I am on blog holiday while I meet a deadline for Evil Day Job. Please enjoy this rerun of one of my past posts.
Okay, so I’ve been giving all sorts of things a trial run in terms of trying to outline Til Death Do Us Part (which needs a new title, so if you have suggestions, please feel free to offer them). For House of Cards, I didn’t outline on the front end. About halfway through I made a loose sort of outline of events up to that point and an action points outline of what I wanted to come after. I used a very low tech solution of index cards to write out all the stuff that happens and organize it into a more suspenseful whole. That worked fairly well but took up most of my living room.
When I got started on Flash Point, I simplified and embraced PBW’s Novel Notebook, which works out to be a very useful tool but not one that’s calling my name for TDDUP.
Well, then I remembered Crystal King mentioning doing some cluster mapping sorts of stuff. And that led me to FreeMind. I downloaded and tried this earlier this week, and I found it a really neat way to visually link stuff together. Except that the program won’t allow me (that I can tell) to draw lines between two connected series of events or have more than one root node. So I stopped that.
Well then Pot got in on the search and we revisited PageFour. This is a really nifty simple word processing program designed for writers. You can organize your work in progress in a way that suits you, put your character summaries and plot outlines wherever you feel like it, have all your chapters and notes, right there with easy access. The trial version is free and allows you to have up to 3 workbooks going at once. This particular software works really well for Pot because she routinely has boocoodles of windows open in Word between notes and the chapter she’s working on and maybe the full draft, etc. Though she was very disappointed that it won’t allow her to write in pink.
She also found Papel, which I downloaded and looked at but didn’t really use. One post about it said
Papel is a new and intuitive tool for creative writers, it features a drag & drop interface, fully customisable icons and colour themes, writing project backup, timed Auto-save when editing text content, spell check and thesaurus. Papel allows you to write intuitively without logical tasks interfering with the flow of your ideas….
It’s also free, for those who wish to try it out.
Oh but then she found Text Block Writer. Now this one we both really like. This program (also free) allows you to create text blocks, which are tantamount to the index cards I used before, and arrange them in columns in any order you choose. It is, essentially, a virtual way to storyboard exactly how I do with index cards without the taking over of all flat surfaces in my living room! There is also an export feature which allows you to take your outline as created in TBW and send it to an RTF file so you can read the whole thing. There is some sort of additional code/commands you must type in to make everything appear as is in the program, but either way, another great way to represent your story. Pot and I came up with the following coding system for blocks:
Gray: backstory
Red: suspense
Pink: romance
Green: action that advances the plot
Yellow: Questions to answer
Orange: setting
Purple: secondary plot
Brown: general notes
Blue: character
Black: conflict
From there we’re doing things somewhat differently, but this system allows us to send our TBW files back and forth for comments and know what we’re looking at. She’s more detailed than I am (and you can see her take on the program here), and that’s mostly likely a product of my natural resistance to outlining at all, even though I know I should. I approach it with about the same dread I would the gallows. Sad, I know. But at heart I am still a pantser. Gotta change for professional productivity level though. Sad.
Anyway, of the lot, my vote went to Text Block Writer. I do really like PageFour as a word processor, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever switch from Word just because I email my files back and forth to myself at work to work on during my spare time. Speaking of work….must get myself there post haste.