I use an app called Scrivener to write. I absolutely love this app. I even wrote to the company and told them so. A wonderful part of the app is you can write small snippets of copy and arrange and re-arrange as much as you want. It’s super easy and works great – until it doesn’t.
As I mentioned, I’m working on story #3 in the series of shorts for The Cat Who Saved Rehoboth. I have a dozen short scenes, each with a specific topic and focused on one plot point. This is more unorganized than I normally write. Normally, I write in line, today followed by tomorrow, this afternoon follows this morning. But for some reason, I started this story with a scene I liked, but not the opening scene. No sweat – move it. So I wrote another scene and another. None were good openers but all told part of the story – a story that I had not quite figured out completely.
If I had an idea for a scene, I wrote it. Well, it might work better in the next story, so I dragged it to the next folder. The scene might work better early on – drag it. I had a story word limit of 12,000 words and so these scenes were short, 600-word target each.
After several weeks of writing, I ended up with a dozen scenes and no story. And the scenes are anything but chronological. What a mess. I was utterly confused which is making it very hard to get back to writing.
Six weeks of writing and nothing. Well, not nothing really – I designed and wrote all the copy for the website while on hiatus. But to be honest, I did so because I didn’t have a plan for the story.
So today, I finally tackled story #3. That doesn’t mean I finished it, not by a long shot. All I did was put the scenes in order, deleted a ton of stupid writing, and re-plotted out the story. At least now I have a plan on how to move the story along.
The moral of this story – I got caught up in bells and whistles and forgot about substance. Bells and whistles are there for a reason, but I let them distract me. I need to focus on the current scene, keep the story on track, and use the bells and whistles later where they will be more helpful.
I’m not completely invested yet. I’m still a bit confused as to what is happening. And if I’m confused, oh my, the reader has to be off doing something, anything else but reading this mess.
