual writing, there is always OpenOffice.org, an office suite roughly equal to Microsoft Office. Its text processor should be good enough for anyone except the seriously disabled. It has continuous spell checking, word completion, quick word count, master documents with sub-documents (ideal for chapters) and the usual tools such as index, cross-reference, footnotes, bibliography database... And it can make PDF or HTML files, if you need to distribute your work. And of course there is some outline capability.

When it comes to outlining, organizing notes etc, however, my new favorite is a small, free program called KeyNote. It lets you organize your notes in a tree-structure, which I love. One main branch could be the actual chapters, while smaller branches could be the characters, the places, timelines. It is very generic, so you have to impose a structure of your own. Basically any notes you can think of, you can write at the touch of a hotkey, then just place them wherever you think appropriate in the "tree". Unlimited post-it notes baby!

On the other hand, if you CAN'T think of what notes you should make, you may want to look at Power Writer. I tested it last fall (Oct 12 and Oct 28) but didn't find it worth the price, since I already have the text processor part for free. But it does ask a lot of leading question. For every chapter and plot point (scene) it asks the essential questions like "Why would people continue to read after this is finished?", "What does this plot point reveal about [character] and how does it bring them closer to their goal?" For each character it conducts an interview not just about eye and hair color, but also ambition, their greatest hope and greatest fear, more stuff like that. It encourages making lots of background for your story.

As for me, my muses usually take care of those trivial tasks. I rarely ever see them fail at it. People don't change eye color (or if they do, it is because of contacts) and they even have some small quirks that set them apart, like a pet phrase they use to excess. On the other hand, muses come and go. I take a weekend off, and the muse sulks and leaves. You don't become a published writer that way. On the other hand, as a published writer I would probably be insufferable. ^_^