Dee, sorry, being a geek. VBA is Visual Basic for Applications and it can be used in all Office apps to write your own add-ons to the basic program. For example, working in Excel, if you had several sheets of data that you used on a daily basis, always doing the same thing with them, you could write some VBA code so that a single click of a button does it for you. It's very powerful - if you want an Office app to do something, VBA can do it.

What I was thinking was that it wouldn't be too hard to write something in Word that helped with what you guys are having problems with. For example, you could use master & sub documents to track characters, plot lines, etc. then have a special toolbar to provide functions of some kind. I'll have a play about. There's plenty of this sort of thing out there on the web but it's all pretty expensive and may not have involved much feedback from real writers.

Jon

Sounds very interesting, Jon. I do wish I had more computer skills. I can use Word and Excel but I'm very aware that I’m just scratching the surface. It’s not until someone mentions something like this that I realise how much there is that I don’t know. The crazy think is that my partner works in IT, but I don’t know what questions to ask him!

I’ll be very interested to hear if you come up with something.

Dee


<Added>

crazy think? thing!

;)

Hi, Everyone -

A friend of mine swears by the use of post-it notes for organising the narrative sections of documentary films, and I'm about to attempt the same for my novel...

You write down everything that happens, action by action, each action on its own post it note... then you swap them round, adding and taking away, until you have a narrative you're happy with...

Don't see any reason why you couldn't include aspects of character in this process...

K

I always find timelines quite handy, especially when writing 'realist' fiction. When writing my novel I often lose track of what day it is! Which can be very embarassing when re-reading work.
Luke

I’m experimenting with a new approach at the moment that may or may not work (you can all judge for yourselves soon). It involves identifying the different threads or sub plots of a story and writing each one as a separate story (the advantage being that each is fully developed). Then I distil each thread down to bullet points and add them to a different column in an excel spreadsheet. Then I add cells to each column to make the points where the different plots meet occur on the same line. Then I have my map and I can jiggle things around to my hearts content. It’s great for spotting continuity errors, particularly of the temporal variety which I always struggle with.

Hope this helps

Grinder

Post it notes sound good, Kate. Much better for moving things around. At the moment I have 15 A4 sheets covering the dining table. I'm not good at breaking things into categories and being logical, but the idea is I want to be clear about the motive for each character in each action. I'm going with the very simple scheme of a circle for a desire and a square for an action and then lines to link them. Anything I can't break down like that yet I'm putting in a triangle in the hope of being able to break it down later. It's just giving me a system to try an remember all the people who are involved in an event or who are affected by it.

Jon, going the VBA route sounds like a good way to spend the day playing with VBA and not making any plot decisions.

Timelines, I just tend to fix the date at the start and then date/time each scene at the corner of the page.

Sharon

The VBA stuff was more me being altruistic and thinking of building a tool that could be useful to the people in this forum. It's not a one-off thing, once built it can be circulated to all & sundry.

J

Ah, sorry Jon, didn't appreciate what you were proposing. Have you done it yet?
Sharon

Butting in at the end here! Grinder I like your idea of developing each of the subplots as a separate story and then weaving them together. In theory all points should be covered and plot-holes filled in! My (9 year old) daughter told me that the Hitchikers Guide story (we just saw the film) was like a plait with Arthur Dent running down the middle and the vogons and Ford/Trillion/Zeephod running in and out on either side. I sometimes try to plot the plait of my story out but generally give up half way through. It becomes very heavy on one side usually! The VBA thing sounds splendid though. Very useful.

Sue
x

Sharon, been working on it over the last week (it has to fit in around other work unfortunately) and am ready to put all the pieces together. Should have something for people to play with by the end of the week.

Jon

Please can it come with very simple instructions?!
Sue