Behind the Scenes (Organisation/Planning) (Patreon)

Hi everyone! This isn't really an update or anything. Just sort of a random behind-the-scenes talking about planning and organising projects.

I'll be honest with you all. Despite that I sometimes hear from people that they respect how organised I am...

I'm not a naturally organised person. 😱😱

Like...at all.

One reason I'm more organised now is because I needed to be. 

Writing in a chaotic way was not working for me. I know a lot of writers who claim they "work best" if they are chaotic. And there may be some people for whom that is true. But I noticed that even while I used to say that...

It wasn't true because being chaotic thwarted my progress more often than it helped me finish things.

So I taught myself to be more organised - tracking word counts, setting goals, etc. 

I ended up also trying out various different programs to try to help me organise my writing better. And I've found some good programs - Scrivener, Plottr, Google Sheets. 😤

The issue is that there's never a single software that seems to do everything.

Scrivener helped me organise my writing by allowing me to put everything in a single project folder where I can access multiple files easily. But I actually don't like it for planning in spite of all the 'cards' and 'corkboards' - I just it kind of...ugly and cumbersome. A lot of programs also don't implement spreadsheets (which are useful for word counts and word count goals) in a nice way.

Plottr is really great for planning and creating a nice visual timeline of a branching story. But I find its note organisation pretty lacking. Outside of places and people, it's difficult to keep track of things - so if your world building involves a complex magic system, languages, etc. It's less useful.

Basically I'm always looking for programs that help me organise better so that my writing goes smoother.

Lately I've been looking at Obsidian...

Obsidian is a software I came across months ago, downloaded, thought 'this looks complicated', and deleted.

I know people who use it for project management (setting tasks, and goals, and calendars, etc). And it just didn't strike me as something that would help me in that regard.

I revisited it after seeing some dev-friends talking about it. And wanted to give it another shot over the weekend. (Look! A Pretty theme!) 🤩

I ended up spending a lot of time consolidating project notes and world building into this program and I find myself really disappointed that I didn't have this software back when I started Gilded Shadows. It's really quite useful for organisation. Especially with the help of copious plugins and highly customisable themes.

"Antichthon" is a set of potential future projects that all take place on different worlds that exist within the same universe. They all have similar (Steampunk/Clockpunk) fantasy aesthetics and they all have the same base world building when it comes to magic systems or the races that inhabit those worlds, but they all use that information in unique ways.

Still, I thought it was a useful set of projects to experiment with because one of the really useful aspects of this software is its ability to crosslink between different notes.

And since these projects all have a lot of connects back to the same lore, I thought it would be interesting to organise it all and see how it goes.

(This theme, in particular, is nice since it has the rainbow folders, which help differentiate settings by colour.)

I haven't used it just to work on story/game concepts but also to organise a lot of things I've written down about visual novel game design but have been struggling to organise.

With game design, there are so many interconnected topics that I have really struggled to organise all of my thoughts and keep it all organised.

The truth is that when you have a bunch of separate notes (or "essays") with related content, they can get a bit disorganised and unwieldy. So, again, consolidating everything and cross linking concepts has been really useful.

As I said, I'm really sad I didn't have this when I was working on Gilded Shadows initially. At this stage of development it might not be helpful for me because I only have one route and dumping everything into Obsidian is potentially more work than it's worth. (ALTHOUGH - maybe it would be useful for organising the lore book so I may give it a shot anyway.)

I have used it for When Stars Collide as there is SO much lore with that game (a lot of which never gets mentioned but still exists. Even with all the folders in Scrivener (which you can actually link to each other) I just find obsidian a bit more intuitive in several ways.

Within Scrivener, I still often put notes in random places and lose them. For instance, I gave one character a last name but then couldn't remember the last name and couldn't find where I'd written down. Somewhere in Scrivener but who knows where? 😩😩

With Obsidian, as long as I write my notes in this software, I feel like they will always be easy to refer back to. Because writing something in a random place and losing it is actually something that happens pretty frequently for me. So hopefully this can put a stop to it.

I also just like how it looks - the themes are fun and make it pretty and that encourages me to use it (which seems silly but humans are simple creatures sometimes).

I'm still working on using it to set up tasks and maybe even see if it can properly track goals and word counts in a way that will let me move away from google sheets. But so far I am really liking how Obsidian is set up.

And the idea that it can help me keep track of my huge amounts of lore is pretty enticing.

In fact, just in writing this up I think I may actually try to organise the GS lore book content in Obsidian as well.

The point is that as I have accrued a few years of experience writing and finishing things, I've realised how important being organised is to that process.

My natural state is more of a "discovery writer" (AKA Pantser) who is not inclined to plan, who wants to jot down notes anywhere and everywhere, whenever and however I want - sometimes handwritten and in a notebook.

But my observation is that *that doesn't help me succeed* as a writer.

Knowing I've written down a bit of lore or a short scene - and then not being able to find it is frustrating. Having to sort through 20 files of story notes and lore to look for someone's last name because I wrote it in a weird place...is frustrating.

Not knowing where I am in the writing process of a huge project is distressing.

Not planning out stories properly before I start writing them just makes me get stuck.

The more I work on things the more I find myself trying to organise and plan better. So I'm constantly trying out different software meant to help with these things. Sometimes they work for me; sometimes they don't.

Sometimes they're helpful enough to use them, sometimes they're not.

One day I will find a magic software that does everything I need it to but for now I just continue to look for better tools to help me out.

I don't know if people find it interesting to see and read this kind of thing but I thought I'd share since this is something I've been playing with over the last couple of days and think I'll be using in the future! 

😊😊