Category: Friday’s Findings
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Friday’s Findings: Using Scrivener’s Snapshot Function to Revise
There are a million ways to revise. And there are a million ways to use Scrivener. For my fiction writing, Scrivener offers flexibility and customization. I have found it malleable to fit whatever writing project I am working on at the time. If you haven’t used it, you would too, I bet. No, I’m not…
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The Final Destination
How I’m Designing Resolutions for Every Character in My Series This past week, as I was rewriting scenes for my upcoming novella, Normous, I realized something: I needed to make sure I kept track of where my characters end up at the end of this series. Was I smart enough to keep track of the…
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Friday’s Findings: Name-dropping
The other day, I typed out a paragraph for the science fiction novella I’m working on, and I realized I’ve had this aching question for years: when do I use a character’s name and when do I use a pronoun instead? Are there formal rules for this sort of thing? When do I use my…
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Friday’s Findings: The 555 Experiment
When I did my own NaNoWriMo last month, I realized something: writing 1,666 words a day isn’t sustainable for me. I work a full-time job, and I’m not as fortunate as someone with a flexible schedule or who doesn’t have to work full-time. For people in those situations who wish to write, I truly wish…
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Friday’s Findings: Beginnings and Ends for a Scene
I’ve been writing a lot of scenes lately, and I am constantly asking myself, “Am I beginning all my scenes the same way?” Am I always starting with dialogue? And what about ending a scene? How can I make sure I’m not always ending my scenes in the same way? Are some of them cliffhangers,…
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Friday’s Findings: My 50K Novel Week 2
As an alternate to NaNoWriMo, I’m doing a 50K word rough draft of a novel in 30 days. Here’s how the second week went: Day 8: My city has the best coffee shops. I’m sitting in one before I go to work and I’m going to outline some unfinished scenes. I swore I wouldn’t do…
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Friday’s Findings: My First 50K Novel
On Friday, October 31, 2008, I woke up to the radio talking about something called National Novel Writing Month. Write fifty thousand words by the end of November? Impossible! But I wanted to try it because I’m crazy. So, after work that Friday, I checked out the NaNoWriMo website. I spent my time making a…
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Friday’s Findings: Write in Chunks. Small Chunks.
Look for those ten-minute gifts of time. Although 10,000 is not a magic number, that’s the number of steps I try to get every day. I used to look for that big chunk of time to get to that mystical numeral. But some days, that just wasn’t possible. By accident, I discovered I can get…
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Friday’s Findings: The Snowflake Method Using Tabs
People have sprinkled various ways to use Randy the Snowflake Method of developing a novel: Excel Spreadsheets; a three-ring binder; Plottr software; and so on. Really, some notebook paper and a pen would be enough. However, a writer who wanted to experiment using the Snowflake Method with different mediums has plenty of options. All of them are…
Andrew M. Friday 