Progress and motivation

Here is another little tool I use to help move my writing along.

This is not for everyone, I know, but I'm a bit of a measurement freak at times. When I'm tackling a big project, I need to see my progress somehow.

Writing a novel is a big project. Here's what I use to give a visual guide of how I'm doing. This is done in Excel. There's a table of data, and a graph.

First off, I need to explain how I write. I don't find it easy to find my way around a 400 page document, so I break it up into easy chunks. Ghosts wound up split over 13 separate documents. I give each document a meaningful name related to the story at that point, then prefix it with a number to ensure the documents appear in the correct sequence.

This makes it more difficult to keep track of overall word count, which is where the spreadsheet came in originally. There is a column for each document, where I keep note of the separate word counts. This is then easy to total up.

To turn it into a graph over time, I create separate rows showing the word count on particular dates. So as not to have too many rows, I usually create a row per week rather than per day. This shows how the word count rises over time - the red line in the graph.

But progress is more meaningful with a target to aim for. So, I have a "Target" row showing where I want the word count to be at some point in the future. It is then a simple formula to work out what the target should be on any given day, which automatically populates the target column, and produces the blue line on the graph.

You can see, I started off badly and have been slightly below target ever since. But I don't feel too bad about it, because I'm still on course for a reasonable word count by the end of the year. I'm pitching short of full novel length for a first run through, because I find it easier to add words in where scenes or characters need development, than to trim out later on.

I find measurements like this can be a double-edged sword.

If I'm doing reasonably well, and I've got some momentum going, then seeing the chart climb helps keep me on the straight and narrow. I feel good when I'm on course, and I can kick myself into making the extra effort to keep it that way. This worked for me while I was drafting Ghosts, and it seems to be working now. That little chart helps draw me back each evening, even if I only have the energy to add a couple of hundred words. I stay in the habit of writing each day.

However, if I'm not feeling the love, then no amount of graphing will motivate me, and I'm more likely to get depressed at the targets I'm missing. This happened when I first started Tiamat's Nest. I drafted some scenes, started tracking with the aim of completing a draft in a few months, then ran out of steam.

I don't believe in becoming a slave to targets, so the best thing to do in that case is acknowledge that this is not the right time, and set it aside. That's what I did with this WIP three years ago, and now I'm back with a vengeance!

Stalking agents

Seeing as I am actively querying, I thought I'd share something about my process.

The tool I use is nothing exciting. It's just a spreadsheet containing what I consider to be relevant details of each agency.

Probably too small to make out details here, so I'll zoom in a bit on each section...

Name/Website/address: All pretty self-explanatory. The thing to note here is the traffic light coloring. This is the end result of other information further on. Any clear red flags turn this overall indication red. Bright greens are reserved for those that definitely deal in my genre and have a good record. Pale green and yellow show some concerns in the details.

One thing that throws up a red flag in this technological age, is an agency without a web presence. If I can't find a web site, and most especially if the site is unused or invalid, then I won't bother any further.

Sci-fi: This is a crucial question for me, and is trickier than it looks. Some agents are very explicit in ruling out sci-fi. Of all the genres agents might explicitly list as something they don't represent, sci-fi/fantasy seems top of the heap. It makes me feel very unwanted as a writer. A few (a very small few) explicitly say they do. This leaves a large grey and ambiguous territory in the middle.

There's also a lot of conflicting information out there. Searches for sci-fi on sites like Publishers Marketplace can yield apparent hits that are contradicted on agency websites. I usually look for several pieces of consistent information before labeling a definite "Yes".

That still leaves the many agents who accept "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction" with little additional information. Nobody seems all that clear on what that means. Sometimes all you can do is query and hope.

Source: When I started building my agent list, I felt it important to keep a note of where I first saw the name. It was a strange and confusing world, and I worried that I might not be able to trace back to the source of information. Now the names are like old friends, I don't pay much attention to this column.

Alerts/track record: Important information, especially alerts. I am careful to check sites like P&E and Writers Beware.

Contact: Most agencies have several agents, each with their own specialties. Before I query, I need to identify which (maybe several) individuals are candidates to contact. Of course, I will only query one agent at a given agency at any one time.

Submissions: A very important piece of information before going further. I use a cryptic code to list submission requirements, but it is fairly self explanatory. Do they want a query - not as dumb a question as it sounds, some agencies require you to submit via their web site! Do they want a synopsis or not? A bio? Do they want pages included (5 pages, 1st chapter, 50 pages) - the requirements differ. Any additional constraints, such as a short synopsis, or query word count limit.

Most importantly - do they accept email? I have sent some queries snail mail, but it is such an onerous process in comparison, that not accepting email submissions is a significant handicap in my opinion.

Of course, all these details are important to re-check immediately before querying. Agents move around. Is the contact I made a note of still at that agency? Submission requirements change. Alerts change over time too.

So, I'm curious. For those of you who are currently querying, or have done so in the past, does any of this sound familiar? Any other tips you'd like to share?

Plot wrestling

I can't believe it! I looked back and it's over a year since I last posted about the Writer's Toolkit.

After all my posts about different kinds of tools to help in different situations, there I was this summer trying to wrestle a plot to the ground, and casting around for the right tools to help me out.

What helped me get moving again was the use of two tools, and, true to the central theme in the Writer's Toolkit series, both of them got modified to suit my immediate purpose.

First, the challenge...

Tiamat's Nest is a web of causal connections. There's a lot of things happening that affects what people know at any given moment, and how they act subsequently. Lots of "X knows this because of Y, but Z doesn't know that yet..."

And there's four major individuals or groups of characters, plus several other minor players, each playing out their own independent story. And these different threads criss-cross and connect to each other.

That's a lot to keep track of and to weave into a single story, and at the point where I got stuck I hadn't fathomed half of it out yet. It felt a bit like wrestling an octopus. The challenge for me was to depict the web in a way that allowed me to see the big picture, and flesh out the details without getting bogged down by them.

The solution...

Tool Number One was inspired by Randy Ingermanson. In a recent newsletter, he talked about story threads and writing character synopses, where you examine each main character in turn and write a brief synopsis of their part in the story.

In Randy's technique, each successive synopsis builds on the previous one and takes you further into the story as a whole. I modified this slightly so that they didn't run together into a linear whole, but essentially told the story from that character's point of view so I had several parallel synopses.

The benefit of this is that it got me closer to the characters, and allowed me to advance the story based on each character's perspective. This was great for ensuring consistency. It also persuaded me to choose a focus character where I previously had a group. The other members of the group are still there, but I now have a much crisper view of the action and a more personal perspective.

Tool Number Two was a modification of something I've used before - a timeline with swimlanes for each main character.

I had tried this originally, because the tool worked very well for me in Ghosts...

...but this is where I very quickly got bogged down in the extra mess of detail present in Tiamat's Nest.

The modification that helped me out was to forget the time aspect for now, and to focus on the key events that cross threads. Instead of each row in the table representing a block of time, each row now introduces a key event in the story. Where the row crosses columns for the main characters, I describe the character's part in that event, plus subsequent actions along that character's story thread for as long as they stay confined to that particular thread.

In this way, I can map out the major highlights of the story and keep the detail under control. This way of arranging information also helps with ensuring that each character's story remains consistent.

Now, you may have noticed that both of these approaches duplicate a lot of information. This is not a good thing. Duplication is wasteful at best. At worst, it gives ample opportunity for introducing contradictions, because keeping duplicate sets of information in step through the inevitable modifications is tricky and error-prone.

I am still working through the plotting, but the way I see it, the character synopses were a great way to get me into my characters' heads. I doubt if I'll flesh out the entire story in this way. Now I've got started on the tabular format, and transferred relevant data over from the synopses, I see this is my main vehicle for the rest of the plot. I will also need to overlay my timeline back onto it eventually, but for now I'm more concerned with the order of events and connections between them.

So, how about you? Do you have any favorite techniques for wrestling a troublesome plot to the ground? Do you use any structured tools? Do you take what you've seen other people do and stick to "the rules", or do you like to innovate to suit your purpose?

A dangerous yearning

In the last few posts on writing tools, I've talked not about the tools themselves but about the kinds of writers who may - or may not - embrace them.

First, I preached to the converted - you inveterate planners, who avidly lap up any new way of organising thoughts. My mission there wasn't to enthuse about the endless variety of tools available, but to caution against gorging yourselves to the detriment of your writing.

Then I threw myself on the mercy of the pantsers, risking your ridicule as I offer the tools as valuable lifelines in times of adversity while you sail the trackless seas of unstructured creativity.

Now I address a different audience: those who yearn to be more structured, more disciplined in your writing.

In a sense, this whole series of posts was inspired by you.

Over the last year or so, I've seen numerous blog posts describing one tool or another. In amongst comments on how great an idea this was, I invariably saw a few plaintive cries of "if only I was that organised."

And I felt some resonance with those cries, because (believe me here!) my own writing process is not all that organised. More ominously, I found myself sinking into despairing feelings of inadequacy. "If So-And-So-Big-Name-Writer is using this method and I'm not," the thinking went, "then maybe I'm not a real writer."

Waaaaaaaa!!!

It was then that I decided to rebel against those feelings. At the same time, I wondered if others out there, you of the "if only I was that organised" variety, might suffer the same pangs whenever you see someone espousing some nifty tool to ferret out structural plot weaknesses or lack of character growth.

Sure, it's good to be curious. Try out new ideas. You never know, they might be helpful. But if they don't work for you, then don't stress about it. This is back to my core theme: know the outcome you seek, and pick a tool that works for you to achieve it.

Just because you don't use Snowflake Pro, or religiously outline each chapter on colour-coded index cards, doesn't make you a bad writer. There are all sorts of reasons why you may not be good writer, but failure to use any given tool or technique does not number among them.

No more so than the conspicuous absence of a Le Creuset $1,500 copper cookware set in your kitchen cupboard makes you a bad cook.

So, my message to the yearners out there is: 

yearn away, but nix the angst!

The Dark Side Addendum

Hmmm...that could be a good title for a novel, couldn't it?

Back to the point, though. I had a few more thoughts about my last post, and realized that the question of when to "tool up" is a lot more subtle than I may have suggested.

I focused a lot on the opposite ends of the spectrum - plotters versus pantsers - and I may have implied that you can only be one or the other. You either lay your full toolkit out right at the start, like a surgeon embarking on a quadruple bypass, or resort to it only when you've gone off the rails and are trying to rescue a train wreck of a novel.

No! That wasn't the idea at all.

Let me repeat a key sentence from last time: the beauty of most of the tools I've talked about is that they can be used at any stage of the writing process.

That means before, after, during, or in any combination.

Think about a simple example: the humble character sheet. Some folks are likely to start these off right at the outset. Like putting on clean underwear before leaving the house, it's an ingrained habit. But some folks may go through the whole story without making any kind of character notes at all. Erm, no, I don't think I'll extend the analogy.

Me? I've never felt the need for full-blown character sheets, not yet anyway, but I do make character notes constantly throughout the writing as details about the characters emerge. I don't do much up front, but nor do I wait until I need to rescue myself from trouble.

The point is, the same tool can often be used at different times, in different ways, and for different purposes.

In this example, the outcome I seek is usually simple consistency: I jot down details as I invent them so I can use them consistently later. I know I'll get into a muddle if I don't, so that's how I work.

And, to complicate matters, the same writer might use different tools at different stages of the game. It's not an all or nothing deal. So even a devoted plotter may only bring out certain standard favorites before setting pen to paper (character sheets...check, outline...check, ...), maybe bringing other tools to bear at later stages of the writing, and keeping others in reserve for use only when needed.

There is no light and dark; we are all shades of grey.

Welcome to the dark side...

In the previous entry in this series, I appealed to those of you who love to try out new tools. The enthusiasts. In this post, I'm appealing to those at the other end of the spectrum - folks who turn up their noses at the thought of any kind of constraining structure around their writing process.

Dedicated plotters will surround themselves with outlines and plans and character sheets right from the start. At the extreme, some folks may not write a single word until they know every plot twist, every character trait, and have mapped out their world to the last detail.

In contrast, maybe you are one of those people who can sit down to a blank page and just write. Words come, characters form on the page and the story unfolds. You have no idea where it is taking you, but that's the fun of it. And you have no need for tools other than your imagination and something to write on.

As long as what you're doing works for you, that's wonderful. I envy you.

But what happens when you start to hit problems? It's a rare writer who can throw words at the page and end up with a coherent and compelling story. Sooner or later, most of us start getting snarled up in our web of words and have to sort out the mess.

The beauty of most of the tools I've talked about is that they can be used at any stage of the writing process. To the plotters, the toolkit is an indispensible part of the process. To the pantsers out there, scornful of such deadening constraints, I offer the toolkit instead as a safety net. Only to be used in emergency.

But when an emergency strikes, you'll be glad to have some help at your side.

The trick is to recognise when you are hitting difficulties, and choose a workable way to extricate yourself.

Hello, I'm a pantser and my plot's in a knot...

The first step on the path to salvation is to admit you need saving.

Do you ever find yourself noticing signs like this?

You re-read and find inconsistencies: a name spelled one way in the first half, and differently later on, or someone with brown eyes in one chapter and blue in the next; your burglar getting ready for a midnight jaunt right after eating bacon & eggs and admiring the dawn chorus.

That "small building" you described that must be the size of Buckingham Palace from all the rooms and hallways your characters just walked down once they were inside.

You hit a road block because you keep getting lost in a complex sequence of actions: Legless the Oaf puts down his sword so he can open the door...no, wait, he needs the sword in his hand when the door opens and the Ballrag attacks him...hang on, didn't he lose his sword in the Crack of Doom in the last chapter?

Your plot has meandered out of all control and you've no idea what happens next, but you suspect you've passed that same twist in the road three times now.

Or maybe you think you're OK, but your critique partners start pointing out things that you hadn't noticed: inconsistencies, cardboard characters, actions that have no credible motivation.

Or, you're trying to revise your magnum opus and it feels like you're wrestling an octopus.

All these are signs that you're in a hole and you might need something more than your bare hands to dig yourself out.

I'm a pantser! Get me out of here!

When it comes to getting out of difficulty, I suggest that the outcomes-based approach I've promoted becomes more important than ever.

If your aim is to write as freely as you can, then you likely want to put as little effort as possible into formal structure. This means you really don't want to waste time and energy throwing random tools at a problem hoping for a fix. All the more need then to understand what you are trying to achieve and choose the best tool for the job.

First, understand what it is that's causing you trouble. For example, are you getting into knots over time, space, distance, causation, motivation, description, character development, story arc?

Having identified the source of your angst, what outcome do you need? Consistency, a clear visualisation of the scene, controlled reveal of information, credible motivation for actions and reactions?

Only once you understand what you need help with, and what outcome you seek, pick something that will help you sort out the mess as quickly as possible, and let you get on with the fun of writing.

So, skeptical pantsers of the world, my message is simple...

The conceptual tools I've talked about in this series are not chains to bind you.

Used sparingly, at the right time and for the right reasons, they are your lifelines.

Happy writing.

When all you have is a hammer...

Every problem starts looking like a nail.

And I'm guessing - just a small leap of intuition here - that you wouldn't be too impressed with a carpenter turning up to fit your kitchen cupboards with nothing but a hammer in his toolbox.

You expect him to be equipped with a range of quality tools to tackle various stages of the task in hand. Likewise if you engage a plumber, or a gardener, or any other professional.

Why would writing be any different?

This series of posts has so far explored just a small corner of the warehouse of tools that writers have available to them. I've mentioned some specific examples along the way, but the main aim of the posts has been to offer guidance in how to choose your own toolkit to suit you.

Some of you are tool enthusiasts, some are dedicated pantsers who either scoff at such constraining discipline, or yearn for it but despair of ever improving themselves. These next few posts are aimed at the enthusiasts, the scoffers, and the yearners respectively.

Kids in a sweetshop

First, advice to the enthusiasts out there: don't gorge yourself, you'll make yourself sick.

There's no need to use every single tool in your toolkit on every story. Tools are there for a purpose, and it's important to use them appropriately. Note that I'm back to using the word "tool" in its conceptual sense, i.e. things like character sheets, outlines, timelines etc.

I used to work as a software developer, and I used many conceptual tools to help describe the features of complex business applications. I had a large repertoire to draw on, but I used different ones in different situations depending on what made sense.

What made sense depended on various characteristics of the application.

For example, an ordering system might have many flows of information from one business entity to another: from customer order to service delivery unit, to work order, and on to customer invoice and payment. In such a system, many different departments and business objects are involved, so data flows and process diagrams will be needed to capture the key features of the application.

On the other hand, in an incident management system the data more-or-less stays in one place, but actions by various people take an incident through its lifecycle from open, to assigned, to work in progress, to resolved. Here, a data flow diagram is not likely to convey any real insight into what's going on, but a state change diagram sure as heck will.

The point is that in software development there are many different diagramming conventions to capture different concepts: flowcharts, swimlanes, use cases, data flows, state transitions etc. Which ones are useful depends on the dominant characteristics of the system you are trying to describe.

Does this start to sound familiar?

In writing, different kinds of stories have different characteristics that are important.

Some tools, such as outlines and character sheets, are likely to be common features. But if your story is heavily character-based, for example, then detailed character notes become far more important than in an all-out action story.

In a murder mysteries or political and spy thrillers, logical connections are vital so you are more likely to depend on detailed timelines, and swimlanes that help you track who's where, when, what they can see, and what they know. Your character sheets are also likely to focus more on connections and motivations and you might need stakeholder maps to keep track of who is "friends" with whom.

In both science and historical fiction, setting consistency is important so you are likely to need detailed setting notes, whereas in contemporary settings, especially ones which you know well, you are writing from innate knowledge.

Do you get the idea?

Different kinds of stories present different kinds of writing challenges, and require a variety of different tools to help meet those challenges.

So, just because you've seen a nifty new technique doesn't necessarily mean that it's right for your purposes in this story.

If you're an enthusiast, you might be itching to try it out. Do so, by all means, you need to get the measure of new tools and understand their strengths and shortcomings, but don't feel you have to use it in every situation.

The best hammer in the world might be great at hammering nails, but it really sucks at driving screws.

Writers tools - content v. medium

Earlier this year, I started a series of posts on writers' tools. My theme up to now has been looking at desirable outcomes (things you might be trying to achieve) and picking a suitable tool for the job.

This series is woefully incomplete, and I'll try to peck away at it from time to time, but I want to take a few diversions into some other topics around the use of tools.

I'll start with some clarification the use of the word "tool" itself.

When you talk about tools, you might think of things like MS Word, or Scrivener, or Snowflake Pro. My posts up to now have not been about these, but about conceptual tools. Things like flowcharts, timelines, character sheets.

In other words, I've been concentrating on the content - arranging ideas to reveal insights. But the medium is important too, because that is how you expose your content to view.

First off, let's look at some of the media you might use to contain your conceptual tools. Most of these are computerised, but not all.

• Word processors, such as MS Word. Great for manipulating text, including lists and tables.
• Spreadsheets, such as MS Excel.
• Specialised diagramming tools, such as MS Visio.
• Pen & paper.
• More specialised physical media such as index cards, Post-It notes, whiteboards.
• Specific writing systems, such as Scrivener.
• Your own head - don't overlook the manipulations you do mentally without necessarily committing anything to a more durable form.

Yet again, my advice is simple: choose the right tool for the job, using whatever measure of "right" makes sense to you.

In the rest of this post, I'll touch on some of these measures of "rightness" that you might want to consider.

Can the medium carry the content?

This is clearly important, for example you'd be daft to try drawing a complex diagram using something with no diagramming capability.

This consideration is especially important for the computerised tools. General purpose office tools such as Word and Excel have their obvious strengths - manipulating text and numbers for example - but they can be pressed into service in many less obvious ways.

MS Word can produce tables and diagrams, so if you are most comfortable with Word then you might use it more extensively for these purposes. Word's paradigm is the written page. You can have as many pages as you want in a document, but there are practical limits on how wide you can go so I find it works best with tables of only a few columns. However, for small tables I find it offers much more user-friendly flexibility than Excel.

MS Excel has tables at its heart. It is much more two-dimensional than Word, so is easier to use for large tables. I also use it for simple diagrams, those that are little more than boxes of colours or text placed against one or two axes.

Here is an example of a timeline with dependencies:

It might not look much like a diagram, but for cases like this you can strip out the pictorial fluff and what you have left is the essential core of the conceptual tool.

If you want sophisticated diagramming capability, you might want to consider a specialised tool such as Visio.

I have no experience with specialised writing software. Maybe someone can help out in the comments. I understand that they usually contain a number of tailor-made tools, such as outlines, scene lists, and character sheets. All I'll suggest is look at what conceptual tools they offer, and think about how you want to employ them.

Is it the right strength for the job?

Are you trying to crack a nut with a sledgehammer? Or trying to steer a yacht with a teaspoon?

Think about the size of task you are trying to accomplish. The same conceptual tool might require different approaches depending on how much information you are trying to capture.

For example, think about a logic diagram used to untangle plot dependencies. If you are only trying to order a handful of events, you might do this in your head. That's fine. Just remember that you are still employing a conceptual tool to assist you.

If you have a more complex scenario, then maybe pen and paper would do. Or you might order the events in a list in MS Word with notes about the dependencies.

But if you are trying to order the events of a whole novel, then maybe you need something more industrial strength to help you out.

If you need to lay out a complex timeline with many threads and dependencies, then you might even consider project management software - designed to achieve exactly that.

Does it fit with your way of working?

This last consideration is all about you. What works for you? Do you enjoy the discipline of having everything in one electronic repository? Are you OK with a folder full of Word documents? Do you keep everything straight in your head? Do you prefer the feel of pen on paper?

If you are a highly structured top-down thinker, then maybe a writing tool like Snowflake Pro will work for you. If you are a dedicated pantser then trying to use a tool like this might put you off ever writing again.

There's no right or wrong way to work. The only right answer is to do what works for you. Whatever you choose, the most important thing is that you feel comfortable with it.

A final thought...

This series is called "Writers toolkit" for a reason. A carpenter or plumber doesn't carry just one tool around, so why should you? There's no reason not to make use of a collection of tools, as long as they work effectively together, and together they work for you.

The floggings will continue until morale improves

The floggings will continue until morale improves - a time-worn witticism adorning many a workplace, but sometimes it comes a bit too close to reality to be funny.

And when it does, how well do you think that works? How does it feel when people's actions and stated feelings are completely at odds with all the available evidence?

So...*drum roll*...

Why would you try to do that to your characters?

As writers, we are in charge of our worlds. Puppetmasters of our characters. But that doesn't mean we can simply pull their strings and make them act how we like. Not if we want them to be credible. So here's a few tools I've come across to help with...

Outcome - credible motivation

How you act and react in any given situation depends on a complex interplay of motivations. Amongst other things, your motivation for a particular behaviour is grounded in who you are, what you know, what you believe, and what you feel.

Your characters are no different. So if you're to portray them in a credible way, you need to understand their motivation.

This is not a post about actually creating compelling characters. There was a whole blogfest devoted to this a few months ago here, with tons of excellent advice. This post is about organising that information to get inside their heads so you can make them act in a way that won't have your readers going "Huh?"

Who you are

The most obvious tool to nail down your character is the trusty character sheet. This can be as simple or as detailed as you want. Many people use forms or templates to capture things like name, age, appearance etc.

All well and good, but if you want to understand your character you need to think about some deeper aspects of who they are. Things like background, upbringing, religion. I don't mean you need to lay out their life history. For this particular purpose, you are trying to get to events that formed the character, that would influence how she behaves. Did she have a troubled childhood? A domineering parent? A fear of dogs? And how does that show up in present-day attitudes and behaviour?

And what about skills and preferences? Someone with a passion for archaeology is going to have a rather different view of evading pursuers in that labyrinthine Egyptian tomb than someone who believes in the supernatural and is afraid of the dark.

The character sheet can prompt you to think about some standard aspects of your characters, as well as being a handy place to record the facts for later reference, but there are other tools that can help you really get inside their heads.

One that I like to use is the character interview. Here, you pretend to be a journalist, or a TV host, and ask your character questions. You let them respond how they see fit. See here for some examples.

Similar tools involve writing a letter from your character, or an entry in their personal diary. They all work the same way - to dissociate your mind from your author's voice, and let your character's voice shine through. It can be quite revealing hearing things that you never suspected.

Of course, having this information is all very well, but you must remember to use it, too.

Who do you hang out with?

An important part of who you are, is who your friends - and enemies - are.

You may have already noted things like religion in your character sheets, but what about belonging to things like clubs, political parties, secret societies? As with other things on the character sheet, the groups you are interested from a motivational point of view are those that involve sharing in a strong set of beliefs which will guide your character's attitudes and responses to certain situations.

To work out the effects of these influences, I suggest treating these groups as characters in their own right. Develop something like a character sheet for them, to document their history, core beliefs and values, and maybe alliances and enmities. Then, when you label a character as "belonging to the Ancient Order of Compulsive Leg-Waxers", you will have a good idea of all the emotional baggage that label brings with it.

Furthermore, when you look into which groups your various characters are affiliated with, you may uncover new reasons for one character to like or hate another.

If groups of allied characters are important to your story, you might find it helpful to add membership lists to your group descriptions, to keep track of characters who may be expected to act in concert. After all, some groups have efficient communications networks, so what one character learns along the way might find its way to another person's ears in a way that would otherwise be hard to explain.

Of course, individuals form friendships and enmities too, without the need for any group affiliation. These can be tracked on character sheets, but sometimes the dynamics might be better revealed by a stakeholder map.

This is a diagram that shows characters (the "stakeholders") on the page, with lines between them to denote positive or negative relations. Seeing relationships mapped out in this way can suggest alliances or conflicts that you may not have otherwise considered. You can use the same idea to illustrate group dynamics where you have groups that interact with each other rather than just forming passive backdrops for individuals' motivations.

Here is an example I drew when I started on The Ashes of Home. Here, "smiley" marks on lines show friendship, while "frowns" show enmity. Drawing this map brought home to me just how isolated Shayla was, having pissed off a lot of people in Ghosts of Innocence, and this realisation changed the whole tone of the sequel.

What you know

So much for background, how a character acts will also be influenced by what they know at a given point in the story. Here, I'm really concerned about what new knowledge they gain during the story, as opposed to what you've already established in their background.

In an earlier post, I suggested keeping a knowledge map - simply a swimlane diagram that charts knowledge acquired at different points in the story.

What you believe

This is similar to what you know, but add the layer of interpretation (which might also be influenced by what you knew or believed previously).

For example, Lady Dolores enters the library to see Lord Pantyhose lying dead on the floor. She catches a glimpse of Hugh Gormless-Twitterer leaving hastily through the door at the far end of the room. Only an hour earlier, she had glimpsed Hugh taking His Lordship's pistol from a drawer in his desk. So what does she conclude?

What she knows, is that His Lordship is dead, and that Hugh was recently in the same room. What she believes is that Hugh shot Lord Pantyhose. It is the latter that will colour her subsequent actions.

These subtleties can be captured on your knowledge map by simple annotations to distinguish facts from interpretation.

Eye witness

Counsel for the Prosecution, Sir Hugh Beady-Scrimshaw QC (hereinafter referred to as The Prosecution):  

Sooo...Mr. Flatulent...in your statement to the police, you claim to have seen your wife, Mrs. Edith Flatulent, enter your house at 4:33 precisely, thereby proving that she could not have been at the High Street Jewellers at the same time conducting a robbery with a sawn-off shotgun.

Mr. Clement Flatulent, 33 Bullshit Place, Dorking, Surrey (hereinafter referred to as The Witness):  

That's right, guv'nor. I was watching telly at the time, see? And the Generation Game was on an' I 'ave a clear view into the hall from my settee. She just came in the door, went into the front room, and left a few minutes later. But, like I said to the rozzers, if she was 'ere, she couldn't 'ave been there as well, innit?

The Prosecution: (with a theatrical flourish pulls a drawing from the voluminous folds of his gown, and acknowledges applause from the gallery with a graceful inclination of his head) I present to the court a plan of Mr. Flatulent's house...

...From this plan, it is quite plain that if Mr. Flatulent was indeed sitting on his settee as he claims, then he had no sight of the front door, nor of the door to the front room. I put it to you, Mr. Flatulent, that you did not see who entered your house and cannot be sure that it was your wife.

The Witness: Oh 'eck.

Mrs. Edith Flatulent: (sobbing) It's a fair cop.

Substitute "The Author" for "The Witness", and "The Reader" for "The Prosecution", and you have a situation all too easy to get caught in. I know I often get carried away writing scenes and making assumptions about who can see what, only to have to come back and rewrite parts where I realise that what I've put on the page drives a bulldozer through the laws of physics and spatial consistency.

Anywhere that line of sight becomes important, I find it essential to draw a picture. Plans and diagrams are invaluable tools in the writer's armoury for dealing with spatial consistency.

The most common tools here are simple top-view maps and plans to establish the spatial configuration of a setting. I use floor plans of buildings and ships, and maps of various scales for towns, regions, and whole planets.

Often, these end up only partially filled in because I usually only do enough for my purpose.

These drawings help me to anchor myself in a scene (which is the subject of another post) and help to sort out questions such as line of sight (as in the opening example). Can my character realistically see what is happening down the hall? Or is the Town Hall visible from the kitchen window?

Less obvious uses are to establish realistic travel times between A and B, whether from one room of a mansion to another, or one town to the next.

Of importance in action scenes is to confirm that the action you are describing has room to take place. Does anyone remember cartoons like Tom & Jerry, where chases took place down endless hallways that would require a house the size of Buckingham Palace to accommodate? You don't want your treasured WIP to end up like that, do you?

Finally, don't neglect the third dimension, particularly for line of sight questions. Can you really see from the bedroom window into the neighbour's yard? If in doubt, draw a vertical section to scale to see if you have line of sight over that eight-foot-high wall.

Or what about seeing from the top of that hill into the valley below? Anyone remember drawing contour sections in geography class? Your poetic description of the car chase the hero watches from the trig point might be all for naught if you haven't confirmed your line of sight. Often all you can see from the top of a hill are the tops of other hills!

Of course, you could just stick with what you've written. After all, nobody will notice.


Will they?

Picture this...

I realize I've been a bit slack on the writing tools front. This is the last foray down one of the side roads of logical consistency, all about building your own diagramming tools to help untangle logical and logistical nightmares.

Previous posts in this mini-series:
Helping ze little grey cells
Grow your own
The diagrammer's Lego set

This post asks some of the kinds of questions you might wrestle with in the course of plotting. The idea is to make these diagramming concepts more understandable through examples.

Help! I can't get things in the right order

So, Legless the Elf is battling the loathsome Ballrag. He puts down his sword so he can get out the Emerald of Everlasting Cleanliness. He needs to do this before he can dazzle the Ballrag with the Emerald, and the Ballrag's cry of pain can distract the surrounding hoard of Porks. But the Porks need to be distracted before he can put down his sword for a moment.

Oops!

These kind of circular dependencies are easily exposed in a network diagram, like I've talked about in previous posts. These diagrams won't tell you how to resolve the dilemma, but they will make it clear where the problem lies and should make it easier to visualise possible solutions.

Could the vicar really get to London to commit the murder and back in time for dinner?

We can get so caught up in the events happening in our story, that we can easily lose track of the time it takes for some things to happen, especially if we have several things going on at once. If you're in this position, you can map out events on a time line so you can see exactly how much time to allow. Where you have more than one sequence of events going on, lay them out alongside each other so you can make sure important points coincide. This is what I did for Ghosts of Innocence...

This approach is also great for keeping backstory straight, except your units of time are more likely to be in years, rather than days or hours. This can help sort out questions like...

How old was Great Aunt Jessica when Crawford Bolger founded the Bolger Cookie Company?

or...

If Captain Throgmorton is eighty-seven in the story, could he really have fought at Gallipoli like he mentioned at dinner on the night of the murder?

Of course, those are easy to answer individually with some very simple mental arithmetic, but once again a diagram comes into its own when things get more complex. If, for example, you are trying to establish the history of the Bolger Cookie Company, whose fortunes are at stake after the dastardly murder, then maybe you need to track the company's history alongside Capt. Throgmorton's wartime escapades and make sure that he really could have been in the right place at the right time to be the father of Uncle Herbert.

Trouble sorting out who is where, at what time?

A lot of mysteries depend on where people are, who else is in the same room together...or passing by the door and ready to overhear the argument between the recently-deceased Lord Pantyhose and his prodigal nephew. If you're faced with this kind of orchestration nightmare then the important features are person, place, and time.

All my earlier examples have put events front and centre in the diagram. A while ago, I promised some examples where other things go into the boxes. Here, I suggest a swimlane diagram where the lanes are assigned to key locations in your setting and the boxes denote people. You can label them with the character's name, but it is also a good idea to colour them so you can easily track a character's movements from place to place. Arrows from one box to the next show when the character is moving around. This can be important if a journey takes a time that would be significant on the scale you are using.

 

Hold up, did Jeeves know about the missing cruet set when he entered the Flamingo Drawing Room or didn't he?

In a complex plot, it can get tricky to keep track of who knows what at each stage. And knowledge is important in establishing motivations for subsequent actions. Here, I suggest a different swimlane diagram. This uses a swimlane for each character, and plots key events along the other axis. Boxes in swimlanes show which characters were involved, and they show what new knowledge the character gained. This makes it easy to scan back up a swimlane to check what a character knows about at any given moment.

If you have a few very key pieces of knowledge, you can colour-code the boxes where that item is disseminated to help track the spread of information.

A couple of final thoughts...

Firstly, this is not an exhaustive list, just a few illustrations to get you going and thinking for yourselves how to apply the toolkit I introduced last time. There are so many ways to expose the innards of your story, so many variations to play with. Think about what aspect you are grappling with and devise your own tool to show it. See a need, fill a need.

Speaking of needs, the second thought is that your use of tools like this should be driven by need. Not by how cool it looks, and certainly not by feeling you ought to be using it just because venerable author Ivor Booker-Winner happens to use it.

Make sure that what you use works for you.

The diagrammer's Lego set

Networks, Gannts, PERTs, calendars, ...

The world of logic and planning is full of intimidating tools. And rule books thicker than a politician's hide for how to use them, draw them, what shape to make the boxes, and how many nervous breakdowns you're allowed along the way. Throw in some nifty software like MS Project and you can easily feel like the tool is in total control.

But this is writing we're talking about here, not project management, not software development, not bound by the strictures of PRINCE or SSADM (and, yes, that's at least as punitive as it sounds).

No-one is going to audit your plans for compliance with standard #252 subsection 3 paragraph 9.4 on the use of the colour pink in heading titles.

The only one who needs to get anything out of these tools is you. The author. The ultimate ruler of your domain and arbiter of whatever standards you set for yourself.

This little mini-series, this diversion down one of the Byzantine side roads of logical consistency, is all about giving you the confidence to throw out the rule book and draw pictures that make things clearer to you.

The nitty-gritty

These kinds of diagrams are all, at heart, variations on a simple theme. They all show you things of interest, and relationships between them.

To build your own useful diagrams, you need to decide two things:

What things are of interest in your particular situation. Things of interest might typically be characters, actions/events, time, or places (i.e. who, what, when, where). But you might have your own ideas. In the next post, I'll give some specific examples of things you might be struggling with in the quest to wrestle a complicated plot to the ground.

How best to show them to reveal what you want to see.

This mini-toolkit gives you a few simple ways to depict these things, and important relationships between them. You'll soon see that all those impressive diagrams are built from these simple ideas, and when you see them stripped and naked like that, they don't look so scary.

1. Put things in boxes.

This usually accounts for the meat of the diagram - its most important content. So you usually choose the most important objects of interest to put in boxes.

As we are talking about writing stories, and stories mostly consist of things happening, most of the time your boxes will contain actions or events of some sort. The examples in the earlier post were all of this type. But that ain't necessarily so, and later on (probably another post) I'll give a useful example of something else to go in the boxes.

BTW - by "boxes", I mean any shape with a definite boundary that you draw around the information inside: rectangular boxes, round bubbles, fluffy clouds, diamonds, pink hearts...

2. Lines between boxes.

Lines or arrows can be used to show relationships between your major objects of interest. In the network diagrams and Gannt charts I talked about last time, arrows show logical precedence or causal relationships: this has to happen before (or at the same time as) that.

Again, I've only talked about diagrams where lines happen to show dependency, but there are other uses of lines which I'll touch on with concrete examples later.

3. Position on the page.

How you position things on the page can be made significant. If you have one kind of thing of interest in your boxes, such as events in the story, you can lay out something else of interest along either a horizontal or vertical edge of the page. Then where you place your box along the page shows a relationship with whatever is on the edge.

Timelines are one example, where you mark off intervals of time along one edge.

Another common way to divide your page is into swimlanes. This simply means marking off strips of the page and assigning each strip to something of interest, such as a character, or a location, or a subplot. Everything in that particular swimlane is then associated with that character or location, or whatever you've decided on. This is a useful way to group things together so that it's easy to see at a glance everything that belongs together.

Think of a swimming pool. Imagine there's a hundred people in there, all ages and abilities, trying to swim lengths. It's a mess. But if you get your lane markers out and signpost the lanes according to ability (beginners, slow, medium, speedy) then things become a lot easier to manage...et viola!...you have swimlanes.

Of course you can combine these. Swimlanes along one edge are usually combined with time along the other, as in the Ghosts of Innocence example.

So, maybe you decide you need a timeline, but you want to easily see which characters are involved in a particular action, and also where it is happening. Obviously a swimlane might help, but are you going to slice up your page by character, or by location? Whichever aspect you choose, you will lose sight of the other. Well, you can do both, using...

4. Shape, colour, size, text.

Visual properties of boxes and lines can all be used to denote things of importance.

To resolve the dilemma I just mentioned, you could use swimlanes to show where things are happening, and choose a different colour for each of your characters. Or different shaped boxes. Or both. For example, you might use yellow stars for Sir Prancelot, pink hearts for Lady Jejune Legover, and black squares for the evil Baron McNasty.

We've already met examples where the size of the box is important. In Gannt charts, the length along the timeline shows duration. But you could also use size to show other things like distinguishing the main plot from subplots, or highlighting pivotal events in the story.

And, if all else fails, you can label your boxes with additional information.


How does this relate back to some of those earlier examples?

Probably the simplest diagram I've talked about is the basic dependency network. With the above building blocks in mind, you can see that this diagram shows actions/events in boxes, and arrows between boxes indicate that one event must happen before another. Positioning on the page is relevant, but only in so far as arrows must be arranged to go in a definite direction of flow. This is what ensures your dependencies are consistent.

This network does have a sense of the direction of time, but a Gannt chart takes this a step further by adding actual time measurements along one axis. This means that timing and duration of events is significant, not just order, so we have used one edge of the page to show time as an object of interest, and show relationship of events to time by how they line up along that edge.

Both of these diagrams can be further extended by adding more of the techniques listed above, such as swimlanes, shape, colour, etc.

All I'm really trying to illustrate here is that a whole plethora of diagramming tools, many with fancy and intimidating names, are nothing more than variations on a simple theme.

There is nothing difficult about them. Don't fear them.

Fear leads you to the dark side...

Kids in a candy store - don't overdo it

Once you start inventing your own diagrams, you can get really creative with exposing different aspects of the logical structure of your story.

But...one final word of warning. There is a limit to how much different information you can usefully convey in a single diagram.

There are practical limits on how many swimlanes you can get across a page, and the more you have, the less room there is to fit any meaningful information in.

Similarly, there are even fewer different colours or shapes you can realistically use and still hope to distinguish one from another. And if you try to combine too many different things, then you can easily end up with a mess.

Of course, the above also depends on what you are trying to get out of the diagram. If it is going to be your master reference, a repository of useful information where you tend to home in on the detail, then you can probably get away with cramming a lot more in.

But if you are trying to illustrate some pattern or picture at a glance, then you probably want to keep it simple.

My advice is: decide on the features that are most of interest, and focus on those. What is it you are trying to achieve with this diagram?

Oh, look! Outcomes again...

That is the subject of the next post, where I'll come at these diagrams from the other end...examples of problems you might be facing in unraveling your plot, and ways to build helpful pictures using these building blocks.

Grow your own

No, I'm not talking about smoking anything dodgy! I'm taking a little diversion onto the side roads of logical consistency, because all this talk of networks, and Gannts, and timelines, and swimlanes, can be a little daunting.

Tools like this come in all different shapes and sizes, with a host of different conventions for showing information. This can lead you to wonder how you will ever remember all those different diagrams.

The simple answer is - you don't!

In my previous post in this series, I showed a timeline from Ghosts of Innocence. If you think I memorised a vast array of subtly different tools, so that when the time came I could pick just the right one off the shelf, then your overestimation of my abilities flatters me.

Let me reveal a little secret. My memory for lists of facts & stuff like that is amazingly bad. And I'm incredibly lazy, so I like to make things easy for myself. I don't have a long list of tools in my head, I just have a very short list of ways to make my own tools.

In the Ghosts of Innocence example, I used that particular kind of layout because it suited what I needed to show.

In this case, my story had multiple points of view and several interconnecting threads of action, so it was important to keep sight of what each character was up to and how the different threads ran alongside each other and intertwined. However, I didn't have many causal connections so a full-blown network wasn't necessary. All I needed to do was track a few major crossing points.

But timekeeping was definitely important, because I had several journeys of many days duration. I needed to make sure, for example, that people didn't arrive before they were supposed to, or too late to make their next connection.

That led me naturally to design a layout that had a timeline along one axis, and swimlanes for the major characters on the other. Not because there was a ready-made tool for the job, but because that particular combination showed me what I needed to see.

Oh, look! There's that central theme of "outcomes" showing up again. Know what you want to achieve, and choose the tool for the job. 

Except that, in this case, "tool" is actually a component, or building block, used to make up a tool.

But look what you can do with some very simple building blocks...

I've become a bit paranoid about the length of some of these posts, so I'm going to pause for breath here. In the next post, I'll delve into the basics of this whole class of diagrams and show you how to build your own tools for yourselves.

Helping ze little grey cells

So, you have your facts straight, as per my post on factual consistency. Everything is happening in the order you outlined. Characters' hairstyles and eye colours don't shift from scene to scene, and you stick to your description of the flock wallpaper in the Flamingo Drawing Room in the sprawling mansion, right from the opening chapter through to Hercules Parrot's dramatic exposure of the midnight pudding thief.

You've got factual consistency licked.

But then...

Some astute reader points out that the cook couldn't possibly have had time to walk into the village and back in between Uncle Herbert's bathtime and the discovery of the missing cruet set in the middle of the croquet lawn.

And if Aunt Maud really could see the summerhouse from her lawn chair, then she couldn't possibly have also observed the twins duelling by the Fountain of Eternal Mediocrity because of the twelve-foot-high privet hedge in the way.

Because, while you were busy with factual consistency, you got ambushed by it's twisted sidekick...logical consistency!

Outcome - logical consistency

This is all about making sure your facts also abide by the laws of physics, geometry, chronology, human psychology, or whatever laws are relevant to your world and important to the story.

This alone is a huge topic, so I won't try to hit it all at once. This post will concentrate on causality, dependency, and chronology - making sure things happen in a logical order and in a plausible time.

In many stories, this is not a huge problem. Sequences of events happen one after another, and it's pretty clear which needs to go before which. But if you have a complicated plot, where many threads are going on at once, and especially where who knows what is important, then things can get messy real quick.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Think of an Agatha Christie mystery. My head hurt tracking all the movements of people around the boat in "Death on the Nile", and to be honest, even if there was a logical inconsistency there I'd never have spotted it.

I don't know how Agatha Christie plotted those stories, but most people need some kind of tools to help manage webs of intrigue like that, and mostly this involves some kind of visual depiction of relationships.

One of the simplest is a dependency network. This kind of diagram has two simple features: things that happen are shown in boxes or bubbles; important relationships are shown as arrows connecting things that happen.

Things that happen can be things people do (like Uncle Herbert takes a bath, or the cook walks to the village), or events (like Aunt Maud sees the twins duelling). For simplicity, I'll refer to all of these as "actions", even though some are passive (like seeing something happen).

Relationships show some kind of dependency between one action and another. These may be:

• Directly causal - Action A causes Action B to happen. For example, Jeeves entering the Flamingo Drawing Room at an inopportune moment causes Delilah to flee in panic onto the verandah.
• Dependent - Action A logically must happen before Action B. For example, the cook has to discover the antique silver cruet set is missing before the search for it can begin. You could argue that this is also causal - the discovery caused the search - but that is only partly true. There were choices to be made first (announce the loss, or conceal it, or pack bags and set sail for Brazil...). The key thing is that the search couldn't logically begin before the discovery.
• Or required by the story - it is important for Action A to happen before Action B. For example, it is important that the cook leave for the village before Jeeves enters the Drawing Room, otherwise she'd see a semi-naked Delilah running onto the verandah, which we don't want her to know about.

For whatever reason, there is a clear requirement that A happens before B, so you draw an arrow from A to B to show this.

The diagram as a whole must have a direction of flow, usually either top to bottom, or left to right. Use whichever direction works best for you, but choose one and stick to it. Arrows can go with the flow, or be slanted at an angle across the flow, but they cannot go against the flow.

This is what ensures causal consistency and avoids chains of events that try to turn on themselves and eat their own tails. If you can't arrange things so that the arrows all go with the flow, then you have a logical inconsistency somewhere.

Here is a network diagram from the start of Electrons' Breath, where I was trying to sort out the interactions between the main players as various threads of events unfold.

Please accept my apologies for the handwriting! This shows just how quick and dirty these tools can be. Great for roughing out first thoughts.

The beauty of network diagrams is that they are simple and scalable. You might use one to map out a whole novel, or simply to make sure that a messy fight scene hangs together. You might limit it to just the major plot, or delve into all the twists and turns of sub-plots. Wherever you have a mess of things going on, this might help you to keep things straight.

Time, gentlemen, please!

So, maybe you've got the cook toddling off to the village at the right point in the story, but returning again only minutes later because her departure and return are logically sandwiched between two other events. But the village is a fifteen minute walk away, and the cook isn't all that young or sprightly, and she's bound to stop for a pick-me-up at the Jolly Ploughman...oops! Your network diagram didn't show up that little problem because all it cares is that things happen in the right sequence.

Where time is important, you can turn to a related tool called a Gannt chart. This is essentially a network diagram with a measured time scale along the direction of flow. Instead of simple boxes or bubbles for actions, the length of the box now shows duration and its position on the page shows when it happened. Everything above still holds true, except now you have to make sure that you have room for the right sized boxes.

This can show up temporal inconsistencies, like where you haven't left enough time for a series of events to happen. It can also show up the less obvious opposite problem, where your character on one thread is going to end up twiddling his thumbs for an embarrassing length of time while waiting for something else to happen.

While network diagrams are easy to sketch out on a piece of paper, Gannt charts take a lot more effort to draw. If you are going to do things like this, you might consider drawing software that lets you move whole blocks of activities around together, or even project management tools like MS Project. However, I think you'd have to have a pretty complex plot before you needed industrial leverage like that.

Let me check my calendar

The chances are, if you have concerns about temporal consistency, you can probably get away with a related but much simpler tool: a calendar, or timeline. This focuses just on the timing of events, rather than all the causal relationships between them.

Without all the arrows to worry about, you can knock up timelines quite easily in tables, maybe using Excel. Here, your activities are in cells, and each row (or column, if you are going left to right) represents a unit of time. This makes it very easy to lay out a series of actions one after another, and make sure they will fit into the time available. If you need to move blocks around, you just have to make sure they still occupy the same number of time units. This is easy in a spreadsheet using cut/paste.

I used this approach to map out the main outline of Ghosts of Innocence. Here, time flows down the page, and each row is a day.

This kind of approach still lets you check for some causal consistency, providing you don't have too many dependencies. You can lay out several different threads in parallel on the same timeline, and make sure the important points where they cross paths coincide. In this example, I use arrows >> and << to show where events need to stay lined up.

In the swim

This chart also illustrates another useful technique.

Just as the position and size of a box on the page can show you time and duration, you can make use of the other dimension to show some other key information. In this example, while the rows show time, the columns show the main groups of characters. This is then called a swimlane diagram, because your activities are confined to swimlanes running either down or across the page.

Keeping everything related to a character together in a swimlane helps keep track of who's doing what, as well as when.

Back to the theme of logical consistency, this helps to ensure that you don't end up with people trying to do things in two places at once.

Outcomes

You don't approach a real-world task, like cooking a meal, or making a pirate ship, by simply dragging out the first glitzy tool you see and trying to put it to use. Do you?

Well? Do you?

OK, maybe you occasionally get a shiny new toy and want to try it out, but that's not how you go about tasks most of the time. I hope.

So why should writing be any different? If you're cooking, you have knives to cut things up with, pans to boil things in, ovens to bake with. The analogues of writing are not as physical and obvious as cutting, boiling, and baking, but they are there.

I like to think of it in terms of tangible outcomes. You don't pick up a tool thinking "I'd like to use this...now, what am I going to do with it?" You start off by thinking "I need to do ... (fill in the blank), which tool will best achieve that?"

The problem with writing is that I reckon people rarely dig deeper than "I need to write a story." Sure, the written story is the ultimate outcome, in the same way that a meal on the table is the ultimate outcome of cooking, but I believe there are some intermediate goals in writing that people maybe don't think of as concrete outcomes with appropriate tools to get them there. They just get stuck in with all sorts of writerly things, and eventually a story emerges.

Of course, I may be wrong! Please feel free to share in the comments how closely, or otherwise, this describes you.

The things I want to share are how I see different aspects of the process of writing. And I'm going to look at some desirable outcomes in this process.

I'm kicking off with one that I'm sure most people will relate to...

Outcome - factual consistency

This is about avoiding things like the blue-eyed hero on page one turning up with brown eyes on page fifty three. Or the captain's cabin being next to the sick bay in one scene, and a hundred yards away in another.

I thought I'd get this one out of the way because it's a bit of an oddball. It's both easy and difficult to discuss.

The easy part is that I only really have one tool to offer here, and that is to keep records. Document any facts from your story that you might need to use in more than one place. This applies to events, settings, characters, culture, technology...pretty much anything you can think of.

The difficult part is that practically any tool you might come across could fall into this category. They can almost all be used for factual consistency checks. Conversely, I suspect very few tools are used solely for this purpose.

Example 1: a plot outline is primarily a tool for organising your thinking about the flow of the story, but you can also refer back to it to ensure you keep your story consistent about what happens in what order.

Example 2: I draw maps and floor plans a lot to help me envisage a scene when I need to describe it. Those same drawings are crucial references later on to make sure other scenes at the same location are consistent.

Example 3: If I had to hazard a guess at the most commonly-used writer's tool, I'd suggest character sheets. Many folks use detailed templates to capture appearance, background, traits, beliefs, etc. They may well use these sheets as tools for developing fully-rounded characters, but once you have this information written down it becomes a tool for factual consistency.

This is all common sense, and this post is a bit light on startling originality. But I do have a few specific suggestions to make.

Once you have a record of some facts relating to the story, remember to use your records. The records themselves don't ensure consistency. Only you can do that. When you write a scene, check over the details of the characters that appear in it. Is it taking place in a setting you've already got some facts about? Review those to refresh your memory.

Avoid duplication. If you have the same facts repeated in different places, you can create a maintenance nightmare for yourself if (read "when") you need to change something.

While writing Ghosts of Innocence, I started keeping a dictionary, or glossary, of words important to the story. This included people, places, drugs and poisons, items of technology, cultural references. This was a useful reference, and may make a great appendix to the book itself one day, but I soon found it difficult to maintain. The reason? Almost everything in it was a duplicate of information I already had elsewhere, and the elsewheres were more important to my process, so the glossary kept getting overlooked. This is probably something that would be best left to the end. With hindsight, I'd make sure my other tools had some way to identify information to be extracted into a glossary later.

Adapt your tools. Maybe you need to keep some information about your characters that isn't in the character sheet template you use. Well, why not adapt the template this time? Add in the extra details rather than keeping them separate. You might even find occasions where it makes sense to merge two tools into one to avoid having parallel sets of details.

If you do have to duplicate information, and it will be necessary sometimes, decide which tool is your authoritative source.

For example, you might have sequences of events listed in a plot outline, and also mapped out on a timeline in a calendar. I suggest you choose one of those to be your definitive source of truth. That is the one you start making changes to. The other records then follow. If there is ever any conflict between different records, always refer back to your chosen authoritative source.

Quick aside: What if your facts are variables rather than constants? What if they change during the course of the story? You may have characters who change over time, or a setting that is totally different after some catastrophic event. In this case, you need to make sure your tools allow for some kind of version history. Maybe you keep a separate character sheet for your heroine as a young girl, compared to same heroine as housewife, compared to same heroine in her secret life as an elite undercover agent. Just make sure you use the right version in each scene!

Finally, before you go overboard documenting the crap out of every little detail, remember that both your memory and the story itself are valid records too, if you choose. Some things might be so embedded in the story that you won't forget them. Or some scene in the story might describe a place so effectively that it can serve as your primary reference. The choice is yours.

Outcome - long term memory

Just a little addendum, for those who like to throw themselves into a story without any kind of ancillary documentation. Outlines and character sheets are for wimps, you think, and you might remember every little detail about your characters now, while you are writing their story, while things are fresh in your mind.

But what about in six months time, when those batches of queries you sent out are starting to bear fruit, and an agent is interested...providing you make a series of revisions...and you've been working on a totally different story in the meantime and now can't remember who was who, and why was it so important to go to Mordor in the first place?

All of the above, talking about maintaining factual consistency while writing, applies equally to remembering what the heck was going on when you come back to your story after a break.

Just a thought. No pressure...

Writers' toolkit addendum

Now I've had a chance to think more about the task I set myself yesterday, I can see this is a big task.

There's a lot of ground to cover, so I thought I'd better say something up front about how I see this emerging.

Firstly, I plan to break this up into digestible chunks.

Secondly, my time is quite limited so this will be a gentle long distance jog, not a sprint. I'll try to get out a post in this series every week or so.

It looks like the biggest body of work will be posts about function, or outcomes that you might be seeking, and some of the tools I've come across that help achieve those outcomes.

By the way...another quick addition to the "What this is not" list...

This is not any attempt at an exhaustive list of writers tools! I wouldn't be that pretentious (I hope). All I can offer are things I've heard of in my very short time as an amateur writer. I would very much appreciate any additions you'd like to share in the comments as we go.

In between these posts, I'll slip some thoughts about the other aspects I mentioned. Personal preferences, scalability, and a few other things.