Novel Writing Software

Yes. That does not go in your novel. That goes in something we call "notes." You do that in "note taking" software, not "novel writing" software, because taking notes is not writing a novel. Confusing the two is, again, an excellent way to write badly.

There is this thing people do these days which is tremendously counterproductive, and that is to sit down and say "I am going to write a novel." And they open up a program, type "My Great American Novel, Chapter One" - and start writing chapter one.

No. Wrong. This is not how it works. This is not how anyone anywhere has ever written a novel that didn't suck. You may as well just type "it was a dark and stormy night."

People do that with all kinds of things. They say "I am going to write a WSO," or "I am going to draw a picture," or "I am going to develop a plugin," and they sit down and start working without a single damn clue what the hell they are going to do in the end. And for sufficiently short and simple pieces of work, sufficiently skilled and experienced people can do that.

I can sit down and crank out a 5,000 word short story with absolutely no initial clue what it is going to be about or even what genre it is going to be, let alone who the characters are and what is going to happen to them. In fact, I can do it in just a couple hours without a single editing or revision pass. It won't be particularly good, but it won't be particularly bad either.

Jason Fladlien and Robert Plank can do the same with WSOs. Van Gogh and Picasso could do that with portraits. Larry Wall and Eric Raymond can do that with software. If you're good, you can do what you're good at very quickly and skip a lot of the planning stages - because you have done the planning stages so many times in the past.

But it doesn't scale. You can't write a novel the same way you do a short story. I see a lot of people say what amounts to "I can write a 2,000 word scene; if I write five of those it's a 10,000 word short story; if I write twelve of those it will be a 120,000 word novel."

I see people who think, having written a series of short reports, they can write a book. Having done a podcast, they can do an audio coaching product. Having posted a YouTube video, they can do a DVD training series.

But go to the greats. Everyone from David Mamet to Stephen King to Alan Moore has tried to express this. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. A large work is not just a collection of small works. Amateurs - specifically, bad amateurs - always think they can do it this way, and they are always wrong.

As John Cleese said, "It's not simply a matter of the number of words. Getting them in the right order is just as important."

Larger works are exponentially more difficult to get in the right order. The planning stage needs to be longer, and unlike shorter works, the plans are not sufficiently similar to be easily reused. A five-page short story using three-act structure does not exactly have a lot of room for things to move about. Each act is roughly one to two pages. Once you have written those pages a couple dozen times, you know pretty much all of the ways you can write them.

(Not all of the ways anyone can write them. Your personal style is the filter - while another plan might work for someone else, it won't work for you. It wouldn't be your writing. Dashiell Hammett's two pages will look pretty similar every time, and Bentley Little's will too, but they won't look anything like one another.)

In a longer work, you might be using Campbell's much larger seventeen-step process. And each of those steps is fifteen to twenty pages. And those steps go in order; they have to. And once you have produced something approximating the end result, it is too late to reconsider where in the project that part belongs. You can't just pick it up and move it somewhere else unless it doesn't really matter where it goes. And if it doesn't matter where it goes, chances are it doesn't go anywhere.

There is a process that works, and which has been used for hundreds of years. That process is to start with a skeletal sketch of your intended project and gradually detail and refine it. The larger that project is, the more important this process becomes. The internet has not changed this. Software has not changed this.

The existence of CAD software has made the process of planning and constructing a building faster and easier, but it still involves the same steps in the same order that it always has. Architecture and construction have not been revolutionised. They simply have a new and faster tool to do what they have always done.

And while that tool allows them to pick up and move the entire second floor to a new location, this simply cannot be done in any reasonable fashion. Even though the software contains this function, you can't really use it. The change cascades throughout the entire structure and requires an extensive redesign.

Failure to understand this is why your hard drive is probably full of shit you have started and never finished.

I'm no exception. I have dozens of projects sitting on my hard drive that were started and not finished - books, videos, info products, software - because I started them without a sufficiently clear picture of what I was doing.

Smart people learn from their mistakes. Smarter people learn from the mistakes of others.

Stupid people keep doing the same thing over and over, and don't listen to anybody.

Exactly. And Scrivener does it all easily and efficiently, for us lesser mortals ;-)

Some bestselling authors develop a general outline and work from there. Others plan it down to the most minuscule detail including comprehensive backstories for each character. And some bestselling authors wing it with a 'What if" idea and go from there, no plan, no outline.

One author who consistently makes the top 10 New York Times list said s/he has no idea what's going to happen in his/her books until the characters tell him/her.

I know this because in one of our previous books we interviewed a number of bestselling authors and asked how they write among many other questions.

Dee
Who isn't a New York Times Bestselling Author ... Yet

Yes, it is still my advice. There is good info in the book...

The *Elephant in the Room* issue with software and books about structure is one I address in one of my webinars and indirectly in my Guide to Writing Popular Fiction....

There is no *One Size Fits All* ;-)

The person who is teaching about any given structure know it works because he/she uses it... in their chosen genre. The problem comes when he/she assumes that because it works in the way that he/she is using it, it will therefore work for anything.

But if you look carefully, structure can and does differ from genre to genre, and some of the really successful authors have actually created their own unique structures -- Jeffrey Deaver did this for his Lincoln Rhymes series...

I am currently writing a novella series for which I developed my own structure... and it is very different from a short novel structure I use in a diff genre ;-)