I remember reading a blog recently in which the writer mentioned that she had made Excel spreadsheets for all of her main characters to keep track of...I forget. What could she possibly need this for? Now that's dedication!
And yet the other day, I found myself having to not only figure out high school schedules for five of my main characters, but I had to then figure out a whole semester's worth of football games, dances, test dates, date-dates, and a slew of other stuff.
YIKES! I promise, I had no choice. My MC kept running into people in random classes and then I would see later that there was no way those two girls could have that class together. Or I would have some guy ask a girl out for an event that was two weeks prior. Arrghh...This is no doubt due to my non-chronological method of writing. Who knew writing could be so technical at times?
Is this like the unpublished back stories that you hear people like J.K. Rowling talk about? I heard her once say that she had volumes of writing about Harry's grandparents etc... My mother asked me the other day why one of my characters did something, and I said, "Oh. Well, her parents...yada yada yada..." And then I realized that her parents barely enter the story, but I knew the root of why she did what she did. So, anyway, now I know everyone's schedules and life is much easier. Does everyone do this?
P.S. I'm not sure, but I am thinking that maybe, just maybe, Scrivener has some way to do this better. I'll let ya know.
3 comments:
Katie - For me this is the absolute hardest part of writing - keeping the time logic together. No matter how I plot and graph and record, I can't seem to keep it all straight. In one case I needed an extra day that didn't exist and I briefly thought about making it a Leap Year so it would make sense without me having to go back and rewrite. Logic is so overrated!
No solution for this dilemma on Scrivener, I'm sad to say.
It's funny because it's a lot like keeping up with my own and my three kids' schedules--and we all know how hard THAT is to graph out on our Mom Agendas!
And then, I noticed that I had confused my fictitious math teacher with my child's real life, in-the-flesh math teacher. Aaaaaargh!! Focus . . . .focus. . .
Wait a minute! You could put your excel spreadsheet into your research folder in Scrivener and look at it split screen. Or, are we just making everything way more complicated than it needs to be??
Well, I honestly can't comment. SF has had me laughing over on FB and now I can't think of a darn thing to say except that I am glad I am not the only one who needs to write an extra book to help me write my original book :)
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