Tech Tuesday: Word frequency in Scrivener

Need to get rid of those echo words in your manuscript?

A while back, I wrote about a web site called Wordle that lets you create a word cloud showing your most commonly used words. Fun and highly distracting, but not very practical for regular use.

As it happens, Scrivener has a built-in feature that will display the frequency of every word in your document, or group of selected scenes. Here’s how:

1. Select the scene or scenes you wish to view.
   (As always, shift+click for contiguous selection, cmd+shift for non-contiguous selection.)
2. Click Edit Scrivenings.
3. Click inside the editing window and press cmd+A (or Edit, Select All), to select all of the text in the window.
4. From the View menu, choose Statistics, Text Statistics.
5. If necessary, click the triangle next to Word frequency to display the chart.
6. Click on either the Count or Frequency header to sort the words in descending order.

Voila! You’ll want to scroll down to get past the, to, he, she, and so on, but it’s worth it to have quick and easy access to your most frequently used words.

Want to learn more? You can find great online tutorials at the Scrivener Tutorial Videos page.

Enjoy!

Size matters

I’m struggling with my storyline, thinking that it’s not “big” enough. Are my villains’ (yes, there are two) motivations and goals big and interesting enough? Do I have enough layers? Do I need to flesh out my secondary characters more?

Argh!

In a lot of the romantic suspense books I read, the villain has a reason to go after the hero or heroine, but their larger purpose is something big like human trafficking, or stealing women’s eggs to sell to infertile couples, or…okay, well one of my villains is a drug lord. Is that high concept enough?

I keep thinking that I’m struggling to reach 80K because the premise is not quite large enough. Or maybe I just need to do a full-pass edit from page one before I get frustrated. The thing is, I want to get my plot hammered down before I waste time on the full edit.

I have some ideas for changing things up without completely changing the story structure. I’m pondering them now, and trying to decide if I should give it a rest for a week or so.

I probably won’t.

I’m also pondering dropping my first four scenes. A depressing loss of 2400 words, some of which would have to be added back in to fill in the backstory the reader will have missed.

Why cut them? Well, I was thinking about entering a contest that is only for the first 1000 words of the MS, and I realized that I don’t like them that much. The prologue maybe (I know, big no-no), but not the rest. They seem necessary, but I still don’t love them.

I’m hoping for some guidance in the form of my beloved CP who is very busy right now. She’s also in the throes of revision, and her poor husband has a busted wheel.

No matter how many words the MS ends up with, it’s the size of the story that matters. I only hope that, by the end, mine’s big enough.

The Sunday Squirrel: the beginning

The man had been five feet from her heels since she broke away from the pack in the second mile. Forty-five minutes ago. His heavy breaths and the light slap of his shoes on the asphalt were her constant companion. Why didn’t he just pass her?

She’d entered the half-marathon to get a time check–make sure she wasn’t losing ground. It wasn’t like she needed a race to motivate her to run. When she ran, she was powerful and in control. The hours she spent eating up the trails around her condo made up for the rest of her existence. She’d run all day if she could.

Maybe one day she wouldn’t stop.

As they rounded the curve into the last mile, cheering crowds and race volunteers packed the tree-lined road. She wiped errant beads of sweat from her forehead, picked up her pace, and focused on the tiny red FINISH banner in the distance.

“Race you.”

Lindsey jumped at the deep voice of her unwanted running partner. He gave her a slow, sexy smile and took off. No way. No way was he going to follow her for ten miles and then beat her in the end.

For a few seconds she had a view of his broad shoulders and powerful thighs. He was lean and muscular, more like a fighter than a runner. She might have enjoyed his company if he’d been in front of her the whole time.

Too bad. She poured on the speed and flew past him, surprised to feel a grin on her face.

She crossed the finish line and gradually slowed to a walk, dipping her head as a volunteer draped a finisher’s medal around her neck. Hands on hips, she made a beeline for the bananas and water bottles, thankful for the cool breeze that hinted at fall.

“Hey,” the hottie who’d stuck to her like glue said. “Nice run.”

“Thanks, you too.” She turned away with a polite smile. Trolling for men at a race–or anywhere else, for that matter–was not her style.

He touched her shoulder and she yanked away, hoping he hadn’t noticed the uncontrollable expression of terror she knew had crossed her face.

“Sorry,” he said, his hands up in apology. “I just–”

“Look. I’m not interested, okay?” She retreated and changed course toward the parking lot.

“Lindsey, wait.”

She froze–her blood turned to ice–and spun to face him. “How the hell do you know my name?”

With a rueful look, he pulled a rumpled business card from his shorts pocket. “Colonel Stark sent me.”

Put it in perspective

I was commenting on Larry Brooks’ upcoming deconstruction of Avatar over at storyfix.com, when I realized something about characterization: it’s all about perspective.

Yeah, I know this is nothing new, but for some reason it clicked. You see, I didn’t expect to like Avatar. I’d heard that there was no plot, just pretty special effects. Well, I went anyway, and really, really liked it. And because I’d heard there was no plot, I found myself analyzing it on the way home.

I believe the naysayers were wrong. There was a pretty strong plot, complete with character GMC, turning points, black moment, climax, everything.

Okay, that’s another post, or just check out storyfix.com this week…

Back to perspectives. I made a comment that I had been analyzing the plot, “much to my husband’s dismay”. And then it made me think about how he points out engineering stuff all the time. Like why a certain structure works, or why a ship in space wouldn’t “fall” after it’s been blown up, etc… And I tend to turn over plastic containers so I can see if they’re injection blow molded or extrusion blow molded. If you want I can show you the ejection pin mark on your toothbrush, too.

Yes, I taught the plastics lab during grad school.

So, what’s my point? It’s that our backgrounds and interests color how we look at the world, and if our characters are rich they’ll be the same way. The things they’ll notice about the world around them are determined by their background, personality, and experiences.

Not that I’ve necessarily done this with my MCs yet. Give me a break, I just thought of it!

So, how do you find opportunities to show your character’s perspective?

The science of writing

Author Christina Dodd is celebrating her 20th anniversary since getting The Call. Wow! When I look at someone as successful and prolific (42 novels published) as her, it’s easy to think that it will never happen to someone like me. But she’s quick to point out that her journey to publication was long.

Ten years long, in fact! She garnered 25 rejections (not too bad, actually), and in those ten years, she wrote three manuscripts. So just like many of us, she wasn’t spitting out 3-5 books a year yet.

Writing is a study in patience and persistence. If we keep writing, keep learning, and keep querying, I’d like to think the odds are with us. That eventually we’ll get The Call, too.

It supposedly took Thomas Edison 10,000 tries to create a viable electric lightbulb. He is purported to have said that he didn’t fail 9,999 times, he merely found 9,999 solutions that didn’t work. For a scientist, failure is just part of the process of eliminating incorrect solutions.

What if he thought #3,455 was the best he could do? That he had nothing left to learn and therefore was a failure? Maybe Joseph Swan would be a famous inventor instead.

What if Christina Dodd had given up after seven years? Or nine? If you thought of the write/submit/rejection loop as a scientific process of learning what does and doesn’t work in your quest to invent a salable manuscript, would it help?

Go out and keep finding ways that don’t work, because one of these days, you’ll find the one that does. And then you will get The Call.

Good luck!

Tech Tuesday: Split and merge in Scrivener

[If you don't use Scrivener, and you'd like to read about creating villains, check out my guest blog post over at Romance Magicians today.]

Have you ever created a long scene and then decided it should really be two scenes? Maybe there’s a great hook in the middle, or you missed a time change. Or maybe you imported your MS from Word, and now it’s one long scene that you need to break up into 80!

No matter why you need to do it, splitting scenes is amazingly simple in Scrivener. Here’s how:

1. Place your cursor within the text where you want the split to occur.
2. From the Documents menu, select Split, At Selection.
3. Scrivener moves all of the text after your cursor into a new file with the same label as the original plus “-1″. For example, if my scene were called To Doctor, the section I split off would become To Doctor-1.

Voila! Scenes split. If you’re splitting a large amount of text into many scenes, it’s worth learning the shortcut for Split, which is cmd+K.

Okay, but let’s say you wrote two scenes and they really should be one. Or you split a scene five months ago and you want to merge it back together. No sweat. Just use the Merge feature:

1. Select the scenes you want to merge.
   - use shift+click for contiguous scenes
   - use cmd+click for non-contiguous scenes
2. From the Documents menu, select Merge.
3. Scrivener merges all of the scenes into the top selection, in order from top to bottom. So, if you merged Scene 1, Scene 2, and Scene 14, all of the text would be moved to Scene 1 (in order).

That’s it! If you like shortcuts, you’ll find them on the menu. The one for Merge is option+cmd+M.

Writers write, right?

I had another epiphany recently about how much legitimate competition there is in the publishing industry.

I’m amazed by the number of writers who don’t write. What? You read me.

After reading numerous blogs, perusing my many writing loop and online course emails, and attending meetings with other writers, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s not as much writing competition out there as you might think. At a recent meeting, when asked how many pages they’d written since October, the majority of the writers hadn’t written more than 5-10 pages. In THREE months!

At that rate it will take them at least ten years to write a 300-page book.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good reasons why people don’t produce. Work, family, illness, vacations, and all of the things that make up life chip away at writing time. I get that, but in the end, if you want to write a book, you have to sit down and WRITE IT.

It seems to me that if you’re putting in the time to finish a book, query it to agents, and improve your craft, you’re ahead of most of the other writers out there.

Some stats to note: Of the approximately 10,000 RWA members, about 19% are published (in book-length fiction) and 12% have PRO status (completed a manuscript and are actively submitting to agents/editors). That 31% is the real competition in the romance industry.

If you read enough agent blogs, you’ll also realize that many of the queries they get can be dismissed out of hand for dumb things like lack of personalization, querying for a genre the agent doesn’t represent, telling the agent you’re the next big thing, or not following submission guidelines. If you remove those uneducated submissions, the pool of viable competition shrinks drastically.

I’m not trying to imply that getting published is easy. But I was cheered to realize that the playing field isn’t as big as I thought. If you really want to get published, first you have to be in the game. Make sure you’re part of that 12% who’ve made PRO, and your chances will go up dramatically. Make that your goal this year. If you’re already PRO, start and finish another book this year. And query it.

Never give up. Good luck!

The Sunday Squirrel: love?

The premise of today’s squirrel was to write a love scene where the characters do not touch, or say anything similar to “I love you”, and there is no internal dialogue. (Think distant 3rd person.) Here’s my attempt at making it clear that these characters love each other…

He met her gaze. “Stay.”

Her hand slipped from the doorknob, and she stepped toward him, her eyes glistening. “I want to…but I can’t.”

He shoved trembling hands into his pants pockets. “You belong here. With me. The house is empty without you.” He shifted and whispered down to her, close enough for his breath to move wisps of her hair. “It has no soul when you’re gone.”

The tears finally spilled over, leaving black tracks down her cheeks. Her hand came up, palm out, and hung in the air, somewhere between a sign to stop and the beginning of a caress. She held it for a beat and then her face crumpled. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, turning away and covering her mouth. With a quick twist on the knob, she yanked open the front door and ran to her car.

The door slammed shut with a gust of cold wind, and he watched her blurry form through the frosted glass until she drove away. He sank to his knees on the Oriental carpet runner and rubbed his chest, leaning forward until his forehead rested on the blue and red yarns. He beat the polished wood floor with his fist as a low moan escaped his lips. ”Carrie.”

Ready for some football…humor?

OMG. I love the Cake Wrecks blog when I need a good laugh. Yesterday’s post of football cakes had me reaching for the tissues. I think the “frankenpoo butterfly” pushed me over the edge…

Enjoy!

Why I write romance

I’m not sure when I first realized I liked to write, but in 7th grade I penned my first novel (I use this term loosely to apply to a hand-written story of about 50 journal pages). I still have it somewhere. It even had a romantic element. Hey, I was 12, and I’d always liked boys.

For some reason, I never considered a writing career, though. It seemed daunting, and about as likely to happen as that singing career I once envisioned. It’s still daunting, and the achievement of bestseller status is unlikely–though I’m not opposed to it–but here I am plugging away at the keyboard each day, blissfully hopeful.

For years, I dabbled in poetry, wrote lots of technical documentation, and emailed little bits of inspiration home from work. When I finally quit working two years ago (wow, time flies!) I spent time learning Dreamweaver and writing fitness articles for my lame website. I also considered pursuing freelance writing, but couldn’t get excited about it as a full-time endeavor.

I really wanted to write fiction! The problem? No ideas. Well, not the kind I thought I wanted to write. I’d spent most of my adult life reading mysteries, political/military thrillers, and historical adventures. How on Earth do people like Sue Grafton, Clive Cussler, Ken Follett and Vince Flynn think of this stuff? Talk about intimidating.

Looking back, I was always happier when the story included a romantic subplot, and especially a happy ending. That should have been a clue.

It wasn’t until I picked up a couple of old historical romance novels from the “Free” box at the library that I realized there was a genre for the stories in my head. It really was an epiphanic (yes, that’s a word), slap-your-head sort of moment. I knew historical wasn’t for me (love to read it, can’t write it), but when I started picking up contemporary and romantic suspense books from Suzanne Brockmann, Christina Dodd, Lisa Kleypas, and others, I knew I had found my home.

It’s always fascinated me how the smallest act can have such huge consequences. Would I have come to romance another way eventually? I hope so. It’s likely. But who knows how much longer it would have taken?

I’m just grateful for the ways of the universe, and happy to have found my niche.