Writing in a sequential pattern

My main tool of the writing trade is Notepad++ which is the standard windows editor in steorids, without the bulk of most replacements. Although it has a word count function and you can also make a shortcut for it (but not combined with select all and count, which you need to do first) it does not offer a word count display while typing, nor have I found a plugin for that yet. Maybe something I have to do myself.

In the failed quest for said plugin I came across multiple solutions for writers. Many of them even opensource. I came across one I would like to link but have lost the url for. The gist of this free tool is that you write scenes, not pages or chapters. Then you group scenes into chapters. Now moving scenes or chapters around is rather simple. Myself for example, I currently have each chapter in it’s own text file. Now moving a chapter is rather ugly, as I have to rename everything to match the correct numbers. So that scene approach sounds like a good plan, even though I don’t think I’ll do it that way.

See, the biggest problem here is the style of writing. If you write a book, your goal is to produce this large block, that you release as one solid thing. The book consists of tons of scenes, chapters, maybe even multiple parts. But as long as you have not released the book, you can move around pretty much anything as you like, write and rewrite things as you damn well please.

With a series of books you get into a problem though. Once book 1 is out, you have laid certain things “in stone”. You can change anything you want in book 2, but everything you have laid out in book 1, you better stick to it or some clever reader will find it and rub your nose in it (and everyone elses too). Unless you write a south park episode, nobody cares how many times you kill Kenny then. So although you have a monolithic (and often chaotic) writing inside the one book, the second book has to follow sequential rules.

Now Toreas is an even bigger problem in that regard, as it’s sequences are chapters. So once I have released something in a chapter, I might be able to get away with correcting some spelling and grammar, but I can’t save a character or kill one, just because it would benefit my writings later on. This is very sequential work and makes editing a nightmare.

Writing is for the most part a very creative thing. The time thinking about the story, rereading it and chaning it, outweighs the typing by far. Writers block is all too common and people who paint also know the same feeling under the title artists block. So when the muse strikes, it’s neccessarly at chapter 2, but could be somewhere in chapter 200. Although you want to finish and publish chapter 2, the chapter 200 thing needs to be written down. You feel it’s good and you want to write it, so you do, but again, chapter 2 get’s delayed. Currently I have 5 of the first 9 chapters either done, or near done. I also have 21 more chapters in a raw written form, without any editing done to them yet.

So although the writing process is rather chaotic in nature, the release process is rather sequential. In Toreas to the extreme even. So sometimes, it can take a long time for one chapter to be released, even a short one, but sometimes it could happen that multiple chapters are released together. My goal is not to have a regular update schedule, but rather have a good story out there, at the moment I decide it’s worth to publish it.

I have to keep track when I released which bit, so I can see how my release speed is doing over time. That might be a good section for the statistics about Toreas.

So since this is so sequential, I decided to change the strategy on how to handle the files behind the scenes a little. The chapter that should be released next will have it’s own file, but everything else is in mostly one big file. In that big file, I can write short story bits, then expand upon them. I can move around content, decide where to draw the lines for new chapters and so on. I might keep some blocks of new chapters, like say I wrote a sequence of 5 chapters for the far future, in a separate file though and maybe just write a note in my work file about what happens in that block and how I named it. If this works out, I should be more agile in writing the sequential ways of the story rather than fall back into the chaotic ways of writing a book.