#hiveword

This is a program I’ve used on and off. It’s called Hiveword. It’s free for the most part (there is a subscription but I haven’t delved into it that much as it costs $$$). I’ve added whole chapters to before, but for Drawn with Stone I’m just doing scene summaries. And plot line summaries. (Not show in the video.)

This is really just me going over how I’m currently using it. It’s one of... four programs I’m using (all completely free because if I’m not making any money of what I’m writing, I’m not going to invest in a writing program — as ten published authors have told me in the past not to do).

When I said I didn’t “want to spoil myself” that wasn’t what I wanted to say. I don’t remember what I wanted to say, but it wasn’t that.

Last year I signed up to Hiveword, a site that organises your novel, where you can lay out scenes, make character pages, distinguish multiple plot arcs within a novel, and much more. There’s a paid version but I haven’t gotten that.

Last night, I was looking at the notes of the post that warned us about Microsoft’s pending censorship of everything its services are used for, which I hope will be shot down for many reasons, but one of the alternatives to Word that was given was yWriter, a free novel-writing program that I decided to test and see if I liked it. I don’t think the drag/drop options are entirely accessible, but apart from that, most features seem to be accessible to me via tabbing/ctrl-tabbing.

I love all the detail that’s been put into these two things, all the stuff they thought of to include in the novel-construction process.

The problem is, I have always hated outlining. Like, always. I get bored. I feel like thinking too much about things or thinking about the same traits in relation to fifty or more characters (yes, my casts are indeed that large even in my original works and that’s just the major and a portion of the recurring charas) gets repetitive and dull very very quickly. If I felt unmotivated before, this kind of process drains me of all the desire I had left to work on the project for a fair while afterward. This isn’t to say I don’t know what I want to come out of the story, the direction I’m going in, but a lot of the connecting tissues and muscles that hold together the bones of my story are as-yet unknown to me, and I therefore don’t know precisely which chapter certain scenes are going to be in without knowing what will happen before, between or after them. Even programs like this can only help me so much, since I can’t drag and drop very well with NVDA (the mouse-routing commands can be frustrating and often I end up dropping something where I didn’t want it to be and then it refuses to move again no matter what I do). And yWriter even asks me how long a given scene takes, in minutes, hours, even days! I don’t even know what to say to that!

I don’t know if this is a problem with me or just my way of writing, because my usual way of writing tends to involve a heck of a lot of not writing, but the prospect of filling out a project with a bunch of details that turns my beloved story into a dry set of statistics, even in yWriter where the text of the scenes is also present, makes me feel very overwhelmed and wondering if this is why my novels never seem to get anywhere, because I’m too lazy to sit down and put in the work of filling in all the blanks in this or that form, because why would they be there if they weren’t necessary? Other writers thought they were necessary!

Perfect Integrated Writing Tools?

#amwriting #writingtools #hiveword #outline

Hiveword online  writing tool to organize, outline, and plot your novel

For writers who are “plotters”, the perennial favorite topic of organizing a novel is perhaps only surpassed by discussions about outlining. The reason is simple, of course—both can sometimes feel like chores, both are difficult to do well, and most successful writers consider both…

Hey peeps, thinking about National Graphic Novel Writing Month thought I share this: http://hiveword.com/

It does have a secure connexion, yes :)

Also if you use it for its intended purpose (aka: just writing quick notes summarizing your scenes) your work is protected anyway because no one can recreate the exact same story, even with the plotline :) Not to mention people usually rip off things that are already popular rather than unknown things.