Let's Talk Editing: Software and How I've Kept My Sanity

Ladies and Gentlemen: Meet the Manuscript.

Don't even ask about the background color, it's a long story.

It's a pretty hefty thing to cart around, as it doesn't really fit in my laptop bag when inside the portfolio I've been holding it in, and at 267 (luckily numbered) pages, I can't exactly let it just let it float around freely.

My editing process has been weird. There will be four or five pages at a time where I'll go into full on line-editing mode, and then suddenly it'll just be vague, abstracted half-cursive, half-print notes about a general idea for how to make this scene not completely suck. I wonder what the notes of real authors look like before they get an editor to hack away at their drafts. I hope they're a little like mine, editing susceptible to the whims of my very scatter-brained mind. I've also made myself a rule to keep from getting distracted, the only rule I've given myself for this process:

You do not change a single thing until all 267 pages have been marked.

It's working, so far. At times I feel very out of my element and in over my head, but then I'll notice a tense change or a sentence made more smooth by turning it into a parallelism. Or maybe I'll rework a sentence into the notably breathy and semi-rushed way of moving through the words that I've developed as a "style" and sit back and think, "the fact that you can make a run-on-sentence acceptable shows that you're not forty thousand dollars in the hole for nothing, Sam. You went to school for this. You can do this."

I like this new part of me. Maybe I'll still call myself a fat cow or socially inept, but Purchase instilled one thing in me: the ability to drink as much alcohol as possible and still wake up hangover-free.

Oh, and writing ability, I suppose.

But still, there's times when the fact that I have two copies of this story, one in print and one on screen, and they're the exact same copy, and that's not a whole lot to work with.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I liked when I used Liquid Story Binder. Unfortunately, that was on my very old and very deceased former laptop, and I didn't really have it at my disposal unless I wanted to make ANOTHER fake email to get the trial from. So I decided to branch out, and get a hold of another piece of writing software.

Scrivener.

You hear about it a lot, it's almost always within the first three comments on forum posts of "what kind of writing software do you recommend?" But I'd never downloaded it, I think either because this is the one that didn't have a PC version or this is the one that didn't have the customization Liquid Story Binder offered (read: I couldn't give it a dorky fantasy background. I'm a fickle girl.)

Either way, it offers a PC version now and the background is less important now that I'm 23 and have a finished first draft to juggle.

And I love it.

I'm on the free trial right now, which lasts for 26 days or something before I have to either export my projects or drop 40$ on the license. I'm 95% sure I'll be buying the license when my time is up. It's just that cool.

Things I love: It's so easy to jump right into and I don't feel pressured at all to write solely in its word processor. The pictures later will show you, I mostly just copy/pasted my document in to start, and I can already see that editing/moving things around within Scrivener will probably be something I'll be able to adjust to rather easily given the amount of sub-categorizing I can do. I'm not sure I could write a full first draft in this program, but editing seems a lot simpler.

Things I don't love: I haven't figured out how to put in a dorky fantasy background yet.

I put Halfer into the Scrivener project format.

You can essentially split up your story as much as you want. I chose to do Chapters, since that's how the draft is written. Seeing it laid out like that in front of me for the first time made it seem more concrete, in a weird way. Twenty chapters seems like a good number now! You don't have to do chapters, you could probably go all the way down to separate words if you wanted, though I don't know why you'd want to.

Each chapter can be divided even further. I split it up into scenes, and they get corkboarded too! This has been helping me figure out whether a chapter is too long, holding irrelevant scenes that should go later, and I think when I'm done marking up the manuscript I'll make preliminary notes on each chapter on the little index cards. Right now they're blank, but you can totally type into them.

You can pretty much subdivide these little folders as much as you want, but I only went two levels deep before I dropped my text in. Each scene holds the scene its labeled as (duh) and while I think it might be a little clunky at first to keep moving back and forth, the organization the software's giving me probably makes up for having to spend some time getting used to it.

I also made a blank page underneath the chapters that I keep open while I'm editing my papers...this is really super handy because I've been able to just look up and quickly type out a poorly-spelled and often mean note or idea to myself on what I'm editing. I type faster than I write, so it's a lot easier to reach up and plunk some keys than to grab a marker and write the whole thing out while maintaining my concentration.

Scrivener has so much other stuff too. 

Like most writing software, it offers folders for pictures and character profiles and even music and things you wouldn't think about holding in one place. It's got so much potential to be whatever you want it to be, whether you just want it to store all your worldbuilding info or you want to work from the ground up on a new project. I think it's definitely worth the license price.

So basically this is how I've been editing, and I'm really excited to finish marking these pages up, so the real fun part can begin. This program has me really excited to use it. I know you could probably find a million better reviews on it around the internet, but I just wanted to let you guys know what I thought about it.

Also, this is the picture I promised in my last post, where I write now! I wish it wasn't sunny outside and was instead taken during the 40 days and 40 nights of rain we had, but nothing's perfect. I love the loft area cause it allows me to hide in the shadows and watch for people I know that I don't actually want to talk to.

Viva la Introvert!