NaNoWriMo Scrivener Tips: Annotations & Dump Files

Hello! Last time I wrote about NaNoWriMo Scrivener tips, I mostly talked about dividing your work up and defeating the psychological feeling of defeat that comes when facing a hefty word count goal.

This time I have a different target in my sights. We're going to shoot at that pesky inner editor person that's constantly putting your work down.

There are two approaches to dealing with the inner editor, and we'll have a look at both of them.

First, it's long been a NaNoWriMo tradition to squelch the inner editor; to lock him or her up deep inside you for a month and not let them have a say in anything you do. Scrivener's inline annotations feature can help you accomplish this.

In-Line Annotations

If you're the type of writer who hates having imperfect text and you fear leaving it in your work, it can help a lot to specially mark the text in some way, especially a way that's easy to find again later. Inline annotations can be a big help. They're bold and colorful (red, in the image above; I believe Mac versions of Scrivener allow you to change the color,) and so they stand out from the rest of your text.

You don't have to actually hunt them down manually just by color though. Scrivener's Find command has a Find by Format option, and one of the supported formats is specifically for locating inline annotations.

And best still, when you're done your piece, inline annotations are optional when you compile your work into a text file! This means when you do your final compilation to feed to NaNoWriMo.org's word count at the end of the month, all of those annotations count toward your score, but change that option, and you can compile without them.

Dump Folders

Dump folders aren't so much a feature as a way of working I've developed. A lot of other people do it too, in my experience. You basically set up a folder at the bottom of your main Manuscript folder, and when you want to get rid of stuff like annotations because it's driving you crazy having them remain visible throughout your text, you just cut them out and paste them into the dump folder.

The advantage of having one of these is that it keeps your text clean and organized; this is the solution for those who can't completely ignore their Inner Editors. Because the "deleted" text stays in the dump folder, and the dump folder is a part of your project manuscript, it has the same advantage as inline annotations; they do get included in your final NaNoWriMo word count. And because they're all clustered together at the very end of the file, they're pretty easy to remove afterward, too.

That's all for now; back to writing! Good luck everyone.

Camp NaNoWriMo August - Dead Sense

Ever since I finished my zombie story The Fast and the Dead back in February, I’ve been thinking that not only is the title no longer really appropriate but that I’d have to completely rewrite the story. This is doubly true since Camp NaNoWriMo in June, an experience that has taught me a huge amount about longer-form fiction.

So with less than two weeks remaining until Camp NaNoWriMo August, I’ve decided that my August project is going to be that rewrite. I’ll be using the first draft of TFatD as reference material, but I probably won’t have to refer to it all that much. I’ll be taking the core concepts of the story, and the characters, and fleshing both out into something much better. (At least I hope so!)

Gone will be a lot of the empty filler that I ended up writing when I didn’t know what else to write. Probably the most important thing I learned during June’s Camp NaNoWriMo was how to keep all that filler separate from the contents of the book, so with some luck, I should be able to keep it pretty tight.

Editing The Ship of the Unremembered

I think tomorrow will be the first posting of new material from the book. I’ve started recutting sections and arranging them to where they make the most sense from a narrative point of view.

Unlike just about everything I’ve written and posted here before, this book is long enough to have a few different viewpoints represented, so keeping the chronology straight is more of a challenge than I’ve faced before. It’s a fun one though, and I learned a lot about my personal writing process in doing this book. I’m definitely doing another book next month. And I’m definitely pre-planning it this time.

The Price of Demand Edit Saga Continues

I’ve finished working up a final outline for the edit of The Price of Demand. The work I’ve done so far with the dialogue has really helped point me in the direction the story needs to go. A lot of elements I had in there originally are going on the scrap heap, even more than I’d suspected. That’s okay though. They didn’t need to be there in the first place. The new revision of the story should be much tighter and should make far more sense, with motivations that make more sense.

I’m a little sad to make some of the changes. Electrite becomes little more than a footnote in this new version, it’s not really playing a part in motivating anyone besides Altman and Kaylene, who need to keep it a secret. I suppose that’s okay though. It plays important roles later, as regular readers know, and it doesn’t really make sense that it should be central to EVERYTHING that ever happens.

Editing The Price of Demand

Okay then, I’ve resumed reworking The Price of Demand, including the first setup of a new resolution to the story that will make Mitchell less of a Generic Black-Hat Badguy. It’s interesting working on it as pure dialogue, though I expect it to get a little confusing figuring out what exposition goes where when I have to reintegrate it into the text.