For this week I have been working with a new piece of software as I work on my new novel, Command and Control. This software package, Scriveners has been developed as a tool for writers, particularly of novels. It is much more than just a word processing program, but it is a tool for collating and organizing the data that you can generate when writing your tome.

Particularly with SF and Fantasy novels, authors generate a lot of data that get associated with their books. For Command and Control, a prequel to Love and Loyalty, there are in addition to characters, their descriptions, personalities, and backgrounds,  ships, jump point between star maps, technical architecture, political notes and other factlets of world-building.  I had heard quite a bit about Scriveners writing software from members of my writers group and from authors on the web. In general people tended to praise this software and now I too join the chorus.

All week long I have been working on the characters for my novel, detailing their appearances, their personalities, their internal conflicts which I am trying to tie into the novel overall theme of courage and cowardice, and their relationship to the plot and main characters.   Just for the ease or sorting and accessing the data alone Scriveners would be a blessing, but the ease with which you can take a large project and break it down into smaller and more manageable chunks it truly shines. Now I am not a writer who crafts out of sequence.  Once I start actual prose writing I start at the front of the document and work my way to the last page, but there are lots of writers out there that write scenes as the inspiration for the scenes strikes them, bouncing back and forth through their projects. Scriveners is great for that too.

I have taken the project and broken it into three sections, each a major set piece of setting and conflicts that sets up the next arc of the book, and then with Scriveners I’m able to detail the smaller elements of each major setting a process that appeal a great deal to my overly organized approach to nearly everything. I’m likely a week or more away from actually writing scenes, but when I do they will be so much stronger for it. I suspect this will be my best work yet and in part it’s because of the writing platform.