Back in Scrivener is the next step for me. It’s all about the mechanics that help me free up my creativity. If you’ve ever written anything deeply personal or of great importance you know it breaks down to two parts. First you have to be creative, and then you have to make sure it is all good.

Back in Scrivener to clean up the mess.

There is a lot of work in writing a novel, but if you get the steps set in the right way, the mechanics help you along. I start by plotting it. If you missed that article, take a look at Start by Plotting.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, Writing in Word Over Lunch, I have limited time, so the CREATIVE process wins over the perfectionist. I’ve taught myself that writing is like woodworking. I can’t get distracted by sweeping up all the wood chips until I’m done.

I bet some of you shivered at that concept.

I put each document into Scrivener, using the Paste and Match Style (Ctrl+Shift+V in Windows), so that it will use the format selected for the project.

Tedious but necessary.

Moving sixty-four documents back in Scrivener from Word is very tedious but necessary. I don’t worry about formatting; I type and get it done. Once it is in Scrivener it is easier to work through each scene, clean up, correct, improve, delete, re-write, and then clean up again.

Hearing my story.

Scrivener has a wonderful readback tool. If you go to the Edit menu and look towards the bottom you’ll see ‘Speech’ and a nice shortcut. I put my headphones on, select a slow reading speed, and listen to the scene after the first pass at editing. It lets me hear the words and I can get the cadence of the story.

I’m always amazed at how many things sound nice in my mind, read well on the page, and sound simply awful when it’s read back to me. I do a lot of editing and changing in this section. I find the ‘just’ conspiracy has attacked my page.

What? You don’t know what the ‘just’ conspiracy is? Oh, let me tell you.

The ‘just’ conspiracy.

Back in Scrivener, listening to my scene I find that every other sentence has the word ‘just’ in it. Just looking through the scene I don’t notice it. My eyes just skip it and I just don’t know why the ‘just’ simply shows up.

It’s a conspiracy. I don’t mean to put it in every sentence – twice. It shows up randomly throughout the scene and I have to fight – fight I tell you – to get rid of all the ‘just’ words. I think in a 70,000-word document, a minimum of 7,000 ‘just’ appear.

I think Word has it in for me and it simply places them (see what I did there? I replaced ‘just’ with simply – it’s a conspiracy!!!)

I’m sure you have your own favorite, overused, misused, and abused words that you have to remove from your manuscript. For me, it takes hearing it to start the extrication procedure.

Will Power and Tenacity.

Once I’m back in Scrivener it’s all about working the process. It is about sticking to the work and getting it done. I’ll talk in another segment about how I lay out the post-creative work to show progress and keep motivated.

In closing…

Each part of the process requires its own tools. I find the tools that work best for my style, and I blend them into my process. Plotter to plot, Word to write, Scrivener to finish the novel.

I’m curious about your process.

What tools do you use?

• How do you stay motivated throughout the entire process?
• Do you use text-to-speech tools to read back your creative writing?

The next segment is going to cover “Target Versus Actual Word Count” – my other nemesis.