When I first sat down to start writing this story that has been brewing in my mind since, well since forever, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I mean I had written 35-50 page papers in college, 50 or so page short stories, and yeah, I could totally tackle a novel. No biggie right?
Well what started out as a simple concept has ballooned into a true epic. At last count I had over 100 named characters. That is not counting the generic ones with names like "Helmsman" or "Corporal" or "Fairy".
I named groups of military units, classes at the Mage Academy, books, swamps, trees, and my oh my how it grew unmanageable. I mean its no big deal in a short story to handle all of these moving "named" parts, but in an epic it becomes critical. You can't call the group of soldier carrying the shields "Shieldbarers" in chapter 3 and then later in Chapter 11 after you have forgotten all about naming them 8 chapters ago start calling them Shieldguard. This nuance may not seem like a big deal, but trust me it is a big deal, and it is ravaging my story!
I am a pretty well organized person. I've written down all of my brilliant ideas as I have had them. I have written down notes, and developed ideas into workable plot lines. I collected art, and began to draft sketches of my main characters, but by god did I say that Henrik had Blue eyes, Grey Eyes, Silver eyes or brown? Now I got to go back through and search for his description, and PRAY I only described it once.
Once you add in descriptions, names, titles, places, buildings, groups, organizations, you can see that these little details quickly go from being a support for the plot, to crippling it because I can't think with all of the clutter in my brain. Now consider that often I sit down to write and do so from beginning to end of chapter...but it may be weeks or longer before that happens. Wanna guess how many of those details I can retain in my mind after I haven't thought about the story for 3 weeks or longer? Let me help you - NONE - lol.
*sigh*
So shifting gears (I'll tie back in momentarily) National Novel Writing Month, lovingly known as NaNoWriMo begins in November. I participated last year, but didn't participate much or get much accomplished, despite having so much ground work prepared. The concept is it is a voluntary competition to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. If you do it, you win. If you don't then you still win, just not "officially" because after all, you may not have written 50,000 words but you got motivated and actually wrote something.
So in my prep work for NaNoWriMo this year I stumbled upon a tool developed by another NaNoWriMo participant who is also a computer programmer who had the same problem I described at the beginning of this blogpost. He couldn't keep up with who was who, who was where, who was where when and what they had with them so he developed yWriter, a FREE software that OMG has blown my mind and totally saved me from drowning under detail. Its not sexy, after all it was written by a programmer, so it looks very LOGICAL, and not very APPLE if you know what I mean - but luckily there was a video tutorial explaining how to get started. It lets you do all kinds of cool things that a novelist needs, such as create characters where you can input all of their bio's, details, looks, notes, organizational membership and the like. You can create scenes, and locations, and tie them to chapters. You can rearrange the chapters to put them in different order. You can say WHEN a scene begins, how long it takes, and which characters you created are in it. Whoa! What a great tool. My problem now is I pretty much have to stop, and retrofit what I have already written to be in the program. However, I really can't get much further ahead until I do. Sure when I get those surges of inspiration I can still crank out a chapter real fast in the mean time. It just may mean that Henrik has green eyes.
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