T-Minus 5 – Still Plotting for NaNoWriMo


We are about five days from November 1st (Yeah, I know I’m not constant on the way that I count days. Bite me) and I’m still plotting for the novel (curse you, aqua notes). So, I wanted to do a little self-promotion (because I’m both lazy, and a genius) by reusing some old posts and bringing up the topic of…organization. Yup, that old thing.

So, a while back I wrote two guides for scrivener, and talked about how amazing that thing is when writing novels. I know that some people just hate the thing because it’s so damned complicated to use at times, but that’s why I wrote the guides. It really is a powerful tool…(scrivener people, send me money for the free marketing, please).

Free advertisements aside, that software really helped me at thinking about organization and structure a little differently. I used to have outlines before, but they were always a mess. Things were everywhere…files were spread out, and a novel looked like I had dropped an egg on my kitchen floor. It was…a mess. So, revising or even wanting to work on the novel in the first place was awful. I didn’t want to start because I was lost.

That’s why the software helped me. It keeps everything in one place, and it’s amazing. But, what that taught me was how to keep and take notes for a novel. Since then, when I outline or plot, I tend to make sure they’re all together within a single place. In fact, I keep a single notebook for everything now. No longer do I have 20 notebooks for whatever I do. One, with an index. That’s my game.

But I digress a bit. The scrivener guides I made a while back are meant to take the difficulty of scrivener and remove it by just giving you the basics. Of course, they don’t cover a lot, and there’s plenty more tools that can be used (maybe I’ll make another one in the future).

But, to conclude this, I’ll go ahead and link them here. Please check them out!

Scrivener Tutorial One: Quick Start

Scrivener Tutorial Two: Organization