adventures in revision

[marycatelli]

Hack, hack, hack -- you know, in the old days, they would actually take out a scissors and a paste pot in order to reorder stuff in a story.

It's not gotten that much easier even when you can open the file twice and hack and slash from one to the other, because the real difficulty lies in pulling out all the chunks of stuff that have to go somewhere, and then filing off everything that no longer fits, and mortaring them into their new place.  With plenty of mortar, often enough.

Can be rather easier with an outline.  When giving people advice on how to critique a story, I recommend criticizing the overarching plot and the soundness and consistency of characterization, and other big picture things first, and an outline helps with that when you're working with your own stuff.  Also, bracketing stuff and putting arrows to where it belongs is even easier than cut and paste.  (Neatly, so that it can be interpreted correctly when I'm typing it up is another matter. . . .)

But not always, particularly if the effect goes deep.   Sometimes there is no cure but to entirely rewrite the outline, with the old one at hand so as to steal all that I can. . . and remind myself that it's still easier than doing it in the manuscript.  If not that much easier. . . .

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Arrows? I'm trying to get Word 2003 to draw a flowchart on top of the text file. ;-)

[level-head.livejournal.com]

To arrows human, as they say.

I'm not certain how well it is supported in Word 2003. But in Word 2007, you can insert a canvas (as part of the "Insert Shapes" menu), then add text boxes to the canvas in the shape of the flowchart symbols you need. There's a pretty good selection.

Then you can add lines, and you can connect the attach points of the symbols together so that if you move a symbol, the end of the line is dragged with it. You can also force a line to "elbow" to make the connection, rather than run diagonally.

It works well.

One subtlety: If you try to put a symbol inside another text box, it will complain (for example, if grouping a part of the diagram and giving it a process name). But just add it outside the box, and drag it in.

When revising a story as Mary is doing here, I definitely use outlines — and I keep the chapter's outline at the bottom of each chapter when I'm writing (updated automatically from the main outline).

When reorganizing, I create two (or more) styles with different text colors, and assign hotkeys to them. This lets me consign an entire paragraph to one part or another with a single keystroke. Later, when moving them into place, I can focus on the move (by color) and no longer have to think about the text.

And I set the background color in the "from" documents too, so that I can always tell at a glance which one I'm in. Only the new, good version is left with a white background.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

[marycatelli]

Ah, all the tricks and tools which manage to emulate a piece of paper and pen -- while, to be sure, letting you do things those two never would. . . .

Life is full of trade-offs.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

What good ideas about colors!

I've encountered the drawing canvas. If I make one big canvas that covers the whole page, then it's hard to get at the text to change the text -- even when the canvas is formatted as 'behind text'. And the canvas keeps appearing and disappearing like the Cheshire Cat, so it is hard to format it or change its size.

So at the moment I'm foregoing the luxury of 'connectors' that would move with a (pesky) text box, and trying plain lines that don't need a canvas, and moving them by hand. This way I can have the text in a simple column (in a Word table with only one or two rows) so if inspiration flashes I can type unlimited new stuff into the text right there, and sort it out later.

My dream is to have the whole chapter and its notes in a timetable, one column per character, on a single screen in small font, with some arrows showing through to act as a flow chart to show what has to happen to Colonel Mustard in the library before Miss Scarlett can find his corpse.

[marycatelli]

Ah, a word processor that would structure the story as well. . . .

[level-head.livejournal.com]

That sounds reasonable enough. One trick: Clicking the text of a text box in the canvas "lights it up" so that you can then access the box's attributes or move it.

Also, you can link text boxes so that more than one box acts as a sort of "column" -- if you've got a lot on a character, it can stretch to boxes across more than one page.


The automatic text at the bottom of each chapter has been handy for me. The outline is maintained only at the end of the entire document, but I've inserted a cross-reference to the paragraph text at the end of each (originally empty) chapter. So chapter 3 has a "text cross reference" to #3 in my outline, and so on.

If I change the master outline, the chapters are automatically updated. The useful thing is particularly with new writing, as I've got my "things to do in this chapter" immediately below where I'm typing. Easy to focus on the scene of the moment, and not have to keep the entire structure in mind at that instant.

Best wishes!

===|==============/ Level Head

[marycatelli]

Ah, the things Word makes you juggle.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

As I muddle along, I'm inspired by your color highlighting. What I had in mind was a timetable with arrows to show causation, so as to make sure I have necessary events happen in the right order (and don't wander too far into unnecessary events). And some horizontal shape-drawing to show which events for different characters can be combined into a single scene featuring both characters.

But your highlighting also sounds useful for showing which events need to be on-stage (omni POV here), and which are written and which are in various stages of planning/writing/revising.

[marycatelli]

For me, that sounds like a thing which could be very dangerous, insofar as forgetting to update it could be misleading. 0:)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I'm more likely to never let it out of my sight, and therefore type too much in, so that one character's column would look like Proust.

Hm, with CAD, could we do this for a time travel story?

[marycatelli]

Ah, the trade-offs of writing!

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

You of course would outline time travel on an origami tessaract.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you find it useful.

The big trick, for me, was to use Word's styles to do this. Manual highlighting and color changing was tedious, and ultimately fragile.

I'm happy to share DOC files, and the spreadsheets that I build for writing as well, if you like.

===|==============/ Level Head

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

How nice! I'm houseboatonstyx at gmail

[level-head.livejournal.com]

All right. I'll send you two items, both tied to the same project, a science fiction novel set in a rather different future society. Their ancestors were octopuses.

In the DOC file, there is the text I mentioned at the bottom of each chapter, that is from the outline. Any edits you do in the outline (the reddish text toward the end) is automatically brought into each chapter.

I use the same text to populate a timeline, as well, right toward the end. (The concept of a timeline was tricky, as the octans don't keep time the way we do, and even their months are lunar, which means some years have twelve and some thirteen. For the story (set in the far future, of course) I had to make sure that the moon was where I wanted it to be, as the octans don't yet have artificial light.)

My Lady_Anne and I hammered on the outline for a good week or so, and it went through many revisions. The chapters at this point were empty except for the outline text ... and a bit of text from a short story I'd written before. (The same basic concept, but the short story goes rather in a different direction.)

The second file I will send you is an Excel spreadsheet that I used to track the writing of the story. From Chapter 1 to completion of the entire first draft, 80,000 words, was one month exactly.

The spreadsheet was handy: As I entered my word count from time to time, and it would predict what day the draft would be finished. I'd find that if I did another couple of hundred words, I could shave one more day off of the prediction, so I'd push harder.

I set goals of chapter counts (from the outline, one paragraph per chapter) and word count (guessing 80k as a good novel draft size), and from there it was automatic. I also did a bit of a trick at the top so that my outline and such did not figure into the word count. And you can select by style, and get a word count of that, if you're using Word 2003 or later.

I continued to tinker with the story a bit; you'll see that it's at 100k words now. I did some adjusting and added some details to tie into the sequel.

I hope you find this material of use. Feel free to file the serial numbers off and use it for your own projects.

(I have other spreadsheets where their timekeeping system and even growth rates were worked out, as well as the family trees of the main characters — which is very odd for a reason specific to their culture — but these seemed less useful to you.)

Ah... just thinking about it, the hotkeys I use will not be preserved. You can add hotkeys to any style by clicking "Modify" in a style, and changing the "Shortcut key".

===|==============/ Level Head

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Sent.

The subject line was "Writing instruments: Age of Octans" -- let me know when you get it, please.

===|==============/ Level Head

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

The two files arrived, thank you!

When reorganizing, I create two (or more) styles with different text colors, and assign hotkeys to them. This lets me consign an entire paragraph to one part or another with a single keystroke. Later, when moving them into place, I can focus on the move (by color) and no longer have to think about the text.

This is the sort of thing that interests me the most: using color to organize the text.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

There is some of that in the document I sent; the outline is a different style (and color) and the automatic paragraphs extracted from it are yet another color, based upon styles.

However, I don't have anything in the midst of reorganizing at the moment.

Well, actually I do — a scientific research grant that I'm writing (it's my "day job" so to speak) that is being treated that way as I cut it down from 85 pages of material to a 12-page research plan. I use the styles/colors to remind myself what parts are raw text from others' work, and what part is my own writing summarizing it.

But this would just seem like a mashup at this point -- it is, really -- and probably useful only as a description.

I use Alt-R for a style called "Raw" (lavender background), Alt-X for "External" (someone else's writing, reddish background) and Alt-I for "Instructions" (material from the grant documents themselves). The final product is Body Text and Body Text Indent, which are black-on-white.

===|==============/ Level Head

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Speaking of reorganizing, though, these keystrokes in Word (supported for most of two decades) are not well known.

Wherever you are, Shift-Alt-Up will move the object you're in up one notch, and Shift-Alt-Down will move it down.

Whether it's an outline item or a paragraph, you don't have to block mark anything.

I use these keystrokes extensively (hundreds of times just in the past week), and over the years they've not just saved time, they've made certain reorganization tasks palatable enough to actually do.

===|==============/ Level Head

[marycatelli]

Shocking as it may seem -- I outline by hand. Which means I can easily make the outline look like someone's been sketching out football plays on it.

In the days when I used a typewriter, my manuscripts tended to look like that, too.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Not shocking at all, and I agree with utility being the important ingredient. My time tracking system uses (or at least starts on) Post-It notes and index cards. Whatever works!

And I miss the old Selectric keyboard — and golf ball (though I did find the Brother's drop-in daisy wheel to be clever and convenient).

===|==============/ Level head

[marycatelli]

Easily reordered -- how handy.