Introduction
After self-publishing my debut novel, I think the normal thing to do would be to reflect on what I’ve learned in a broader sense, how I’ve changed as a person and all that jazz. I’m not sure I have, though. That’s the problem, and I need to let that sink in for a while.
What has changed about me, however, is my understanding of writing tools. It took me a log time writing to learn to use them, to learn I needed them to begin with, for that matter, so I’d like to talk about the ones I’ve used most in case anyone else finds them useful.
Scrivener
Scrivener is the tool of tools, the Swiss army knife for any writer. It lets you organize documents and a whole lot more. Once I got a grasp of story structure, I set up folders in my Scrivener project:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 (since Act 2 of a story takes up two middle parts). Subfolders were used for chapters, and chapters were broken up into scenes.
That way, you can click and drag to arrange scenes within chapters if you ever need to change their order. And since you can summarize these documents and view them on a corkboard-like layout, you can also keep visual track of your story.
Another thing you can do is add tags to each document. I tagged each scene with every character that was in it as well as what day or days it occurred on, since keeping track of in-world time was important. All that was left was the actual writing!
Word
Word is the Powerhouse of writing software, and these days, you can use it for free online. An Office 365 subscription is pretty cheap too. It’s no Scrivener, you can’t organize and summarize your scene as easily, but once you have everything in order already, paste it into Word, scene by scene. There’s an export function, but it’s not worth the pain.
In Word, I could see my draft as a whole. Set the spacing, et the indents, chose the font, margins, and page size. I could see my book page-by-page, like a printed book, but more importantly, with all my scenes and chapters in one document, it was easier to feed the entire story into the editing tools I’d use next.
Conclusion
And those are really all you need to write. Heck, they’re not the only options out there, and you could stick with Word alone if you like (or the non-Microsoft word processor of your choice), but the organization provided by Scrivener—I’d have been pulling my hair out even faster without it.
At any rate, now that I’ve covered writing a draft, I’ll dig into tools and resources for editing next.