Drawing from the Well
Nothing here…
Filling the Well
…or here…
Polishing the Well
…or really here. It was a rough day yesterday and I’m glad it’s over. I’m ready to move on even though I still have to deal with some of the aftermath from yesterday. I’m hoping and praying that today is a better day.
Well Chat
The FREE Scrivener Alternative
This may take a couple of days to get through because I want to show just how great this program is. Strap in for some tool description!
yWriter, as I said above, is a free alternative to Scrivener. There is an option to pay a fee to register your copy of yWriter, but that is merely to support the developers. Free is my favorite price and was one of the draws of this program instead of Scrivener priced at $45? Really? I thought it was more than that. Still Free > Pay so here we are.
yWriter includes utilities for some of the Campfire utilities I mentioned yesterday. The files are divided by “project” which for me means by book. I don’t overlap my books. I edited the latter half of Book One in yWriter to get everything straight because I was moving a lot of stuff around. When I started mapping out Book Two, I started a whole new project from blank scratch (I know it’s terrifying, it’s going to be okay, I promise). This meant that not only was I not bound by what I did before (other than what was in the first book that I had to take as canon), but I also didn’t have to work around it. I know that everything contained in my Book Two file pertains only to that. I recommend this; don’t cram a whole series into one yWriter file (I would recommend the same with Scrivener, frankly).
Now, why yWriter? To explain why to use this software, I have to lay out what it has in it. Like I said before, this may take a couple of days. yWriter is the following main intereface:
Now, you can see that I have chapters down the side and scenes on the right. Now we’ve talked before about the anatomy of a Scene and that acts as the undercarriage of this program. Now, you don’t have to USE the scene cycle to build your book. yWriter just allows you to create scenes as small pieces that eventually build up to chapters. For Book Two, I actually have a Scene Repository chapter as well as chapters for each major character that contains high points of their journey through this novel. None of that will actually make it into the final product. That’s one of the nice things about yWriter is that you can classify a “chapter” as a chapter in truth or as just informational. Now, what’s in each scene you might ask?
A lot, frankly. There’s tabs for just about everything you can think of. The Content tab is where you write the actual text of the scene. Everything else is supporting background information. Details allows you to put in high points about the scene as well as the POV character and any tags, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can tag which characters, locations, and items are in the scene. You can have loose Notes about the scene as well as a picture if that helps. And then there’s the Goals tab. This is the scene cycle itself. yWriter divides the scene and the sequel through a radio button:
So the Scene is Action and the Sequel is Reaction. yWriter also uses slightly different terms, like Outcome instead of Disaster, but if you’re familiar with the scene cycle, you can translate that in your head. One other nicety is that you can tag a scene as exclusively pertaining to the main plot or a subplot. I don’t use that, but you can if you want. There’s also exporting rules if you want as well as including the date, time, and length of the scene. There’s a Rating tab but I don’t get that so I’m not going to try and explain it.
Once you’ve written your scene (or in my case mapped it at least), you can drag and drop scenes into different chapters. If you need to rearrange, click on the chapter where the scene lives and drag and drop again. It IS that easy.
So this has already been a lot, but there’s a lot more. Tomorrow, I’ll cover creating characters, locations, and items. Pending writing space before getting obscenely long, I’ll talk about some of the finer points as well. This might turn into a three-day post. Love y’all. Have a great Tuesday.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG