I’m doing a lot of writing these days.
Every day I write, every day I take notes, and every day, some of those notes get cut apart and rearranged and they don’t get used. Anyway, one thing I’ve been doing for when I have to write is giving myself a writing template.
I use google docs, wordpress, and Word to do most of my writing. Word is useful for stuff that only needs to live on my computer and which I want to export to PDF with some control – things like rulebooks. Google docs is for anything collaborative where formatting can be handled later. And WordPress – well, back when I was writing a book on this blog, I wrote each chapter in Word and then transplanted it to this blog, with a filter to turn it into html. Since then I’ve learned to use the editor for the blog itself, which is just useful enough that it does most of what I need.
Still have to look up the code to centre Youtube videos.
Anyway, this means a lot of structured writing. Writing where I need to make sure certain things have to show up, or show up in a particular sequence. Writing on my blog tends to be less structured; it’s often more of a flow, where I just start off the top of my head, find a subject, and then it goes. I try to make sure I put something on my blog every day. Some days, I don’t have anything much to say – yesterday, I wrote four articles all at once, and I just don’t want to slip into nothing for today. Something every day, every day. Right?
And so, here’s a basic piece of tech for writing when you write to a structure, and this is good if you want to write an essay but also for writing a story. What I do when I’m writing a story is make a table of two columns. In one column I put the plot beat, the story part, and I put them all in an order I can use. Then, in the table next to it, I flesh that out. Maybe I write prose straight into it. Maybe I write that incident and break it up into new lines of events.
Here’s an example, using lorem ipsum text filled in in the side.
| Introduction | Proin a volutpat lacus. Mauris semper elit nisl, et venenatis enim malesuada ut. Nunc et tortor erat. Pellentesque euismod nulla accumsan, tincidunt magna quis, fermentum quam. |
| Meet Wizard | Fusce mollis dolor nec quam tristique, venenatis hendrerit arcu malesuada. Quisque massa lacus, consequat id nibh vel, facilisis pretium metus. |
| Deal W/Hat | Etiam nec posuere eros, pharetra imperdiet lorem. |
| Grapefruits | Suspendisse sodales lectus et ipsum varius ullamcorper. |
| Punchline | Nulla a nibh consectetur, cursus sem id, varius quam. Pellentesque vitae luctus mi, sed venenatis nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. |
The thing with this kind of structure tool is it’s useful for me as a simple tool that gets me thinking about what I need. It’s a rudimentary basic, it’s getting into the guts of a story and making sure that I get things in the right order, and then I can refine it, make it flow together better afterwards. But a lot of the time we need to get started on things, and this is a good tool for priming that pump.