The Timeline Project – I use this to keep track of all the events, by character, in my novel. I need to keep track of which characters are doing what at the same time. It’s is a nice, free program which allows you to look at characters alone or altogether.

Writing Advice Books

Write away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life - Elizabeth George
Story Engineering: Character Development, Story Concept, Scene Construction - Larry Brook
Techniques of the Selling Writer - Dwight V. Swain

Hours Sleep Today so far : – 11 hours in 2 sessions
Headache intensity / pain level : 6
Nausea level : 0
Joint / muscle pain : 2
Fatigue : 8
Brain Fog : 8

• Write away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life - Elizabeth George
• Story Engineering: Character Development, Story Concept, Scene Construction - Larry Brook
• Techniques of the Selling Writer – Dwight V. Swain

Children are important. They are the future. We can reshape our society through what we teach children and the way we influence them. The task is urgent.

- Media Associates International

read more… in LittWorld Online

Lo and behold! I think I hath found such a program.

It is called Keepnote from http://keepnote.org/

So far it works for all my systems, mainly windows and linux. It seems to be what I have been looking for.

Now I have been working on getting my structure down tight. The key scenes according to Story Engineering are being thought out. Helpful to keep Larry Brook’s material on my nook so I can reference it as I go.

Wish me luck

Update: Keepnote has been dropped from my useful programs. At least for the time being. When I have created another notebook inside Keepnote for two seperate stories, it merged them together into one file.

I wasn’t happy. Not happy at all.

“Characters are sometimes defined by their backstory.  And sometimes they are who they are in spite of their backstory.”

I want to give a shout out to all of those people who come from a depth of madness that you would never imagine just by looking at them.  I want to acknowledge those people who get up each day and put on their work clothes and earn a living and come home and spend time with their families, who put on a happy face and go grocery shopping and get stuck in traffic and pay taxes.  Those are my people!  It seems like no one sees that you are doing so much better than where you came from.   Living well in spite of your backstory is hard, but each day you get up and choose to make something of yourself is a day that you are a bad-ass.

Countless tales exist, and countless more wait to be told. Successful ones contain similar ingredients, which I would catalog as (1) an engaging main character, (2) a catalyst that drives the main character on a particular course, (3) the introduction of detours and obstacles, (4) a point of crisis, (5) confronting the crisis and (6) overcoming or failing that crisis to bring the story to its conclusion.  This can be delivered in a single cycle or a series of escalating tests and resolutions that bring us to the main climax of the story.

Type “On Writing” into the search bar at Amazon.com and you will get a return of nearly 330,000 titles.  So I am not going to try to spell out the secrets of writing in an 800-word post, but I would like to share at least a few resources where you can get a taste of several approaches to writing.

Author Jennifer Monahan (An American in Oz and My First Three Husbands), shared a comment on one of my posts that author David Nicholls defines the critical elements of a story as “1) Action 2) Confrontation 3) Moments of Decision.”   Jennifer also pointed me to the website of Lee Pound who offers a home-study course on storytelling where you can find great information about crafting powerful storytelling.  His take on the necessary elements of an inspirational story are: (1) a defining moment, (2) a strong character, (3) a desire within the character, (4) opposition/obstacles, (5) plot, (6) resolution, and (7) a lesson learned.

Rebecca Berto (aka Novel Girl) has embarked on a series of posts in which she is distilling Larry Brooks’ book Story Engineering, which contends that (1) Concept, (2) Character, (3) Theme, (4) Structure, (5) Scene Execution, and (6) Writing Voice are the core competencies for a successful book. Rebecca has begun explaining Larry’s approach very clearly.  Visit her blog and/or buy Larry’s book for more information.

Randy Ingermanson has developed a process for writing, which focuses on meticulously planning out the details in advance with a 10-step system called the Snowflake Method.  He advises to start short and general and then gradually expand your focus bringing in more detail to your outline.  (1) Start with a one sentence summary that is 15 words or less. (2) Expand it into a paragraph. (3) Describe each of your characters in one page each. (4) Take all of the sentences in your single paragraph summary done in step 2 and expand each one into a paragraph. (5) Summarize the story from each character’s point of view. (6) Expand your one page synopsis created in step 4 into a four page summary. (7) Expand your step 3 character descriptions. (8) Make a spreadsheet with a sentence describing each scene in your book. (9-optional) Expand your spreadsheet into a narrative version providing a paragraph for each scene. (10) NOW write your book. Randy has written Writing Fiction for Dummies and has Snowflake Method software that will guide you through his process.

Jordan McCollum has provided a very exhaustive exploration into the art of writing with a series of 22 posts back in 2009 full of great information about the need for plotting, the three act structure, the Hero Journey, the Snowflake method, and Brook’s Story Structure method.  I commend this series of posts to you as well.

There are countless approaches to writing but I think we’re all on the same page. From Homer’s The Odyssey to Star Wars, from Gulliver’s Travels to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, authors (aka storytellers) have followed the same basic pattern to entertain, frighten, enchant, anger, and inspire us.

Whether you are one who maps everything out in advance or are the kind of writer who takes the seat-of-the-pants approach, we all write one word at a time.  I work using a hybrid, but lean much further in the seat-of-my-pants direction.  I am just not very organized.  You should see my desk at work, it’s piled with the refuse of past and current projects.  I don’t think that I am disciplined enough to chart out a book from beginning to end, although the snowflake approach sounds intriguing. I have noted in this blog a number of times that the journey of discovery is where the pleasure of writing lies for me and I fear that plotting every detail out ahead of time would diminish that sense of discovery. What ever your approach, I hope there is something here that caught your attention.

What are your tips on how to be successful in writing?

Larry Brooks believes strongly in planning. (Image by Scott Huber)

Are you the kind of person who makes lists?  You know, grocery lists, “to do” lists, household chores lists, Christmas lists.

I hate making lists. I prefer to keep it all in my head. I’d rather walk through the entire grocery store and down all the aisles and figure out what I need. Sometimes my wife gives me a list and I have to navigate the store by departments, making sure I get everything she has on the list.

And there is always some ingredient or item I’ve never heard of, so that takes me twice the time in the store to track down everything on the list. Then I can start on my stuff. But because I’ve worn myself out, I become disoriented and can only pick up the things I can think of off the top of my head.

I write the same way. I don’t make an outline. I have a general idea where I want to get (what my story is about) and I ramble down the aisles of creativity, led my protagonist, other characters, and villains and pick up the necessary items to write my story.

So when I chaired a workshop recently for Oregon Writer’s Colony featuring Larry Brooks and his take on Story Engineering, I didn’t think I’d enjoy it much. He called me out during the workshop, suggesting I was a Pantster (person who writes by the seat of his pants).

Then he said something that made perfect sense to me. He said if you plan out your story in advance, you know where you are going when you sit down to write it. This enables you to write a publishable story in one draft. Almost!

You see I’m on my fifth draft of trying to make my current novel polished enough to sell. So when he said that, a light bulb went on over my head. I’m sure if I had a mirror at the time I would have seen it illuminate.

I could divide my story into scenes, plan the scenes according to Plot Points and Pinch Points and other standard story structure devices and write to each scene. This intrigued me because I can see myself doing that and in so doing, writing much tighter and concise. And shortening the timeline for writing a book.

So this week I’ve divided my writing schedule into three parts. Revising my current novel, plotting my next novel (which has the potential not only to be bought, but to be a best seller–yes I am that high on the story concept), and to work on another short story.

I’m using Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering techniques on the new novel and new short story. It’s painful because I want to be writing and taking the time to draft the outline according to a certain structural format is tediously hard work. But it is working. My short story outline is nearly done and I’ve only worked on it this weekend.

It will be the second one with Billie Bly as the heroine. I sent the first one to Alfred Hitchcock magazine October 26th. It was just inside the 12,000 word limit. By using the outline I hope to limit this one to 8,000 words.

The new novel will take longer, but I have some good ideas and some research should help spark more ideas.

I didn’t go into the mechanics here on story engineering, but you can check it out on Larry’s blog at Storyfix.com . This link goes to Day 31 of Larry’s 31 days to prepare for NaNoWriMo, an annual writing ritual to get people into the first draft of a book in 30 days in November.  If you search his blog and start at Day 1 you will gather some excellent writing tips.

For me, this information is the missing ingredient to my grocery list. And I don’t mind making a list anymore if means success in a shorter time period and a better story.

Okay, ignore that telemarketing job I walked out on after less than a day. I couldn’t take the rejection.

Don’t consider my brief one-week stint flipping burgers at a bowling alley. I didn’t much care for the mess.

Fine. The one time I flat-out quit something, I was in the fourth grade.

An asthmatic kid who barely weighed 50 pounds, I walked out onto a soccer field not knowing the difference between a forward and a fullback. Like a deer caught on the city streets, I scrambled back and forth. I turned towards my coach on the sidelines in a desperate plea for help. The soccer ball came out of nowhere – at great speed and force – and hit me flat on the side of my face.

It stung.
My nose bled.
The whistle blew.

Oddly enough, my recent novel-writing experiences mirrored my fear of rejection, my discomfort with a mess, and my day on the field.

I jumped back and forth between the first five chapters. I tried desperately to find my footing in the story and plow through to the end. At work, the story unfolded clearly in my mind. When I got home and opened the file, the plot faded, the chapters looked disjointed. I considered my options: walk away and let the novel gather dust on my hard drive, or suck it up and trust that the struggle yields a lesson.

One place I found solace was on The Sharp Angle, in Lydia’s recent post, The Benefits of Writing Short Fiction:

A good way to improve your skills as a novelist is to write short fiction.

Most of my writing experience is rooted in short fiction; I can write a lucid beginning, middle and end for a concentrated word count. So, I wondered how to translate those skills (in which I feel more confident) to novel writing (in which I fall back into the nightmare of a fourth grade misfit in the middle of a soccer field). Lydia responded to my question in her comments and helped me figure out the crux of my problem:  the “ominous middle” of the novel, as she called it.

The middle of my novel resembled a custard pie that didn’t quite gel. Some semblance of structure existed, but most of the story oozed all over the place. No wonder I never ventured past chapter five. And, because of my fear, chapter five almost ate me alive.

But Lydia’s post, her comments, and her suggestion reinvigorated me.

I am armed and ready.

Nothing’s coming between me and my laptop, at least not during the hours of 1 and 3pm (aka. nap time for child #2). I’m balancing some novel work with short story edits and trusting that, with persistence, the pieces will fall together.

If’ you’re fighting with your novel and are dizzy from the glare of too much red ink on that rewrite draft, here are some links to re-energizing tips:

• From Julie Bush: Story, Write Back to Front
• Darcy Pattison (at Fiction Notes), Revise: Remember the 4 Sources of Conflict
• Larry Brook (on Storyfix.com), Story Structure Series
• Janice Hardy (from The Other Side of the Story), Re-write Wednesday: Oh, That’s Subtle

And, of course The Sharp Angle, where the conversations on short fiction continue.

What resources do you rely on to to carry you through the muddy rewrites of a novel?