It’s been two months since NaNoWriMo, and the words haven’t been forthcoming.  It’s time to shake them up a bit and see what they have planned.

Scrivener Collections

All of my current stories are in Scrivener and, good though it is to see everything in their appropriate folders and chapters, the series does look a little confusing when it’s all there staring you in the face.

Fortunately, Scrivener has a feature called “Collections” which I’ve just started looking at.  A collection is an area in which you store just some of your documents.  Whilst folders are great, they can get cumbersome, particularly when you’re looking at different timelines, characters, stories, and events.  A “collection” lets you focus on just one stream of thought (a timeline, a character, a story thread, or whatever) without altering anything in your folders.

Reviewing on a Kindle.

I’ve been using Scrivener’s collections to reorder my series into character-focussed story threads, thus enabling me to delve into just one without getting distracted by anything else.  Having made up the collections I need to focus on, I’ve compiled them into Kindle documents so that I can read up on what I’ve written so far without any distractions of working at the computer.

This sounds like a lot of procrastination.  Why do a lot of organising and rearranging and re-reading when I should be writing?  It’s true, but it does seem to be working.  I’ve re-read some of what I’ve written and not all of it is all that bad.  In fact, some of it is quite good.

Now, instead of having many “which story shall I continue?” and “which character should I focus on?” questions floating around my head and blocking out the words, I can see which ones work the best and which ones require my most immediate attention.

So, with any luck, I might start seeing a few words coming through the keyboard in the near future.