During this Scrivener Trial period, every time I log into Scrivener the software program reminds me of how many non-consecutive days I have left in my 30 day free trial. Now it’s 15 days remaining.

What do I have for my 15 days?

1. Not as many overlapping files as in this image, but a few I can easily switch back and forth between.

2. Ten chapters of a novel-in-progress. Very rough chapters. Extremely rough. With lots of comments on the side bar for changes and things to follow through in later chapters.

I’m still not confident this novel will work to the end. But I want to continue, probably on Scrivener. If I do make it, I’d write the second draft on Scrivener because I’ll really need to process all these notes I’ve made in the various files. I see myself transferring it all to WORD for draft 3, mainly because I’m concerned about the transfer process. Will it really work? Also, a friend told me certain things come out strangely in WORD as a result of the transfer. I’ll want to fix those up before I get too far along.

I estimate that I’m a little over  1/4  of the first draft. My goal is to finish it by mid-October–unless I hit a wall.  Already, I’ve cut one character and replaced her with someone I had intended to be off-stage. The first character couldn’t move the story much and she wasn’t a realistic suspect, which felt like a waste of my limited number of new characters.

And I still don’t know whodunit. The story seems to be leaning toward one person, but I’m not convinced. For books one and two, I had a strong feeling at this point about who was guilty.

It’s unsettling, but I expect unsettled is one thing first drafts are largely about.

Nowadays, it seems to be a given that de-cluttering is good and its opposite–hoarding or excessive collecting–is all bad. Last week I wrote about a positive I gained from my mother’s hoard of newspapers. Today I’ll talk about a couple more.

The first comes from a book about hoarding I read as research for my novel, Ten Days in Summer, which involves the death of a hoarder. The book noted that hoarders are more imaginative about stuff than other people. You and I look at a used egg carton and see garbage or recycling; a hoarder sees a hundred potential uses for the dozen sculpted cups.

One of my mother’s hobbies was creating dollhouse miniatures. The craft is all about seeing something new in small, usually discarded objects. One year, she asked me to collect the plastic pieces they put on take-out pizza to keep it from sticking to the box top. I don’t even know the name for this coin-shaped plastic on three little stilts, but she could see they would make perfect café tables for her miniatures.

My second positive is from my experience of the one that got away. When we sold our house in Montreal, we had a garage sale to get rid of stuff that we’d no longer need in our new home in Calgary. Among the outgrown children’s toys and kitchen items we rarely used, I included an umbrella stand that my father had given me some years earlier as a birthday present. The stand was pretty, made of brass-colour material with punched out images. But I only use folding umbrellas, so the stand was never practical and mainly took up space in our entranceway. It would be even more useless in Calgary’s dry climate, where I expected to use my folding umbrellas rarely. At our garage sale, my neighbour bought the umbrella stand for $1.00. My heart tugged as he carried it away.

I was right. There’s no place for my umbrella stand in my Calgary home. The main thing it would do is clutter my house entrance or mudroom.

Yet, over the past twenty years, I’ve thought of this umbrella stand and wish I hadn’t parted with the thing. It was pretty and a present from dad. With a little imagination, I could have found a use for it somewhere in my Calgary home.

So is it worth hanging onto hundreds of pieces of junk so you don’t wind up throwing away the one that you’ll miss some day in the future?

Possibly.

On my publisher’s website today, you can read my blog post about how hoarding inspired my mystery novel. As research for Ten Days in Summer, I watched a couple of episodes of the TV show Hoarders.  It baffles me that people can enjoy such programs. Perhaps, for me, the show is too close to home.

My mother was far from a hoarder, but she had that inclination. I have it too, but less than she did–touch wood, if you can find a spot of wood floor in this picture (it’s not my home, although the old globe and fan look familiar).

For more research, I read a book about hoarding and wasn’t surprised to learn that procrastination is a common hoarder trait. More surprising, to me, was another characteristic: perfectionism. For example, the book noted, a person collects stuff with the intention of recycling it. But rather than just throw the stuff in a bin, as most people would, a hoarder must recycle it perfectly. The more the stuff accumulates, the more difficult it becomes to get it right and the more he puts off taking care of it.

This reminded me of me of my mother’s newspapers, which occupied a large part of her garage. Every day, when she finished reading the paper, she would fold the sections neatly back into place and add the newspaper to her latest pile. When the stack was high enough, she’d tie a cord around it and transfer it to the garage. This was before the days of curbside recycling collection, so her next step would be to decide on the best method of disposal.

After my first travel article was published in  The Montreal Gazette newspaper, I wanted to query the editor with more ideas. I realized it would help to know what locales had already been covered in recent issues and refresh myself on the newspaper’s travel writing style. I didn’t have the Internet back then, so I asked my mother if she had any old Saturday Gazettes around. She directed me to her garage.

There I found every Montreal Gazette newspaper going back to a couple years. I leafed through the neat stacks, no doubt messing up my mother’s work, and picked out all the Saturday issues. For me, they were gold. I took them home and devoured week after week of Gazette travel sections, sent the editor a query and secured my second travel feature. Later, I got a third and fourth.

In case I ever wanted to try for a 5th Gazette article, I kept all the travel sections in a box, which I brought with me from Montreal when I moved to Calgary 21 years ago.  After all, this was a company move and I didn’t have to pay to transport stuff. A  few years later, I queried The Gazette editor again. He said he remembered me fondly and wondered what had happened to me, but turned my idea down. I’ve since heard, sadly, that he died.

The box of travel sections is still in my basement. I’ll probably never read them again and really should throw them out.

And I will, one of these days, when I get around to it.

For years, I’ve listened to fellow writers rave about Scrivener, a word-processing program designed for book-length manuscripts and screenplays. Scrivener, it’s said, helps writers organize notes, concepts, research and documents for easy access and reference. One friend claimed he couldn’t write his novels without it.

Since Scrivener is most useful for first drafts, I told myself I’d consider it the next time I started a book. But when the time came this spring, I was reluctant to make the change from the WORD program I’m used to.  What convinced me to give Scrivener a try was learning that it offers a free 30 day trial. This is 30 USED days, which meant that if I signed up and found I wasn’t writing as often as I’d planned, the free period would only count for the days I logged onto Scrivener. So, if I only scriven twice a week the trial will last 15 weeks. I thought this would work well during this period that I’m easing into a new project while occupied with promoting my recently published novel.

Two weeks ago I downloaded the Scrivener trial program. Once that was done, Scrivener recommended starting with the two hour tutorial, although if I was in a hurry to start writing I could go for the 15 minute Quick session and return later for the details I missed. With my limited techy skills, I figured I needed the full deal and began the tutorial.

The first hour went pretty well. Most of the hands-on applications I did worked and they showed me how cork boards and other features could be useful for my book. Except, I’d only finished the How to Begin section.

An hour later I was about half way through the tutorial and lost in a forest of Scrivener details. It was way too much information for me to learn and apply in one day. I shifted to the Quick session and reached the end in a reasonable amount of time with enough instruction to get started.

My advice for non-tech-minded writers learning Scrivener: go for the Quick session and expect it to take the two hours promised for the full tutorial. Of course, a problem with this is that I don’t know if and when I’ll feel motivated to go back to learn more, except when I want to transfer my whole project to WORD for a later draft. Apparently, Scrivener easily allows you to do this and, in fact, expects it, since the program isn’t designed for final formatting to publication-ready.

This picture on the left shows about all I’m doing now with Scrivener. It would be fun to pin pictures on a corkboard like the one above, but I haven’t tried this yet. I’m nowhere near having an accordion document like the first picture in this post.

I’m probably only using about one hundredth of Scrivener’s capacity. I’m also still getting used to the different look from WORD. In the past, I judged my pacing by number of pages written. I haven’t discovered a page numbering feature in Scrivener, although there’s a word-count at the bottom of the page that I can measure against the counts in other chapters and in my previous books.

I like Scrivener’s feel as the words are typed on the screen and I especially like the side bars where I can write notes about scenes and characters, things to follow-through in later chapters, points to research etc. I’m a little worried about losing the material if I don’t save my Scrivener documents properly, so I’ve been saving them in various places and trust at least one will work.

After four used days, I’m not sold on Scrivener, but plan to continue in order to give it a good chance.

I knew there was something familiar about the name Scrivener. I looked it up and was reminded of a short story my friend studied in her university course in American Literature: Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, published in 1853. In that era, a scrivener was a kind of clerk or copyist.  While the job became obsolete in North America, scriveners are still common in countries with low literacy rates; scriveners read letters for illiterate customers, as well as write letters or fill out forms for a fee.

Perhaps, the developers of Scrivener chose this name for us tech-illiterate writers.

The gist of the Bartleby the Scrivener plot is that people kept asking Bartleby to do his job and then other things. He’d increasingly reply “I’d prefer not.” Eventually he preferred not to eat and died. My friend was drawn to story’s absurdity.

Critics have speculated that Bartleby might represent  Melville’s frustrations with his writing situation. Like Bartleby the scrivener who preferred not to do the sort of writing expected of him Melville found himself preferring to explore new territory in his novel Moby Dick.

I can only hope Scrivener doesn’t prove too foreign and complicated for me that I prefer not use it.