Soooooo almost exactly a month ago I said I was committing to writing 1000 words a day. I had been writing that much pretty regularly and didn’t think it would be hard to keep going. But it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. When I’m really moving on a piece, I can write 1000 words in half an hour or less. But I’ve discovered that when I’m editing one story and revising another and don’t know what to work on next, my free-writing tends to peter out around 600 words. Hmm. So instead of giving up and calling myself a failure, I’m just scaling back a little. I can do 500 words a day. Really. And if my word count keeps dropping, surely I can do 250 words a day. But I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Scaling Back a Bit
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Using Google Calendar to Track Plot
Though I write fantasy, I have several stories that take place in the contemporary world. My characters have jobs, enjoy their weekends off, and observe U.S. holidays. But it can be hard to keep track of the date and the day of the week when my characters are running from one crisis to the next.
One of the features I liked best about Liquid Story Binder XE was the Journal, which allowed me to enter a brief summary of a character’s activities on each day of a calendar. This kept me from having characters take days off from work with no explanation or merrily skipping Thanksgiving with no comment.
Since I’ve now moved on to SuperNotecard, which has a less useful timeline function, I started using Google Calendar to keep track of my characters’ lives. While I prefer to use as few separate programs as possible, one of the advantages of Google Calendar is that it’s available anytime I have wifi and a browser open. Calendars can be printed, if you’re the type who needs to look at a hard copy. And by using a separate calendar from my personal one, I can keep it from cluttering things up. I can even use multiple color-coded calendars for characters with different timelines. Also, for stories that require a more detailed level of knowledge, the agenda view makes it easy to look at the character’s actions hour by hour.
I’m all about using free, easily available tools when they get the job done. I’m using Google Calendar because I already had a Google account, but I’m sure there are several other online calendars that would work the same way.
What free tools do you use to make your writing easier?
