For those interested in using (or currently use) Liquid Story Writer as a writing platform, and aren’t part of the Yahoo chat and news group for the program, there has been a lot (double-emphasis on that word) of discussion lately over Scenes vs Chapters as a writing building mechanism.
As it stands, LSB XE is structured around writing chapters then building these into a book. The amount of ways of doing that are limited only by the imagination in Liquid Story Binder, as there are so many different file formats such as listings, chapters, planners, builders, notes, etc. Some have wordcounts, some do not, some work with other file types, others can be associated with them, but not built into them.
For me, like many other writers before me, I found manual workarounds towards my own needs. I am predominantly a scene-led writer, although because I am reasonably structured beforehand, I normally come at writing with a whole scene structure. So unlike many scene writers, I already have chapters in mind.
I therefore use the builder module to write in (as well as keeping research notes in an overall builder) and stay away from the chapter functions completely whilst writing. Each new chapter has it’s own builder and within that builder I write scenes – already plotted out scenes. Each Scene item (a builder item) operates with normal text editing functions and has a word count.
The scenes within the builder (chapter) can be rearranged in order, but currently can’t be moved into another builder. If I want to do this I have to copy and paste all the text out of that scene item and into the other builder.
From a builder where I have the scenes all written, I can then hit the build [to chapter] option, and the whole thing goes into a proper chapter file. I then need to manually add that chapter into a planner listing so that at the end, on publishing the book all the chapters are printed in order.
Because the builder itself doesn’t have an overall word count of it’s contents, I manually keep this in a note record type. Each scene that I complete I will need to go and add that to my manual record, and keep a tally as I go. That’s because I don’t normally finish a full chapter for a few days, and I want my day’s wordcount – especially when writing to a target.
My way of working within Liquid Story Binder is individual and suits me, but many on the LSB Yahoo group have recently become quite vocal about needing to write in scenes rather than chapters. As found in that chat, many who already use LSB use roughly the same process as I do, using the builder to write scenes into, but are frustrated by not being able to move scenes around as you can do in something like YWriter, for example.
The upshot is that Black Obelisk has suggested that the next release of LSB will include the functionality within builders to move builder items (in our cases, scenes) from one to the other.
Whilst other novelists want even more (ie. the ability to title scenes and have these appear in the draft publication under chapter headings, numbers and titles) the above changes will make me very happy indeed.
Whilst I was on holiday last month, I missed not one but two new upgrade releases of LSB. I’ve only just updated my own versions sitting on a PC and laptop from downloading from the website (the current public version available is V4.31d), and await the next version to see how well the new scene functionality will improve my own writing processes.
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Wed, Sep 16, 2009
Writing Features, Writing Process, Writing Software & Tools