Scrivener

I imagine that most fledgling writers - people just like myself, only less so - are constantly on the lookout for any tool or approach that will make writing possible easier. We’re talking here about short story writers, poets and novelists, screenwriters, any kind of researcher. In the digital age, a natural category of tools for such writers is the specialized word processor, or perhaps it’s more accurately called an idea organizer or project manager. The thinking behind this genus of writing program is that for work that involves research and gathering of resources, and for writers who need the flexibility of shuffling narrative elements ala index cards and corkboards, more than a mere word processor is required.

There are several such programs out there in the wild, but I was drawn to Literature and Latte’s Scrivener (a Mac-only program) by a couple of rather positive mentions at Lifehacker, and by a love letter to the program penned by Merlin Mann of 43folders. The Mann review of the product really spoke to me:

If you write like I do (and I pray that you do not), you have a messy approach to drafting that is iterative, intuitive, and far from linear. You do a brain dump, then type a little, then research a little, then type a little more, then move a bunch of stuff around, then groan aloud, then 80% start over and so on until something is done. Yes, it would be more tidy if we all followed the mandate of our elementary school teachers and wrote perfect 5-paragraph essays straight from a completed outline. But, such is life. And Scrivener seems to get that.

I’m using the 30-day trial period to give Scrivener a spin, and so far I’m impressed. The program allows you to save a variety of resources for reference, even PDFs, audio files, and website URIs. The 98% of you who use Microsoft Word can relax, as Scrivener outputs to that program. Expect to have to devote some time to the tutorial, but it’s far from boring and well worth your attention. The acid test will come shortly as I really apply the program to the “longer project” I’m working on, but I think I’d be surprised if the $39.95 price doesn’t wind up feeling like a bargain.

Update: Purchased it a couple of weeks ago.

Windows users: As mentioned above, Scrivener is not for you. But Literature and Latte graciously provides a list of Windows-based writing programs, with descriptions and links. Alternative Mac programs are also listed.

Where it’s at

The new layout hotness that is Waveflux allows for off-the-cuff blogging as well as longer and (it is to be hoped) more thoughtful and considered composition. Still, there are other kinds of writing taking place behind the scenes here, material not intended for the weblog but still worthy of note, as this site functions as much as a personal notebook as a public blather-blog.

I’ve been writing short fiction for some years now - a whopping three publication credits under my belt - with greater or lesser dedication depending on the availability of the muse. It has been noted that waiting on the muse is not the most productive way to get writing done, however, and I’ve tried to get back to a more disciplined approach to writing. This column is where you can expect to see occasional signal flares indicating progress, or regress, as the effort continues.

Currently: I have one story out and about, awaiting judgment in a contest at the Seattle-based litmag Glimmer Train (Portland! Portland-based!), which is perhaps my favorite literary magazine. The editors there are warm and enthusiastic about short fiction and have rejected my previously-sent manuscripts thrice (but with warm enthusiasm all the same).

And: I’m working on a longer project; that is, I’m writing a novel but am too bashful to flat-out say so, so I just call it “a longer project.” I read somewhere that it’s bad luck to talk in-depth about works in progress, so I don’t think I will. Not now, anyway.

Also: Toying with another short piece. Something I can work on when the “longer project” flags a bit. Just to keep the hand moving.

Not much more to say about any of this just now. More later, if work goes well and I’m not feeling overly shy.

The story meme

My portion of the story thread:

The sound brought me up short. “Fenrir?” I whispered. Then, louder: “Digby?”

“Yes, and freezing on your threshold,” came the gruff reply from the other side of the door.

Forgetting the spectacles, I hobbled to the door, threw back the seven bolts and flung the door open. The apparition on my step was not one often seen in civilized places - tall and unkempt, pale as frost, bristling with particles of ice in his hair and beard and furs. But then, we were far removed from civilization. “Salutations,” he said with stiff formality.

Before I could answer, I was accosted by a great bulk of sinew and fur. My vision was obscured by gray fur and one wild rolling eye. Hot breath blasted my face. “Hello, Fenrir,” I said. A long red tongue gave answer, wetly.

“Fenrir!” snapped Digby. “Compose yourself!”

The canis growled but complied at once, settling onto its haunches and fixing Digby with a reproachful stare. “Unmannered brute,” Digby muttered as he advanced into the room, slamming the door shut behind him. “One would think he had never been trained.”

“Understandable, given the company he keeps,” I said, smiling.

Digby glanced around the room, taking in the disheveled papers and volumes. “Late American Scholar, as I expected,” he remarked. “And still impulsive. You should know better than to open your door to strangers. Without your glasses, even.”

“I’m a trusting soul. How did you find me?”

“Simple enough when one knows well the person one seeks.” He turned to appraise me. “Exile becomes you, Lydia,” he said, more softly. “You look well.” He glanced down at my foot. “Though your sock is bleeding.”

“My slipper,” I corrected him. “I dropped something.”

“Ever graceful,” Digby said. “Off with it.”

I sat without argument on the armchair nearest the unlit fireplace, then pulled off the sodden slipper. Digby knelt before me, still wearing his ice-glittered furs. He took my foot in his right hand, then rummaged in a hidden pocket and produced a battered gray device with three lights. He pressed a button and the device began to hum, lights glaring red. He held the device over my damaged toe. “This will sting a bit,” he said dryly.

Setting and time have an advocate!

In response to my recent remarks on the elements of fiction, faithful commenter Bitty (who knows some stuff about writing) makes a case for giving bigger props to setting and time:

“A Family Supper” by Kazuo Ishiguro takes place in the span of time from afternoon through the early evening, as a family has what well may be their last supper. If it weren’t set in Japan, if it weren’t in the family home, if it weren’t ending as the sun goes down, the other elements of the story would be as useful as an apple stem is to a starving man. It’s one of the most cleverly crafted stories I’ve ever read. If I were teaching creative writing, I’d assign students to dismantle that one and learn from it. (That and Mona Simpson’s “Lawns.”)

Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour.” Nuff said.

The present action of “Personal Testimony” by Lynna Williams takes place at a Bible camp during the time it takes to conduct the evening worship service. Significant, significant, significant. More particularly, the action takes place in a tent on the grounds, a tent that used to be a circus tent. What eventually becomes obvious is that this Bible camp is one big circus. It ends with father and daughter kneeling at the altar, although not explicitly in worship. The adept reader makes connections, however. I could go on with this one, but it’s partially meaningless if you don’t know the story. However, without the Bible camp, the tent, the altar, there is no story.

In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the house is literally a character.

An adept writer doesn’t just stick the protagonist in a Starbucks — unless perhaps the protagonist’s mother was gunned down while drinking coffee there.

Sometimes setting and time are less important than some other elements, but I always start with setting/time (yes, they’re Siamese twins), and narration when I begin a class discussion. Get that part straight and the other things fall into place.

Elemental

I mentioned earlier that in On Writing Short Stories, author Tom Bailey divides fiction into these familiar and basic elements:

character, plot, setting & time, metaphor, and voice

You could make a case for letting setting and time stand alone like the others, I suppose, but they seem rather fundamentally entwined, bonded since birth, the Castor and Pollux of fictional building blocks. Also, they’re somewhat minor-league compared to heavy hitters like character and plot, aren’t they? We have to let them slip past the velvet rope, sure, but they’re definitely B-listers.

Anyway.

In The New Rules of Lifting, authors Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove divide weight training into six basic elements or movements:

squat, deadlift, lunge, push, pull, and twist

Schuler and Cosgrove don’t claim to have invented this concept - the book credits Paul Chek - but they certainly recognize the value of reducing a daunting activity to its basics.

I rather like that approach in weight training, and in fiction writing - the reductive, stripped-down-ness of it all.

Notes from the spiralbound

I read Tom Bailey’s On Writing Short Stories, his section on basic elements of fiction: character, plot, setting & time, metaphor, and voice. Wasn’t sure which of these elements to focus on at first. Thought about starting with plot as it’s such an eternal challenge for me; then considered voice, since it’s a strong point and integral to the way I approach writing - thought it would be a cheap and easy way to regain entry to the story in progress. But I kept backing up, backing up, until I found myself square at the start of the treatise, reading about character. Which makes sense, after all, because my concerns about the story just now have everything to do with character, its revelation over time, its role as the source in the development of the narrative.

So. After that, I reread “Poaching” from Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Such enviable writing; I hate Wolff a little. But I like his treatment of characters, the unfolding of character here. The language he uses here is so appropriate to the story - I can’t think of another word for it. My vocabulary needs work. I should compare this story to “Hunters in the Snow” sometime.

Permission

M and I have devised a scheme that is helping me to write (that is, non-bloggy writing) more often: every Monday and Wednesday, I head off to class. That is, I head for the attic, or perhaps the dining room, or anyplace else in the house where I can work undisturbed for about as much time as it would take to go to an evening class, sit through it, and come back home.

Though it’s early in the history of the new arrangement, I feel as though I have permission - which I somehow lacked heretofore - to go hide out and write.

Very weird.

Anyway: apropos of the topic, free range librarian K.G. Schneider:

A few lucky devils get to Be Writers, and have daily schedules neatly arranged into writing, a light lunch, and more writing, followed, I guess, by lovely evenings spent catching up on other writers’ output, whilst the house help brings you champers and oysters to keep the edge off.

But the rest of us squeeze writing into those precious few hours in life that are not assigned to rendering unto Caesar, child-rearing, cooking and cleaning, bill-paying, attending one’s preferred house of worship, untangling Christmas tree lights, or sleeping.

Those of us writing at five miles per hour have our survival methods. I have a writing friend who marches off to a lunch place nearly every day to write for forty or so minutes. I admire her; she cranks out the prose, and dang, it’s good stuff.

But it takes me at least twice that long to corral my yawing, meandering mind into its Writing Place — an exercise that requires rearranging my pencil-pots, flipping through an old, suddenly interesting book, or embarking on adventures in personal grooming (usually involving sewing-scissors and toenails).

Steve Clemons on John Bolton: The nomination hearings in progress

I’m going to have to put The Washington Note back on the blogroll. Steve Clemons’s blog is providing excellent commentary on the Bolton hearings (and has been all over Bolton for some time, states Robert Silvey in his own piece on the controversial nominee).

Bolton is getting justifiably rough treatment (mostly consisting of having his own words handed back to him) from Democratic critics on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It may not be enough to keep the nomination from getting out of committee, but at least it’s on the record.

Falluja II: Beyond the city limits

Via Prometheus 6, another reminder of what the Falluja offensive is failing to accomplish. Emphasis mine:

Beyond Embattled City, Rebels Operate Freely

Iraqi insurgents have extended their reach over large swaths of the country, including sections of the capital, making it unlikely that the United States can establish the stability needed for credible elections in January even if its forces succeed in Fallouja, military and political analysts say.

There is little doubt that American-led forces will recapture Fallouja within days, the analysts say. But U.S. officials who are planning for the election face another challenge: a law and order vacuum in many Sunni Muslim areas where there are no American or Iraqi forces and insurgents can operate with impunity.

Masked gunmen patrol these places, particularly at night, assassinating government officials, carrying out kidnappings and intimidating the people.

“There are large areas of countryside that are controlled 24 hours a day by the mujahedin, where people do not see U.S. forces,” said Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst for the London-based Jane’s Defence Weekly.

With voting scheduled to take place in less than three months, there has been no let-up in insurgent attacks nor any sign that the government can curb them.

“You need to be able to replicate the density of troops now in Fallouja right across the Sunni Triangle, at least, and in Baghdad, and we don’t have enough soldiers to do that. And it’s hopeless to pretend Iraqis have the ability to do that,” Heyman said.

“Hopeless to pretend.” But don’t think the Bush adminstration won’t try. And in case you think Baghdad is secure, think again:

Mustafa Alani, chairman of Defense and Terrorism Studies at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, said that Baghdad was likely to be a chief target of the insurgency. It is the country’s nerve center, and with at least 6 million residents spread over a vast area, difficult for U.S. and Iraqi forces to stabilize.

“Baghdad is the real battlefield right now,” Alani said. “It’s the largest city, it’s impossible for the U.S. troops to control. They cannot really occupy Baghdad; they are spread too thin.”

The capital has become a prime site for one of the guerrillas’ most effective tactics: assassination. Often unrecorded in the daily violence is the frequency of attacks on low- and mid-level government workers. Allawi’s accountant and his son were shot to death two weeks ago; so was one of his secretaries. A deputy director general of the Oil Ministry was killed a week ago, along with a defense official.

Government workers are scrambling to apply for housing in the capital’s U.S.-controlled Green Zone to escape gunmen in their neighborhoods.

Don’t forget Samarra. And Mosul.

In Samarra, which the insurgents abandoned after intense battles with U.S. troops and Iraqi forces in early October, the guerrillas have begun to re-assert themselves. Two coordinated car bombs and several mortar attacks Saturday killed more than 30 people. This week insurgents killed a shop-owner suspected of spying for the U.S. His body, was left in the street as a warning to others.

In the north, Mosul, once trumpeted by the U.S. military as a model of stability, is now mostly controlled by insurgents. Two U.S. soldiers were killed there in mortar attacks this week. Insurgents killed four Turkish truckers Wednesday and guerrillas armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades clashed with American troops for several hours. They attacked two U.S. convoys, killing four people, a reporter on the scene said.

The true cost of The War That George Built will become more apparent, even to Americans, between now and the scheduled January elections.

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