by Tosh McIntosh

Last week I posted on the Yahoo Group an offer to conduct a tutorial (of sorts) on the lessons learned so far in my attempt to use Scrivener, John Truby’s Anatomy of Story, and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces as adapted in Christopher Vogler’s The Hero’s Journey to complete the first draft of Test Flight, the third novel in the Pilot Error series.

The inciting event for this effort with Test Flight arrived about a year ago when I realized that each of the first two novels in the series had required the better part of eight years from the created date on the MS Word manuscript to complete the first draft, incorporate multiple revisions, and finally reach publication. And although the two eight-year periods overlapped, the total time invested approached twelve years. Higher math illustrated the dilemma I faced with the third novel: at an average of six years’ effort for each book, I might not have enough heartbeats remaining to publish many more. What’s a fella to do?

Identifying the source of the problem seemed like a good place to begin, which brought me to the realization that publication of Pilot Error had inserted an unwarranted level of confidence that the whole process of writing and publishing Red Line would be more efficient. In one sense it had been, because RL required about half the number of revisions as PE. From this fact, I set my sights on writing a better first draft as the cornerstone of the objective to reduce the number of revisions.

Three members have indicated interest in the topic, and I’m presenting it following the Roundtable this coming Sunday, February 28, 2016. If you think it might interest you, please read the following information to ensure my approach to the material will be worth your time:

1. Scrivener software is available for Windows and Mac. You can download a trial version here before committing to purchase for about $45.
2. One of the most significant differences between writing a novel in Word and Scrivener is the latter’s organization of your work into a project rather than a book. To fully appreciate the advantages, suffice it to say here that within a single, but divided, window, you can organize and easily access multiple documents without having to open and size them and figure out where to arrange them on your desktop.
3. The program is extraordinarily capable. And while learning to use every feature is personally tempting, I’ve accepted the wise counsel of others to focus my exploration on the capabilities of most benefit to my immediate needs in terms of what I write and how I go about it.
4. I have no experience using the Windows version, and although there are some differences, nothing I’ve heard leads me to believe the core features I use are much affected by the choice of version.
5. This will be a basic introduction to Scrivener for three reasons:
   1. the tutorial included with the program is excellent;
   2. you can find video tutorials on the website and countless others online, some good, some not so much, but all delivered by writers who think they’ve come up with a cool way to use the program and they are compelled to share it;
   3. and I’m demonstrating only the features that are helping me the most with my stated objectives.
6. I’ve spent most of the time working on TF by:
   1. using Truby’s Anatomy of Story to develop the character web, define the moral argument, and complete the other tasks he recommends to create a well-structured novel;
   2. gathering research for five major elements of the story in which technical details are especially important;
   3. and exploring the capabilities of Scrivener that appear to offer the greatest return on the investment of time required to learn them.
7. All during this effort, my intention has been to complete the research and use the Truby work product to write a complete scene-by-scene outline. Then about three weeks ago, I realized four important things about where I was and where I was going:
   1. my immersion in the story vis-á-vis Truby had created sufficient familiarity with the most important structural elements that I could begin writing;
   2. many of the technical details were imprinted well enough to support a first draft, especially since Scrivener offers the ability to insert source reference material into the project so it’s available with one click;
   3. I had been procrastinating in part due to fear, that I’d be staring at a blinking insertion cursor on a blank page, and after hours of fruitless effort have written no more than seven words: It was a dark and stormy night, and:
   4. the key to eliminating the self-imposed writer’s block already existed in the project in the form of a scene plan I had developed for use in Scrivener.
8. The scene plan format provides a thought-provoking list of the structural elements that should be included in most scenes, and incorporating them is the key to writing scenes that matter.
9. With the commitment to begin writing, I selected the first scene of the first chapter, which was blank, and began filling out the scene plan, using the individual template elements to direct my thoughts. Once I had the scene plan filled out, I began writing the scene.
10. I’d be lying if I told you the words flowed out in such a continuous stream that it was easy. But in truth, the process of filling out the plan was like fanning the embers of the idea for a scene into a flame that heated up the boiler and got this train called a novel out of the station and rolling down the track.
11. So far, I’ve completed this process for twelve scenes in four POV’s divided into three chapters. And just yesterday I discovered a neat trick.
12. When beginning a new scene in the POV of character who has already appeared, I copy the scene plan for that character’s previous scene and paste it into the scene plan for the one I’m preparing to write. This allows me to refresh myself on the character’s goals, motivations, stakes, etc., the last time readers saw him and add the all-important “glue” that holds scenes together as the building blocks of fiction.

That’s my story, and I’m trying hard to stick to it.