How Marcia Lucas (and smart editing) saved Star Wars

22 December 2019Jim Nelson 4 Comments

Among fiction writers, the editing process is notoriously dreaded as drudge work, but revision is where the magic happens. It’s where a struggling, plodding story is shaped into the author’s vision.

Recently I discovered “How Star Wars was saved in the edit”, an impressive and succinct video on the high art of film editing. It demonstrates revision so well, it should be required viewing in creative writing courses everywhere.

That’s right: Creative writing. Even though it regards film editing, almost all the techniques described have application in revising fiction.

To clarify, I’m not talking about the Star Wars story line. The formula behind Star Wars has been so imitated and overdone over the past forty years, there are few morsels left to claim as one’s own. Narratological analyses of George Lucas’ little sci-fi flick are bountiful, as are the reminders how he borrowed much of his structure from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. All of this is well-trod ground and not what concerns me here.

What “Saved in the edit” highlights is a criminally unknown aspect of Star Wars‘ mega-success: The role of Lucas’ then-wife Marcia in sculpting the movie’s rough cut into a blockbuster. If Marcia Lucas had applied her formidable editing talents solely to the movie’s heart-pounding conclusion (the rebel attack on the Death Star), she would have deserved the Oscar for editing she eventually received. Her contributions went far deeper, it turns out.

Ordering scenes

I’m most interested in two of the video’s sections. The first is the explanation of intercutting (or cross-cutting), starting at 6m50s in the video. Intercutting is a film term referring to a specific editing technique. For fiction, a more general (and blander) term would be scene ordering.

Marcia Lucas and her fellow editors crispened the first act by reordering scenes to better establish the story and get the audience involved. Since viewers are able to fill in blanks on their own, the reordering allowed for the removal of entire scenes, keeping the story line brisk and taut.

Revising scene order is the author at her most godlike. She is rearranging the events of her dreamworld like a child building up and tearing down sand castle turrets. Scene reordering requires bold moves and wide peripheral vision. It’s not about word choice and tightening dialogue, it’s asking if each scene is in the right place at the right time—or even if it should be included at all.

(Another visual medium that uses visual cuts effectively is comics, a topic I’ve explored before.)

My latest (and, as of today, unpublished) novel offers a personal example of scene reordering in my editing process. My early chapters were a mess. The main character was traveling quite literally in circles. An early reader (and good friend) pointed out the wasted time and lack of energy in the first act.

Although I like to make a rough outline when I write a novel, I don’t organize down to the scene, or even the chapter. After hearing my friend’s criticism, I went through the draft and produced a rough table of contents. Each chapter was listed with a brief one- or two-sentence summary of its major plot points. (A writing notebook, even a digital one, is a good tool for this task.)

Thinking of his complaints, and referring to my makeshift table of contents as a guide, I “re-cut” the opening chapters and produced a sleeker first act. Sections of one chapter were lifted and dropped into another chapter. Events were shuffled to tighten the story, sharpen focus, reduce transitions, and get the story on its legs. Thousands of words wound up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. It was worth it.

Ordering beats

My other interest in “Saved in the edit” regards the first meeting between Luke and Obi-wan (11m50s in the video):

Originally the scene started with Luke and Obi-wan watching the princess’ message, then they play with lightsabers, and then they consider to go help her.

The editors realized how “heartless” this scene played out due to the lag between hearing Leia’s holographic plea and discussing whether or not to help her. They reordered the scene by opening in medias res to make it seem the two have been talking about Luke’s father for some time. From there,

Obi-wan shows Luke the lightsaber,
they watch Leia’s message,
and then they argue about flying off to help her.

It’s a simple change, which is kind of the point: Sometimes vital edits are not complex or massive, but surgical and subtle. What’s more, notice how this edit did not require re-shooting the scene. All the elements were in place, the problem was their presentation.

The new ordering creates an emotional cone. The tension starts low with exposition (Luke’s supposedly-dead father, a forgotten religion that tapped into a mysterious cosmic “force”). The stakes rise in pitch as they watch Leia’s plea. A tension point is reached when the old man in the desert tells Luke he must drop everything and travel across the galaxy to save a princess.

If you find a scene you’re working on meandering or feeling aimless, consider how the tension rises within it. Is it building, or is it wandering around?

In play-writing, the basic unit of drama is called a beat. A beat consists of action, conflict, and event. Marcia Lucas improved the scene with Luke and Obi-wan by unifying a beat that had been split apart with the lightsaber business:

Action: Obi-wan wants Luke to learn the Force and save the princess;
Conflict: Luke has to stay and help his uncle with the farm;
Event: Luke refuses Obi-wan’s call and goes back to the farm.

Not all edits are rearranging action/conflict/event. If you think of a scene as a collection of little beats, sometimes revision is moving the beats around, much as scenes can be reordered.

One sin I’m guilty of is opening a chapter with the character in the middle of action or a conversation, then dropping to flashback to explain how the character wound up in this situation, then returning to the scene. It’s a false and inauthentic way to start chapters in medias res.

How to correct this? Sometimes by moving the flashback to the start of the chapter and rewriting it in summary. Often I drop the flashback and assume the reader will catch up on their own (as Marcia Lucas did by opening the Obi-wan scene in the middle of the conversation). Each edit is situational and requires a film editor’s mindset. Simplifying scenes is the core of powerful revision.

These editing skills really should be the stock-and-trade of every novelist and playwright. Yet I’ve never seen a book on writing fiction explain these points as ably as “Saved in the edit”. It’s unfortunate it takes a YouTube video on the making of Star Wars to lay out the power of editing in such a lucid and compelling way.

Writing a book is like being an all-in-one film crew. The author is director, screenwriter, editor, and casting agent. The author plays the roles of all the actors. The directing and writing and acting is the fun part, or at least it can be. But editing is where a manuscript goes from a draft to a novel.

Crappy cover letters

12 August 2019Jim Nelson Leave a comment

Anne Lamott is the author of nearly twenty books and numerous short stories, but she’s best-known among writers of all stripes for her essay “Shitty First Drafts”. Her pitch-perfect rumination on the writing process captures the messiness of penning books, short stories, plays and scripts, all of which start with a shitty first draft:

This is how [writers] end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. … Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

If I might borrow some of Lamott’s magic, I’d like to a coin a corollary to her term. If the story-writing process starts with a shitty first draft, it ends with a crappy cover letter.

To bust ass to write a great story and then summarize it in a paragraph or two is the tragicomedy of the author’s endeavor. It’s reaching a marathon finish line and having the judges inform you there’s one more mile to go for good measure. As with Lamott’s first drafts, my cover letters are initially shitty, but they are so insubstantial I prefer to view them as merely crappy.

A one-page single-spaced cover letter has to satisfy seemingly a half-dozen tasks at once: Introduce the work, summarize its contents, establish the writer’s bona fides, suggest the writer’s past successes without dwelling upon them, demonstrate the writer is committed to the craft but is someone the editors can work with when revision time rolls around, and most of all, that the work being submitted is perfect for the publisher’s needs and will sell like hotcakes (if that’s their goal; it’s not a given.)

Hence as I’m writing a crappy cover letter to an editor, a voice in the back of my head whines: Can’t you just read my manuscript?

This is my theory why writers generally loathe to tell strangers about their work. (“Oh, you’re a writer? What do you write?”) Standing before someone and explaining a book in twenty seconds is essentially ad libbing a cover letter in audio-book form. When I’m telling a person about my work the same voice in the back of my head whines: Can’t you just read my books?

Whether submitting to a major New York publisher or a twee not-for-profit literary magazine, cover letters don’t merely summarize—the writer has to sell the story in one or two short paragraphs, even if the intention is for no one involved to make a dime. By and large writers are horrible salespeople, hence, crappy cover letters.

(This may be why so many writers love Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s a peek into a bizarre alternate universe no writer would want to inhabit—but damn is the dialogue sharp and the situation taut. Always be closing.)

I recall one published writer whose counsel for success was Write your cover letter first. His bright idea was to make sure your novel can be summarized in a sellable way before writing the novel itself. (Is your cover letter crappy? Write different letters until one is good, and then turn it into a novel.)

I’ve never done this so I can’t advocate for it. Personally, I think it’s kind of crazy. I have to write a novel before I know what I should have written.

I have scant advice to offer a writer confronting the challenge of whipping up a cover letter for their latest story. Know that you’re not the only writer who hates this final mind-numbing step. One option is to limit your cover letter to your credentials and pray the editor reads your story cold. (I’ve done this with short stories to mixed success; I sincerely doubt it would work for a novel.)

Like Lamott’s first drafts, your first stab at a cover letter will read like crap. So, walk your cover letter through a similar process as any short story or novel: Take your time writing it. Put it through several edit passes. Ask your writer friends to critique it. Hell, pass it out at your writing workshop if they’ll allow it. Remember, writing is an iterative process.

And when you think it’s ready to send…let it sit on your computer for a week or two. Trust me, when you return to it fresh later you’ll spot all kinds of problems you missed before.

Published 12 August 2019. Last updated 9 September 2020.

A quarter-century writing in cafes

23 June 2019Jim Nelson Leave a comment

I’ve spent twenty-five years writing in cafes. For a quarter of a century, I’ve attempted to produce passable fiction within the thin caffeinated air of Bay Area coffeehouses. I’ve endured countless hours of crummy music blasted overhead by baristas with something to prove—coexisted with hundreds of cafe patrons as neighbors, each with differing notions of privacy and personal space—suffered wobbly cafe tables and seats as hard as steel—and consumed gallons upon gallons of coffee, steamed soy milk, and espresso shots—all in the name of writing books someone might want to read.

My first foray into the writers’ cafe subculture came in the mid-1990s with the purchase of a Fujitsu laptop computer. This machine freed me from writing on a desktop PC-compatible occupying the corner of my bedroom. This freedom gave me a way to find a neutral place to get writing done—a place neither the home nor the office.

Cafes back then were largely for drinking coffee and reading a newspaper or book. Writing, when it was done at a cafe, was performed with pen and paper. The parallel advents of cheap personal notebooks and wireless Internet rewrote the cafe landscape in America, morphing the coffeehouse from a casual light-fare experience to a pseudo-shared office for the creative class.

Any writer will tell you, finding a good writing cafe is a cherished gift. Every change-of-address I’ve made over the last twenty-five years was always followed by long days of stumbling from one neighborhood cafe to another in search of the right one—the mother lode, Nirvana, the comfortable and welcoming writer’s cafe. Even when traveling abroad I make a point of finding a local cafe for writing.

As such, I’ve written in so many bad cafes I cannot begin to categorize them—but I’ll try.

Where to begin? There are the noisy cafes, the cafes where the baristas play Dave Matthews so loud I cannot hear my own music, even when I press my headphones tight against my ears with my palms. There are the cafes I can never find a seat in and must ask to share a table. Most creative types seem to find this burden distasteful and will invent an invisible friend joining them shortly, so, sorry, I’ll need to sit elsewhere.

There are the overpriced cafes. There are the cafes with rock-hard high stools seemingly designed by 1970s McDonald’s interior decorators. There are the cafes that are too hot, even in the winter. Here in San Francisco the opposite is largely the case, the cafes where the owner props the door wide open no matter how cold it is outside, allowing chilly breezes to charge inside at sporadic moments.

Clocking in years of cafe time taught me never to tell to anyone sniffing around me that I’m writing a novel. Doing so only elicits all manner of unproductive responses, from snarky to nosy to rude to inane. More than once I’ve had to pry myself away from a chatty cafe patron who, delighted at my endeavor, felt compelled to describe to me all their book ideas. (Sometimes they offer to let me write their book—”We’ll split the profits fifty-fifty.”) In an otherwise wonderful cafe in Campbell, a regular got his tenterhooks so deep into my work I would startle to find him crouched behind my chair peering over my shoulders to watch me write.

I’ve seen tip jars stuffed full of bills ripped from counters, the thief racing out the door with coins clanging across the floor in their wake. I’ve seen notebook computers swiped off tables while the patron was still typing and likewise rushed out the door. I’ve written in cafes decorated like giant doll houses, cafes decorated like discount clothing stores, and cafes so meticulously decorated I felt I’d entered a movie set. I’ve seen a darkened cafe in San Francisco arranged like a ziggurat with staggered levels of cafe patrons seated facing you as you enter, every one of them typing furiously on their MacBooks. The uniform rows of the backlit Apple logo could only remind me of the 1984 Super Bowl commercial.

There are cafes that cap their electrical outlets to force laptop owners to run on battery power only. There are cafes that employ exotic WiFi systems that only give you so much time online before you must buy another drink or pastry. Some cafes are too-brightly lit, making one snow-blind in the evening hours, and some cafes are so dim you cannot see your hands on the keyboard. There are the cafes that close early, eliminating prime evening-hour writing spurts, and there are the cafes that don’t open weekends for mysterious reasons.

I’ve been in cafes where the owner would assure me I could pay anytime before leaving—and then grouse I never paid for the first coffee when I return to the counter for a refill. I’ve been in cafes where the owner relentlessly pushed a food purchase on me. I’ve been in cafes with owners who grumbled under their breath about people not buying enough coffee or staying too long.

The Slate.com feature “My coffeehouse nightmare” is the Platonic example of this type of owner. He served his coffee “on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie,” hired a Le Bernadin baker to produce specialty croissants, and thought the fast-track to coffeehouse profits was pulling Vienna roast espresso shots instead of Italian. In six months, his cafe was out of business. “The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don’t get me started on people with laptops.” By which, of course, he means people like me.

Cafes hold a unique position in American culture. They straddle commercial and social divides. As a cafe patron, you are engaging in commerce with the owner and her staff. On the other hand, you share a quiet, almost intimate, personal space with other patrons, perfect strangers often seated less than a foot away. Unlike a movie theater, where all are sharing a common experience, cafes are a collection of private moments (reading a book, engaging in conversation, outlining a novel) hosted within a shared public situation. At the risk of romanticizing it, successful cafes are places where both halves—the commerce and the social—are well-balanced. Failure, I’ve always found, is where such balance is missing.

My personal code of cafe ethics? Always buy something. Don’t bring in outside food or drink. Tidy up the table before leaving. Don’t hog the electrical outlet. Voices down and phone calls outside. Please and thank you carry a lot of water in any situation, social or commercial.

What cafe do I recommend for writing? The one I’m sitting in right now. And, no, I’m not telling you its name.

Published 23 June 2019. Last updated 21 June 2021.

Revision is where the magic happens

1 June 2019Jim Nelson Leave a comment

“Yorkshire Sculpture Park” (scrappy annie, CC-BY-NC 2.0)

Recently on Twitter I wrote: “Revision is where the magic happens.”

I’m not trying to be mysterious here. I truly believe revision is where a story is honed and distilled. Revision is where the writer’s vision and passion surface after cutting away the dead weight and dead prose. Revision is pruning back a bush and revealing the topiary within.

My tweet was in response to a question (“What’s your favorite part of the writing process?”) which was followed by a warning (“If you say revising I will have a hard time believing you”).

What can I say. Every stage of writing is difficult. There are no moments of pure pleasure for me. Even calling a manuscript finished and walking away is painful. The satisfaction is in the sum of the parts (akin to “work is its own reward”) as well as pride in the finished work.

One response to the question said something to the effect of “getting paid is the best part of writing.” That’s not part of the writing process, no more than collecting the bill is part of the cooking process in a restaurant. Even if you’re earning enough from writing to keep the lights on, great, but that’s not the writing process.

Published 1 June 2019. Last updated 1 May 2022.

Mystery’s 90/10 rule

23 May 2019Jim Nelson Leave a comment

Detective (hans van den berg, CC BY 2.0)

If there’s one trope of the mystery that stands out among all other types of stories—perhaps the single element that defines the mystery—it’s the solution being announced at the conclusion.

Almost all story leads the reader to a suspenseful ending. The mystery is unique in that the main character is responsible for explaining the prior events back to the reader in such a way as to make sense of them all. There are plenty of poorly-written books that open with a great dump of exposition to get the reader up to speed. Mystery has pretty much cornered the market on stories ending with an exposition dump.

This leads to mystery readers’ inevitable slaying of a story: “I knew who did it before I reached the end.” Usually this is put at some great insult or shut-down of the writer.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most mystery writers don’t cringe when a reader claims to have solved the whodunnnit before the last page. Why?

Magician Eric Mead describes a bit of inside baseball for his craft:

…if a magician shows somebody a trick and ninety percent of that trick fools them but there is a little ten percent sliver over here that does not fool them, the average person will say that the trick did not fool them even though they can’t explain ninety percent of it.
…if that same magician shows that same trick to his fellow conjurers, it only takes that ten percent sliver for them to admit that they were fooled.

The same could be said for mystery writers and their craft. The problem of penning a mystery novel isn’t managing to befuddle the reader to the point of utter despair before they reach the last page. If you want to experience such confusion, try Gertude Stein’s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, a novella one reviewer notes “since it’s more or less impossible to work out who any of the characters are, up to and including the person whose blood is on the dining-room floor…then it can only be called a detective novel in the loosest sense conceivable.”

For almost every other mystery book written, fooling the reader is kind of a side quest for the novelist. Even in an Agatha Christie book where six shady suspects roam the English country house, the reader has a better than fifteen percent chance of simply guessing the murder by yanking a name from a hat. And when a reader claims to have deduced the murderer before the final chapter, I would ask in return, can you fully explain the who’s, what’s, where’s, and when’s of the crime? Or are you merely working on a hunch, one that may have to do with meta-analysis of the book? (“The writer keeps making this character seem innocent. I bet they’re the one.”) Or did you suspect the character at one point in the story, fleetingly, before moving on to other suspicions, and later told yourself you’d figured it out? Be honest here.

This is Eric Mead’s 90%, the part of the mystery other novelists don’t fret over when reading someone else’s work.

The 10% most readers overlook but keeps other novelists up at nights? Writing a novel that readers will pick up in the first place; writing a novel that will carry readers to the last page; filling pages with knockdown dialogue, tight scenes, and wonderful prose; and the perennial dream, writing a novel people are still talking about fifty years later. This is the sliver novelists concern themselves with when admiring (or critiquing) another mystery writer’s work. This 10% does require storytelling sleight of hand, and when it’s working it’s all-but-invisible to the reader.

Published 23 May 2019. Last updated 18 April 2020.

Kurt Vonnegut on story structure and punctuation

5 May 2019Jim Nelson Leave a comment

Previously I wrote on Kurt Vonnegut’s considerable body of interviews, especially his comments on story shape and fiction as a series of experiments.

One fascinating (Vonnegut-esque?) tidbit in his interviews was an offhand moment in a 1971 profile by Richard Todd (New York Times Magazine):

The class began in a surprising way. Vonnegut remarked that last time they had been talking about form, and he walked to the blackboard and drew there a question mark, an exclamation point and a period. He said these bits of punctuation were the outline of a three act play or story:

? ! .

A student asked if the end might be “Dot, dot, dot.” Vonnegut agreed.

? ! …

So maybe this is a gimmicky or silly way to describe story structure, but I’m game to play along.

I’ve written about organizing structure to motivate my fiction, so this little lesson in punctuation caught my attention. The way I organize my thinking, the three acts of story (really, four) look something like this:

Act 1: Setup
Act 2A: Complication
Act 2B: Confrontation
Act 3: Resolution

This list comes from my reading of Syd Field’s books on film structure, which I’ve modified (slightly) for the purposes of writing fiction, especially novels.

I agree with Vonnegut that most stories, if not all, open with question marks. Even if I’ve read a book two dozen times—and there are books I can make that claim—the pleasure of the opening chapters is the illusion I do not know what is coming. (I would say this is related in spirit to Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief.) There are numerous, sometimes playful, ways to pose those questions when a story opens, but those questions are almost always there. Rare if ever does an interesting story open with all the questions answered and the main characters in possession of all the facts. Jim Thompson said there was only one type of story: “Things are not what they seem.” That is another way to say stories open with question marks.

Vonnegut’s exclamation point jibes with what I’ve labeled 2A, Complication. Exclamation points do not have to be action or cliffhangers. Sometimes a quiet revelation or admission can turn a story on its head and rearrange how we see the main character and their situation. I hold a pet theory that the art of storytelling lays in reversals (perhaps I’ll post about that some day). The exclamation point is one such reversal for the characters: a well-kept secret revealed, a surprising discovery, a fortune amassed, a fortune lost, and so on.

Vonnegut’s three punctuation marks (and most of his story shapes) imply three acts. I wondered if my idea about a fourth act, Confrontation, could fit into his punctuation-as-story-structure?

Confrontation, I think, could be expressed as an em-dash. Tension draws taut in the confrontation phase of a story. More than any other part of a story, confrontation is where the reader should be asking herself “Wait—what happens next?” In contrast, final acts are generally not “What next?” but rather “How will it end?”

With an em-dash, then, Vonnegut’s story structure could be punctuated like this:

? ! — …

Which seems about right to me.

Published 5 May 2019. Last updated 10 September 2020.

Make your phone your digital writing notebook

17 March 2019Jim Nelson Leave a comment

A smart phone and a writing notepad. — r. nial bradshaw (CC BY 2.0)

Last week, I finished my fourth novel. I used my phone throughout the entire writing process: developing, researching, outlining, plotting, and revision, all the way to my final draft. For all purposes, my phone was my writing notebook for this novel.

I didn’t write the novel on my phone. I’ll probably never do that. When I’m writing I want the full typewriter experience, real keys designed for human hands, the tactile sense physical buttons offer, the whole shebang. And I need a screen display that at least approximates the size of manuscript paper, and not one the size of an index card.

But planning and revising a novel on your phone is certainly possible, and my latest book is proof of that.

In the past I’ve relied on paper-and-ink writing notebooks. A writing notebook is a tool I evangelize to anyone who will listen, mostly because I believe it functions as a kind of “inspiration laboratory” for writers. However, towards the end of my previous novel (Hagar’s Mother) I found myself turning to digital note-taking tools during the editing process.

In the final stretch of editing a novel, a torrent of small details begin erupting. The only way to keep the problems and details organized is with a writing notebook of some manner. When the edits are coming hot and heavy I find removing my hands from the keyboard to be a distraction, so I began using a free note-taking software packaged with my MacBook Air, Apple Notes. Rather than reach for a pen and my trusty notebook, I would ⌘+Tab to Notes and add a bullet point to a little checklist I kept. As I kept working, I would periodically consult my checklist and be sure the appropriate changes were made.

Well, Apple Notes is also available on my iPhone. Thanks to the Internet, at all times my writing notes were synchronized between my computer and my phone. That meant I could review my notes while at work, on the bus, even in bed. It also meant I could add more ideas at any time. Later, when I returned to my computer to resume writing, they were there waiting for me.

That’s the hard reality I faced, one I’m certain other writers face as well: While I sometimes leave the house without my writing notebook, I never leave without my phone. These little devices are simply invaluable to us (which is why I encourage writers to keep them in mind when writing their own fiction).

After Hagar’s Mother, I decided to try an experiment and use Notes as my primary writing notebook for my next novel. I told myself if I had the slightest of problems I would bail out and revert back to my old paper-and-ink notebook. It seemed a risk-free experiment.

Well, I finished my novel and I’m here to tell you: I’m sold. Yes, you can plan, write, and revise your next novel using your phone as a notebook. What’s more, you don’t need to spend an extra dime on additional software so long as you’re using a reasonably up-to-date computer and smart phone. The note-taking software already installed is probably good enough, and if it’s not, there are free alternatives available.

Ways of note-taking

Let me get this out of the way: I’m not a shill for Apple. I’m happy with Apple Notes and how cleanly it intersected with my creative process. That doesn’t mean you should use Notes if you don’t own Apple products, or if you want to try something else. (I list some alternatives below.)

Looking back over my notes, I see three “types” of pages I developed, each representing a period of time in the novel-writing process.

The earliest pages are scrapbooks of ideas, thoughts, and research. Random notions fill these pages alongside bits of dialogue, descriptions, even character names. (With my fiction, I try on character names the way I would try on a pair of pants.) For every novel I will read up on related subject matter to ensure I’m getting basic facts and terminology correct. Using my phone’s Share button I could add any page—Wikipedia, a news article, even a word in my phone’s dictionary—to a note. Although the foundations of the book are laid here, much of this primordial stew didn’t wind up in the final draft.

Later in the writing process, the pages start becoming more organized and less free-form. Here I was thinking about scenes I was developing. Dialogue and descriptions on these pages often reached the final draft. I also began roughing out timelines in these pages, primarily to flesh out the backstory of the main character.

The last note pages are highly organized. The novel was gelling; the big ideas are down on the page and I was more concerned about the small details and tightening up the narrative. In this stage, my note pages are mostly checklists of changes to be made. The pages are broken up into sections: Characters, Details, Terminology, Important, and so on. When I made the edit, I would check off the item.

This stage is where I wrote a final character list (to keep track of names and relationships) and lists of terminology and spelling (useful in a novel with imaginary technology). I also built a final master timeline which incorporated the chronology of the novel into the backstory—useful to avoid the problem of a character is talking about an event as happening the day before when it actually occurred two days before.

A few points here. First, notice the pages are structureless because the process is structureless. Even the later page’s organization is more-or-less free-form. The notebook met whatever need I had at the moment. It never imposed a system on me. Some writing software wants to guide you through steps or categories for organizing your work. I’m not sold on that idea. I could use the digital note pages for anything I wanted to preserve for later. Make your writing notebook a tabula rasa.

Likewise, avoid reminder or to-do style software. Yes, I use checklists in my writing notebook, but I also used it for so much more. Task software imposes organization on your creative output. (“Mark this task High, Medium, or Low?”) That’s not what you’re looking for with a writing notebook.

These notes did not happen in concerted bursts. They represent hundreds of points in time, some slivers of seconds used to type out an idea. At any point in the novel’s progress, I was adding notes on the bus, at work (shh), in my easy chair, even at the gym, sweating and madly tapping a thought that came to me on the treadmill. The phone was always there. Losing even a single story idea to the frailty of human memory and our shortening attention spans is a loss.

Before you start

If you’ve read this far, you might be excited to start using your phone for your next big writing project. There are downsides to keep in mind.

First, be aware you’re entrusting your precious creative output with a third-party corporation. Apple (or Google, or Microsoft, or whomever) could, at any time and with no warning, discontinue the software, discontinue their services, or even go out of business. Whatever software you work with, be sure you can export your data, even if it’s nothing more than printing out your notes or saving them as a PDF. You absolutely do not want to wind up in a situation where a corporation has your precious creative output locked up—or has deleted it.

Just as you protect your word processing files, make periodical backups of your notes in case of disaster. Most modern note-taking software has some method of doing this in such a way that the backups can be restored later if necessary.

Do a little research into your software’s data security practices. While you’re at it, make sure you’re using a strong password. No, I’m not worried about another author “stealing” my ideas, but I do worry about unknown persons accessing my notes without my consent. My writing notebook is a creative and freeing place. Part of that freedom rides on an expectation of privacy.

Recommendations

If you’re curious or excited to start using your phone as a writing notebook, your first step is choosing your software. My checklist for baseline features it should include are:

It should run on your phone and your writing computer. While you could turn to your phone while typing on your writing computer, I found it invaluable to be able to read and update my notes without leaving the screen. Being able to Alt+Tab to my notes and Alt+Tab back to my word processor was invaluable when the story was flowing and I couldn’t type fast enough.
Your notes should synchronize between every computer you use. In the 1990s synchronizing data between computers required specialized software and arcane cables. These days synchronizing should occur across the Internet, all-but-invisible to you.
Your notes should be available on the Web. It’s handy to be able to access your notes from anywhere. In the case of Apple, I can login to icloud.com. Your software should have this feature as well.
…but you should be able to access your notes without being connected to the Internet. As I’ll explain in a moment, it’s quite useful if your note-taking tool has it’s own app and doesn’t require using a Web browser.

You’ll notice that the above three points revolve around a single convenience: access. The key to my success with note-taking software was that I could access it at any time. You never know when or where inspiration will strike. Recording inspiration and returning to it later is the entire reason for keeping a writing notebook.

The reason I like accessing my notes outside of a Web browser is simple: I turn off WiFi when writing. Disabling Internet access is a great way to avoid temptation and whittle away the day surfing around. Disabling your WiFi also removes distractions while writing, such as new email, social media alerts, and so on.

(While I’m on the topic, I also recommend looking into how to turn off all notifications on your phone and computer while writing. Disabling WiFi doesn’t disable your phone from receiving text messages, for example.)

Those are my top-tier must-haves for a digital writing notebook. Features I think are desirable include:

Checklists. It’s great to be able to add checkboxes next to the edits I need to make. It’s even better to check them off when they’re done.
Scrapbooking. Surprisingly, I found myself harvesting ideas from Web pages more often than I expected. Being able to store links, photos, dictionary definitions—even maps—was invaluable.
Folders & note organization. Eventually I would fill a page with so much raw material I needed to create a second page to continue, and subsequently a third. Organizing all these pages into distinct folders is invaluable.

Other features to look for:

Drawing or sketching. If you like to doodle in your writing notebook, you might seek out software that supports drawing. (Alternately, you could use a separate sketchpad app and add it to your notes.)
Audio notes. Some note-taking software can attach voice memos to a note. It’s not how I work, but it might be yours.
Searching. It’s surprising how many times I remembered a keyword but could not find the exact note for it.
Collaboration. Some software allows you to share your notes with one or more people. If you’re collaborating on a novel with another writer (or illustrator, or editor), this might be a real need for you.

If you’re not an Apple user or seeking alternatives to Apple Notes, there are other options you can investigate. I’ve not had a chance to use any of these but they seem promising:

Google Keep
Microsoft OneNote
Evernote
Scrivener (An integrated organizer and word processor for writers, it appears to have a phone app as well)

Good luck!

Published 17 March 2019. Last updated 10 September 2020.

Jim Nelson

Author of Bridge Daughter & A Man Named Baskerville

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