Is This the Perfect Planning Tool? by Claire Fayers

 I came across a curious little story-planning tool whilst randomly web-browsing the other day.

It's called Twine, a free, open-source app for non-linear stories, and there are desktop and online versions, which you can find here

It's a very simple planning tool but what I love about it is you can set up different pathways for your story. Great if you're an indecisive semi-pantster like me. 

Here's how it works. 

Open the application and select 'new'. A box will appear ready and waiting for you to fill in the details of your starting scene.

Then, link to the next scene by means of a double bracket. [[Next scene]]

Not sure you want the story to go there? No problem, you can set up an alternative path.

Keep linking scenes together until you've mapped out all the possibilities for you story.

Once you're done, you can test the various versions of your stories by selecting any scene and clicking 'test from here' at the top of the page. A window will appear with a text version of you story which reads a bit like a choose your own adventure.

You can delete scenes, change your starting point, and drag things around on the screen. A very useful feature is the ability to tag scenes with different colours - great for brainstorming or for marking out your finished plan.

You can export the finished story, but only as a html file so I think this is a tool best used at the planning stage when you have a multitude of ideas in your head. It would be a fantastic tool for plotting choose-your-own type stories.

I'm going to play around with it some more. If you give it a go, let me know what you think.

Claire Fayers www.clairefayers.com

Top Ten Tools For Us Writery Types, by Dan Metcalf

I like making a list or two so I thought for my ABBA offering this month I'd lay out the top ten things I need to write. This list is entirely subjective of course and I'd love to hear what you consider an absolutely essential item for your writing life.

1. Laptop – I'd love to say that I can get away with a pad of A4 paper and a pen, but the reality of life is that work has to be typed on a computer, laid out in a certain way and increasing, submitted to publishers electronically too. I'm also a tad reliant on websites and databases for research (though nothing beats a library for real research!). Mine is an 11.5” ASUS netbook, which does all I ask of it. The memory is running out now, to which I have bodged a solution by whacking in a cheap SD card in the side and occasioanlly importing stuff over to it. I have two cloud backup services too; ASUS Webstorage (came with the computer) and google drive. I'm also sticking stuff on a USB memory stick because I know from bitter experience that YOU CAN NEVER BACK UP ENOUGH.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Notebooks – I covet these little things. Even though I have more than enough at home, waiting to be filled, I still find myself wondering into Waterstones or Paperchase and stroking the spines of the lovely blank tomes available. In a perfect world I would have a subscription to moleskine or field notes to deliver a parcel to my house every few months full of the bleeders, but unless I suddenly hit Pullman-esque standards of success, I'll make do with whatever comes to hand. And in all truth, paper is paper. A 50p jotter from the post office works just as well as an ornate faux-leather ideaspad.

   

   https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/3452943573

    

   
   
   
   
3. Mechanic pencils – Okay, I'm going to say this here and now – mechanical/propelling pencils are better. Just BETTER. Better than a pen (ballpoint or fountain) and better than your regular dead-tree pencil. For one, pencils provide a transience that I like – anything I write with them can be deleted or edited immediately. For two, the propelling pencil has a clarity that I love. Because they have small graphite sticks, you get a fixed width line instead of a thin and pointy line which then devolves into a stubby grey mess further down the page. Also: clickable. None of that pencil sharpener/whittling with a craft knife nonsense. (Only downside I find is that the plastic variety are disposable and bad for the environment – if this bothers you, kindly have a whipround and buy me one of these, because I get through heaps of the plastic Bic jobbies.
   

   

   suzyq212 https://www.flickr.com/photos/88722241@N00/

   
   
4. Tea – You may think I'm being flippant here, but I do drink tonnes of the stuff. I have had to switch to decaffinated which is frankly just as nice and means you can drink more of it without having to jog off the excess energy every few hours. Brands don't matter, no matter what that woollen monkey off the telly tells you. I also have a back-up of Green Tea with Lemon which provides the taste without the need for milk. I'm drinking it now. Slurp. Yum yum.
   

   

   
   
5. A flask – hows this for a productivity hack? My 1000ml stainless steel thermos flask from Asda has served me well. I fill it with hot water in the morning and then bring it to my desk so I can work. This is absolute genius in two ways – One, I don't have to leave my desk and interrupt the flow when I'm writing and two, it saves on your electricity bill by not popping up to boil the kettle every 30 minutes. (But what about milk? I hear you cry; that's where the aforementioned green tea with lemon comes in to play) Try it and thank me later.
   
6. Mini wireless mouse – Not essential, but I'm one of these fogies that gets in a tizz when trying to use the touchpad on my laptop. This little beauty has a small USB plugin neatly hidden in the battery compartment which can take out and stick in your laptop. The AAA battery powered mouse then connects automatically. Soooo much easier (and dirt cheap).
   

   

   
   
7. A mug – okay I realise that now three of these 'writing' tips are beverage based, but if you think about it, doesn't the quality of the mug affect the quality of the drink? And therefore the quality of your mood? And therefore the quality of your writing? Of course it does. You know it makes sense... My favourite writing mug is this fella from the Literary Gift Company.
   

   

    
8. Sounds – In an ideal world I would sit in silence and type away to my heart's content but as we all know, we do not live in an ideal world (for proof, check out who leads the world nowadays.). We live in a world where phones, radios and washing machines bleep at you throughout the day. We live in a world where my delightful sons shoot Nerf guns at each other outside my office window. This world needs white noise and I choose http://www.noisli.com/. You can set the ambient sounds however you wish and block out the rest of reality. I recommend a blend of a crackling fire and thunderstorms.
    
9. Bullet Journal – Time management is very much a work in progress for me, and has been ever since I left school. I've still not cracked it but the closest I ever come is when I keep up my bullet journal. Everything goes into this; story ideas, first drafts, appointments, etc. The buttet journal system helps to keep them all in check. I have tried using evernote and my phone's diary, but somehow it doesn't work for me (but am always open to better time management solutions – leave 'em in the comments) (oh, you don't need to buy an official journal either – I prefer a thick blank A4 pad but loads of people work out of moleskines)
   
10. My brain – I'd be lost without it. No one else's will do, either. It's my own or nothing. In fact, out of all of these items on the list, this is probably the most important, because all you need to create a story is your brain and a wee bit of motivation.

What did I miss? Leave your suggestions below.

Dan :¬)

Dan Metcalf's most recent book is Codebusters from Bloomsbury. He is also experimenting with Wattpad stories for a YA audience, so take a look HERE.

In search of the perfect Roget's... by David Thorpe

One of my favourite writing tools is a thesaurus and this month I decided that I would buy a new one.

My last one has served me well for exactly 30 years, but sadly it predates the IT revolution and doesn't even contain the word 'byte'!

This Longman edition was, when it came out, itself a substantial revision, and was hailed in reviews for being 'feminist' because of its inclusion of more politically correct language.

In trying to select a new edition I discovered that, in my naivete, I wasn't aware of the difference between a Roget's thesaurus and a common-or-garden type. I still haven't found the ideal new edition, and wonder if anyone can recommend one. Here's what's happened so far...

Looking at reviews, I decided to buy the £30 Oxford University Press thesaurus, conscientiously avoiding buying it on Amazon for £19.40 but instead choosing to patronise my local bookshop, because I really don't want to support a company that is taking over just about everything and refusing to pay tax in this country.

I thought if it cost that much money, it must be good. Yes, I really am that naive. Touching, isn't it?

My local bookshop was very pleased, but when my book arrived, two days later, I was not. In the end, I had to take it back. Thing is, it was a conventional thesaurus, and this is when it dawned on me the difference between one of these and a Roget's.

I realised that I vastly prefer the latter, in the form of my much-loved old edition, because it is based on a system of categorising human knowledge devised by Peter Mark Roget.

Roget was an amazing man, who also invented, amongst many other things, the log-log slide rule and was co-founder of the University of London. Apparently he was also, like his contemporary Wordsworth, an aficionado of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and used it to treat his depression.

His other self-administered treatment was making lists, and his longest list ended up as the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition (which also might qualify for one of the longest book titles ever), whose first edition was published in 1852.

A Roget's is fantastic if you don't just want a synonym for word, which is more or less what a thesaurus provides, but also to access other words that exist in a similar or related category.

For example, you might find that 'threnody' is a synonym for 'elegy' in a conventional thesaurus, but in a Roget's you'd also get lists of other kinds of literary forms.

To use a Roget's thesaurus you look up a word in the back. This gives you several possible meanings for that word, if you like, the synonyms. Alongside these are numbers, which you then look up in the main body of the book.

Here, you will find a host of words and phrases which exist in the same knowledge category, linked to other entries for related categories.

This is where the £30 Oxford edition falls flat on its expensive dust jacket. For instance, I looked up 'dress'. In that entry there were just three synonyms for dress, none of which was 'skirt'.

When I looked up 'skirt', it provided only synonyms for the verb 'to skirt', and nothing corresponding to the noun. No mention of dresses!

There were many other examples, but take my word for it, this book is not worth the substantial amount of paper it's printed on. Its only distinguishing feature is a section in the middle which provides lists of words you might want to use if you want people to think you are smart. It is a magnificent example of 'dumbing down'.

Its design makes great use of white space, whereas my Longman Roget's, although in 11 point and perfectly readable, is dense with type, to provide space for as many words as possible.

Of course, there is a thesaurus on my computer, and there is always thesaurus.com, but, like I say, these are just dictionaries of synonyms.

In effect, a Roget's is like an early version of hypertext. If Roget was around now, he would, I'm sure, be working in HTML5.

So I'm still looking for the perfect, up-to-date edition of Roget's thesaurus. There might be something wrong with me, but I do enjoy browsing through it for the hell of it, just to find trails of new words.

There are various more recent editions on the market from different publishers, but you can't tell by looking online how good they are, and I live over 100 miles from a bookshop sufficiently large to stock a variety to browse through.

Any suggestions gratefully received. Do you have a favourite edition? Or, indeed, any other favourite writing tools?