How do you?

[SamScribble]

I have spent most of my writing career ‘writing it short’.

And, before you get too dismissive, writing it short is not an easy option. (Just ask those authors who take part in the 750-word challenge. Just ask Mark Twain. Blaise Pascal. Winston Churchill.)

Short stories, 30-minute radio dramas, and hundreds – no, thousands – of 800-word newspaper columns have been my bread and butter for more that 50 years. Even the non-fiction books that I have authored have tended to be ‘slim volumes’.

And then, a day or so into ‘the great Covid-19 lockdown’, I decided to start writing a piece of fiction with the intention of stopping when I got to the end. Today, I passed the 28,000-word mark and, even standing on tip toes, I can’t yet see the end.

My question, for those of you who consider a 100,000-word piece of fiction ‘a walk in the park’, is: how do you keep track of your slice of created history? How do you keep track of the fact that Jack got the phone call from Mary on Wednesday afternoon? How do you remember that it was raining when Anne arrived at Jack’s flat for the first time?

 

[NoJo]

A lot of writers fuck up, and make exactly this kind of mistake, even when they use a bastion of techniques.

The way you're describing your progress, it sounds as though you're not writing "top down", but linearly. So I guess you may end up with a smaller word-count after a few infanticidal redrafts

 

[Handley_Page]

I have spent most of my writing career ‘writing it short’.

My question, for those of you who consider a 100,000-word piece of fiction ‘a walk in the park’, is: how do you keep track of your slice of created history? How do you keep track of the fact that Jack got the phone call from Mary on Wednesday afternoon? How do you remember that it was raining when Anne arrived at Jack’s flat for the first time?

An author, writing in a journal IO was reading, reckoned he had an index card file which had all the pertinent details and events.

 

[Blind_Justice]

Short answer: Notes, notes, notes and more notes.

Long answer: I was a D&D game master running sprawling homebrew campaigns long before I considered myself to be a writer. One habit which serves me well is having most pieces of info SOMEWHERE for reference. My major characters have stat sheets which not only feature their relative strengths and weaknesses, but also quirks, habits, speech patterns and of course a visual description. There's nothing more annoying to see in a mammoth epic that the heroine has "piercing blue eyes" in one section and "playful emerald cat eyes" in another because the author forgot to fact-check his own writing. Since many of my stories take part in shared universes, I have timelines for major events. I have fact sheets for often-visited places. Also, even if I rewrite a good chunk of the story, I don't throw away the "old" bits, instead I keep them archived, just in case.

I may be a bit excessive in that regard. To pick up your example: If that phone call is important later in the plot and you know that already, have a second document open (or just use a Post-it tacked to your monitor frame) and make a note of it. "Phone call: Mary - Jack, Wednesday, <important plot point/event I need to remember later>" It will save you a lot of needless scrolling through long text passages until you find what you're looking for.

There are even whole programs or services for this, like Campfire Pro (which is arguably more aimed at GMs, but works well for authors of big, sprawling fantasy worlds. No more file cards )

 

[RejectReality]

Short answer: Notes, notes, notes and more notes.

Long answer: I was a D&D game master running sprawling homebrew campaigns long before I considered myself to be a writer. One habit which serves me well is having most pieces of info SOMEWHERE for reference. My major characters have stat sheets which not only feature their relative strengths and weaknesses, but also quirks, habits, speech patterns and of course a visual description. There's nothing more annoying to see in a mammoth epic that the heroine has "piercing blue eyes" in one section and "playful emerald cat eyes" in another because the author forgot to fact-check his own writing. Since many of my stories take part in shared universes, I have timelines for major events. I have fact sheets for often-visited places. Also, even if I rewrite a good chunk of the story, I don't throw away the "old" bits, instead I keep them archived, just in case.

I may be a bit excessive in that regard. To pick up your example: If that phone call is important later in the plot and you know that already, have a second document open (or just use a Post-it tacked to your monitor frame) and make a note of it. "Phone call: Mary - Jack, Wednesday, <important plot point/event I need to remember later>" It will save you a lot of needless scrolling through long text passages until you find what you're looking for.

There are even whole programs or services for this, like Campfire Pro (which is arguably more aimed at GMs, but works well for authors of big, sprawling fantasy worlds. No more file cards )

This.... Though I've still messed up on occasion and had to go back and fix it. I've begun storing mine in my website database, which will eventually be a resource for the website as well as my own use. Right now, I'm the only one who can reach the interface.

I also go back and read through large parts of the existing story any time I've been away for a while, or I'm venturing into a new story where related locations and characters are going to be referenced/spring up.

I've been seriously looking into Campfire Pro lately, ever since I saw Shad doing a sponsor message for it on YouTube. The website keeps going crazy on me though. Scroll bar vanishes and can't see anything except what's on the screen at the moment it happens. May have to try in a different browser.

 

[AlinaX]

It's tough. Even at the novelette scale you have the danger of continuity errors. Just a case of read, re-read, if possible get beta readers & editors, and even then there's no guarantee you'll spot the errors.

 

[lovecraft68]

I have two monitors. One is the current chapter I work on, the other has whatever i have written so far, so if I start to question something I'll do a keyword search in the ongoing document

Of course that's if the spider sense tingles and I question something.

Usually I can write something steadily enough I keep some type of memory.

Currently I picked back up on a piece started six months ago...that's required a lot of searches.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

I usually insert bookmarks or unique characters to points I might need to refer back to, and just use ctrl f to find those items.

For complex interactions like strip poker, I create a spreadsheet with each players name and items of clothing As a player removes each item I mark put an X in the box for that item. I have a few series I'm finishing up of 50K+words.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The longest single piece I've written is my Arthurian thing, 103000 words, written over a year. I wrote it serially, the same way I always do, and the only tool I used was a spreadsheet to keep track of the relative ages of the main characters. Other than that, I rely on my memory and the occasional 'read it all through'. It's episodic, so no different to any of my other stories really, in that each chapter Is pretty much self-contained with only a minimum number of characters interacting.

I clearly have a good memory for the micro detail, which is odd, because I'll often read something through and think, "wow, did I write that?" But i also put 'mood' before 'plot' so that makes things easier.

 

[RejectReality]

An example of some of my reference material for the Magic of the Wood series:

The years are arbitrary. I just started at 1900 because it was a round number. They obviously have no real bearing on the actual stories. I use hyphenated names to help track pairings, and color-coded them as well. The main purpose of this one is to be able to quickly reference how old the other characters in the series are. Having it in a spreadsheet means I can add new kids/stories and let the formulas fill in everything for me.

Just realized I didn't edit an entry after I finished Blessing. Ella has already had her daughter in Queen, so that one's a year off.

 

[oggbashan]

...

My question, for those of you who consider a 100,000-word piece of fiction ‘a walk in the park’, is: how do you keep track of your slice of created history? How do you keep track of the fact that Jack got the phone call from Mary on Wednesday afternoon? How do you remember that it was raining when Anne arrived at Jack’s flat for the first time?

Memory, and a read through of a printed version before submission.

 

[gordo12]

I've only gotten as high as 50k words. But memory and frequent reading from the beginning serve me. I also make notes for important points right below where I'm writing separated by ****** and can refer there.

If it's a really complicated piece I have a separate research paper with all the details I can pull up when writing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My question, for those of you who consider a 100,000-word piece of fiction ‘a walk in the park’, is: how do you keep track of your slice of created history? How do you keep track of the fact that Jack got the phone call from Mary on Wednesday afternoon? How do you remember that it was raining when Anne arrived at Jack’s flat for the first time?

I use Scrivener, which is mostly an electronic implementation of some of the same ideas already discussed. Some of the things I do with that:

- break each chapter into named scenes ("at the party", "after the party", "the next day", ...)
- annotate each scene, for instance with the date when it occurs
- create and assign tags, so I can easily find all the scenes where Martin has appeared
- create a file card for each character with their basic info (date of birth etc.) so I can easily check continuity stuff.

This doesn't prevent all continuity glitches (I just wrote a guy as married and single IN THE SAME SCENE, thank heavens for beta readers) but it helps a lot.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

I’ve got about 230k words published and pending so far of approx 480k story. I did three things to stay organized: first, gave every character, no matter how minor, a backstory, and second, created a master chronology of the major events showing where things overlap in different parts of the series. I actually never use the master chronology because knowing the characters helps me keep things straight.

The third thing is that I broke the story down into serial novels with chapters. That’s an ongoing process and sometimes, a single unit gets too unwieldy. This past week, I was finalizing the latest chapter, and decided the chapter was too long (30k words) and the length weakening the pace. I broke it into two chapters—revised, one’s 13k and one 16k—and the flow’s definitely improved.

I write on my iPhone and use Google Docs, so that might be, in part, where keeping things in chunks is helpful.

Edit: I do a fourth thing too—I write slow. Despite how excited I get about the twists, turns, reveals and sex scenes in my story, I give myself the time I really need to craft a 23k chapter with the same care and intensity that I would a 750-word story.

 

[SamScribble]

Thank you, girls and boys. A few ideas for me to try there.

 

[KeithD]

I've written a couple dozen published full novels. The longer the novel is going to be the more likely my notes, never too full, will include brief notes on what's going to be covered in each chapter, but chapters and plot threads/characters have always been added once I started to write. Even for short works, I'll note down name spellings. I won't do either detailed character lists or plotting charts, though. The more of that you do, the more boxed in your story will be and the more pressure you'll have to include character traits and tidbits that don't really serve the story. There's always more worked out in my mind that I'm not consciously aware of even to the point where reference nuggets will go in earlier chapters I don't then understand how they fit in the storyline, but they always do later.

When I write nonfiction, it's heavily outlined and I stay between the lines. I wouldn't write fiction at all if I did the same there. The fun of writing fiction is seeing where it's going to go and how it's all going to fit. I don't rip out stuff in review. I add. My first draft is a streamlined "drive to the end before you start fooling around with it."

I retain coherence pretty well in my mind and rarely lose that. (I found that in a dreadful M.C. Beaton book earlier today--the villain has a discussion with two trussed-up intended victims, where all of them speak, and one page later Hamish MacBeth shows up and rips covering tape off the intended victims' mouths). Maybe the ability to retain complex order in my mind comes from having worked in crisis news rooms for a couple of decades where I had to write and pass on analysis while the events were being reported by the first-source media--it becomes more of an ability to know where to quickly and accurately fact check rather than knowing/remembering everything.

Doing any of this is a hell of a lot easier in the electronic age than it was before--and quite a few of my books were written before there were either personal computers or the Internet.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

The longest novel length story I have published right now, here at Lit., is Walker Brigade - Book of Incidents. It's at 88K words. I used to be at 110K words when I first published it back in 2005-2006. It's has been edited several times since the first writing, which took me about a year to finish.

Back then I was using yWriter, which kept track of a bunch of stuff that you could reference on the fly while writing a scene.

My next big project was Warrior One, which I did in word. Although they were published as separate stories, they are actual one long novel length work with a total length of 110K so far, as they are not really finished.

The shortest story I ever published is 4800 words or there abouts.

I usually start at the beginning and write until I get to the end like many other writers. I do sometimes skip parts until later, like backgrounds on the characters and such and depending on how I write them in the future, may change what I write about them in the past.

For the longer works I use a spreadsheet or word doc to list places, people, things, and events.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I have spent most of my writing career ‘writing it short’.

And, before you get too dismissive, writing it short is not an easy option. (Just ask those authors who take part in the 750-word challenge. Just ask Mark Twain. Blaise Pascal. Winston Churchill.)

Short stories, 30-minute radio dramas, and hundreds – no, thousands – of 800-word newspaper columns have been my bread and butter for more that 50 years. Even the non-fiction books that I have authored have tended to be ‘slim volumes’.

And then, a day or so into ‘the great Covid-19 lockdown’, I decided to start writing a piece of fiction with the intention of stopping when I got to the end. Today, I passed the 28,000-word mark and, even standing on tip toes, I can’t yet see the end.

My question, for those of you who consider a 100,000-word piece of fiction ‘a walk in the park’, is: how do you keep track of your slice of created history? How do you keep track of the fact that Jack got the phone call from Mary on Wednesday afternoon? How do you remember that it was raining when Anne arrived at Jack’s flat for the first time?

I keep a lot of notes and do a lot of re-reads of previous chapters.

I also use one of those sites that allows you to put in your family tree to track the various characters relationships to each other.

 

[gordo12]

Forgot to mention I also use bright yellow text highlighting in areas I want to check or revisit later. That way I can check them out when editing.

 

[lovecraft68]

An example of some of my reference material for the Magic of the Wood series:

The years are arbitrary. I just started at 1900 because it was a round number. They obviously have no real bearing on the actual stories. I use hyphenated names to help track pairings, and color-coded them as well. The main purpose of this one is to be able to quickly reference how old the other characters in the series are. Having it in a spreadsheet means I can add new kids/stories and let the formulas fill in everything for me.

Just realized I didn't edit an entry after I finished Blessing. Ella has already had her daughter in Queen, so that one's a year off.

Jeez....I have a ratty notebook and it also has all my e-bay notes and other stuff in it.

 

[RejectReality]

Jeez....I have a ratty notebook and it also has all my e-bay notes and other stuff in it.

Oh, I have my collections of ratty notebooks, pocket folders, three-ring binders, etc. I also have sheets of paper folded in half, old load sheets from work, and junk mail envelopes covered with notes about everything under the sun sitting near my computer.

Once something gets complex enough, it gets transferred to some digital form, and if readers might be interested, that digital form is typically designed to be accessed via my website. ( Eventually. These are all still behind the scenes WIP )