Tag: world building

Tool Box: Scrivener

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As many of you know, my primary tool for writing is Scrivener. It is the perfect program for a writer, and I use it for both my novels and musicals. If you don’t know much about Scrivener, this post isn’t so much an introduction to the program as it is to how I specificially use Scrivener. Perhaps it will give you a few ideas of your own!

If you know nothing or very little about Scrivener, check out this excellent Getting Started blog post written by a friend of mine, Emily Irish.

For this blog post, I am going to use the binder for my current project, The Blessed (yep, I’m back at it!), but I will do my best to avoid any spoilers in the process.

First off, I use Scrivener in all of my planning and outlining stages. While I am a huge fan of the whitebook and the classic notebook, when it comes to really nailing things down, that goes into my Scrivener binder. Everything from worldbuilding to characters.Read More »

Tool Box: Android Apps

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There are two apps that I have found to be very useful, if not essentiel to my writing process, and both of them are free! (But unfortunately only available for Android phones. If you know of similar apps for ios, please share them in the comments!)

The first is one I have mentioned before on my blog, and the fact that I’m bringing it up will hopefully show how much I love it. The Writeometer. This app allows you to not only track your word count, but it keeps record of it by sessions, organized by day, so you can always look back and see all of the details of each writing session.

It will also help you set a daily word count goal, depending on how many words you want the finished project to be, combined with when you want to be finished by. You can also set alarms to remind you to write!

Not only that, but it comes with a timer, which locks down your phone until the session is complete, at which time you can enter how many words you wrote to update your word count. One of my favorite things about this time, is if you try to exit it (which you can in an emergency), it will give you a little inspirational (or guilt-trip) quote to encourage you to not give up!

The final amazing part of Writeometer is the reward system! For every session that you complete, you earn guava fruit, which you can spend on rewards, which you also set. Some of my rewards (or “Treats” as they are called) include:Read More »

Something Else

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Recently, I made my The Book Book Pinterest board temporarily public (seriously, go check it out! over 500 pins on this story-board) and I realized I never did a blog post talking about my most important Pinterest board for writing and story-board-ing:

Something Else

This board has become a staple of my process, now containing over 1,500 pins. I use this board in a variety of ways, but I will first talk about what I pin here. The board description says,

Inspiration/Emotion/Narrative Visuals. Images to use for building novel/story boards, to express the emotional or mental state of characters, to explore relationships, to establish tone, to visualize moments, and to inspire themes.

To break it down, I pin any image that…

  • Evokes of a smell or a sound or a feeling (texture)
  • Captures the feeling of abstract emotions, such as Joy, Sadness, Loneliness, Freedom, etc.
  • Visualizes a moment, such as a hug between friends, running from danger, a first kiss, etc.
  • Expresses character, often times these are more abstract images, animals, or artistic images that could represent personalities
  • Represents a tone, such as dark and gritty, light and ethereal, adventurous and inspiring
  • Is just generally inspiring

When working on a story board, such as The Book Book board, these pins are the backbone of it. Sure, I will pin world-building elements that give a very specific look to things, but those are usually only material images. Images from the Something Else board really help me to develop and understand my characters and story better.

Rosi Kallard, the FMC of the Book Book, for instance, has a variety of images to describe her:

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Read More »