Welcome to Week 1 of Planning for Pantsers. If you’re not sure what this is, have a look at the Intro here.
Throughout my writing process, I use various helpful tools and websites without which I’d be even more lost than I usually am. This post will deal with a few of the ‘tools’ I consider essential to making sense of planning.
Right before NaNoWriMo, I purchased Scrivener*. I am now a Scrivener convert, preaching it as the religion of choice for all writers! For those of you who are familiar with it, great! For those of you who aren’t, I highly recommend downloading the free trial and then begging, pleading or borrowing for the money to purchase the full version. It’s not too expensive and is well worth every cent. If you don’t have Scrivener it is still possible to work the way I describe in the series, but will require more organisation than most pantsers have (or at least; it’s more than I have).
I also suggest investing in Holly Lisle’s clinics available on her website, although if you’re wary of doing so, she has a lot of free workshops available as well which are just as helpful for basic plotting. I first bought her “Create-A-…” clinics in about 2009. To this day, I refer back to them when I get lost. They're full of commonsense, humour and helpful tips and tricks. She’ll be releasing her Create-A-World Clinic soon and I’m waiting anxiously for the day when I can purchase it and make my world complete.
Inspiration. For me this comes in the form of the Twitter community of writers; amazing music; blogs and websites written by writers for writers; quirky quotes; crazy animal pictures; my friends and family. Wherever you get it from, inspiration isn’t the invisible idea that strikes when you least expect it. It’s a tool like any other, that you pull out and use to motivate and inspire you to sit down and write even when you really want to sleep, watch TV or go to the toilet. Okay, so maybe you should go to the toilet when you want to, but for the others, tying yourself to the chair works. A cat sitting on your feet with his claws ready to pierce the sensitive skin on your toes should you move also helps.
These are the essential items in my kit. I’m sure that as I continue to grow in my writing, I will discover more, but for now these work just fine in conjunction with each other.
Please excuse me while I go dig Zeus’ claws out of my foot.
*yWriter is a free programme that offers features similar to Scrivener. Although I have it, I haven't played around with it yet so I can't say how useful it is for the techniques I use in this series. You can download it for free here.
Check back on Sunday for the 1st Lesson - Make a Scene
No comments:
Post a Comment