I could really use some advice about the practical aspects of arranging my novel in its 'puter file.

I have four vp characters and the chapters will rotate between them (probably evenly). Sometimes I want to see the whole of that vp character's story together, to see the flow, and sometimes I want to see it interspersed with the other vp's as they will eventually be, to see how they are juxtaposed.

However, I use Word, and there is no way to flick between the two arrangements, sadly. I'm not sure which is a better way of doing it, and am curious to know how others arrange their file when they have more than one story thread or vp.

Also, when I write a scene and discard it, I don't delete it completely in case I change my mind, so I tend to keep it at the end of the file. Do others do this, or do they put such discarded scenes in another file specially for that purpose?

TIA,

Deb

Hi, I have 4 vp characters as well in my WIP and while my 'system' was not exactly the subject of much forward-planning on my part, here's what I do (for what it's worth) - I keep a separate file for each character. I tend to keep drafts as I am editing, so I date them in the title and then work off the newest. I also keep a 'scraps' document for each character - as I cut anything that I am not quite ready to give up on completely, I just paste it into my 'scraps' doc. the scraps documents tend to get quite long, but I have found that I rarely go back to them anyhow, and if I do it's usually for somequite quite new so it'll be close to the top of the file. the scraps are mainly for my own peace of mind - what if I want that thought again and I just can't re-create it?? as for seeing one story against the other, I print out the relevant pages and do it on paper. I haven't figured out any sensible way to do it onscreen.
hope that helps
good luck w/ it!
Tara

Hm. It's a problem, isn't it. I work in separate files for each chapter (my chapters are big, with more than one voice/vp), and hate the moment when I have to put them all together because it becomes so unweildy and you can't find things without doing a search - on what word? I'm there now, and it's driving me nuts. But I always keep things in sequence, and almost always work in sequence so wouldn't rearrange purely to read things together - it confuses my sense of how the reader reads it. The only exception to that rule so far was the very short nightmares at the end of each chapter in TMOL, which I wrote all together, to keep the voice consistent. Various thoughts.

Have a printed version at your elbow: you can flip to and fro, pull out individual chunks/sheets etc. etc. (If you do page numbers like a text book, with chapter number and pp then you never get lost. I hate it, again, when I finally have to have a single file with sequential numbering). If in flipping back to something you want to tweak, do it on the hard copy.

Write the different vps each in a different font, so you can just jump to the next one.

Head (temporarily) each change of vp with a code-word, so you can just do a Find to get to the next one, hopping over the intervening vps.

Have a big/wide enough screen, or two, that you can have two windows up side-by-side at readable size, and have two copies of the file up. (I can just do this on my 19" non-wide screen). If you work on a laptop, I dunno - unless you've got fantastic eye-sight.

On discarded scenes, if it's a matter of rearranging how things come in the chapterI might leave it at the bottom of the chapter for now, to darn in somewhere else in a minute, but if I'm fairly sure I won't I put it in a single file I have for the whole book, called 'dump'. I always think I'll go back and dig it out, but I never do.

Emma


<Added>

Another thought: Kate Long (late of this parish) uses a different colour of post-it note as a marker in the MS, for the different sections of PoV, so that she can follow one through, and also see the proportions of each, and the pattern of alternation. Makes the MS looks like slightly like a multi-coloured cubist hedgehog...

Thank you both - that is all really interesting. I will reply again when I have digested it a bit.

Deb

I always struggle with this a bit myself and i haven't quite found the right way about it yet.

Interesting thread, and i think i might also pinch some of the ideas for my novel so thank you.

jules

Thanks, Deb, for raising this, as it's something I'm wrestling with at the moment. I've found that the hard copy is the best place, as Emma says, to look for stuff for different POVs - and thank you Emma for that brilliant idea of Kate's - I shall definitely be doing this for my WIP.
Susiex

Hi Deb. I have an offcuts file for bits I can't bear to chuck but are chucked.

It is possible to see two versions in Word simultaneously if your screen is wide enough. Open the document and drag it to one side of the screen, then click on File on menu bar and open the other file you want to refer to and drag it to the other side of the screen. i do this a lot. it's like spreading your papers all over your desk.

I agree with Emma about having a separate 'discard' file. It makes the decision to dump something much easier and the need to recover the discarded item hardly ever arises.

As regards keeping track, I also don't think I would like to read the text out of its natural order. In theory Word has the answer to what you want to do with its Master Document and Sub-Document facility. In practice, this is ghastly and I don't recommend going down that route. Disaster is easily accomplished.

I have used a spreadsheet to keep track of the sort of situation you've described, although in my case it was not following point of view so much as being able to see in sequence what happens to each character and when.

Create a spreadsheet with Column 1 for the chapter number and Column 2 for the description of what happens. Create Columns 3, 4, 5... for as many main characters as are relevant, e.g. James, Sally, Fred, Susan. Then, in a highly over-simplified example, the contents of one row in the spreadsheet might look like this (obviously the columns would be across the page, not down like here).

Chapter: 33

Description: James discovers Fred and Sally together when all three meet up unexpectedly when rain forces them to take cover in the clubhouse. James hits Fred with a cricket bat. Sally intervenes to try to stop him. The Captain tells everybody that Kaiser Wilhelm has declared war on Serbia.

James: Hits Fred with cricket bat.

Sally: Tries to stop James attacking Fred.

Fred: Is attacked by James with cricket bat.

Susan: BLANK

The entries in the Description column provide a running synopsis of the entire narrative.

In the individuals' columns only anything directly involving each individual is recorded. Hence Susan's entry is blank here. She wasn't even present.

This way you can easily read down one character's column and follow their individual progress through the narrative. The full narrative is alongside if you need to refer to it.

Of course, it's not the same as having the whole text available, but it does enable you to get a handle on how the different threads fit (or don't fit) together.

Chris

In theory Word has the answer to what you want to do with its Master Document and Sub-Document facility. In practice, this is ghastly and I don't recommend going down that route. Disaster is easily accomplished.

Chris, thank you for saying this, because I've long wondered if I 'ought' to get to grips with this, rather than my simple-minded separate files, and now I don't have to.

I do have a big Master Plan, of the sort you describe: chapters as rows, and different strands as columns, though not straightforwardly characters. And then I do a bit of maths and decide how long each voice's part of each chapter should be, and off I go. Though I would say that despite all this planning, this system didn't reveal to me that I didn't actually have a plot for the second half of A Twist of Gold - that the different elements didn't actually intertwine and interact properly - until I had to write a continuous-prose synopsis for it!

Emma

Chris, I love your idea of a spreadsheet that shows what each character is up to in any given scene and therefore how they progress through the story. Masterful. Will add it immediately. I have a v basic spreadsheet of plots and scenes but not each character in each scene.

Since I'm very given to plots which are all about discovering/unpicking the facts and significance of the past, I find the spreadsheet particularly useful for tracking what's revealed about that: the build up of info about, say, the lead-up to a disaster.

In fact, when I'm constructing the new spreadsheet-based (I fill it in in longhand pencil) form for the plan of a new novel, I usually make a couple more columns than I think I'll need, because sometimes I only realise after a bit of writing that there's some element which needs tracking.

Emma

I have a box of index cards, and use blue cards for character profiles and white cards for each chapter. I write a quick blurb of what's happened in each chapter - and if you do it in pencil, you can rub it out and redo it. I can then check back if I need to look something up, and change things as I go.

If I make corrections/changes on my WIP, I'm quite ruthless, I make the change and don't keep the discarded scenes - blimey I'd have loads otherwise with the amount of changes I've made!

Kat x