Author Archives: Scott Dawson

“Writing Prompts” on Reddit

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I recently stumbled across a group on Reddit. This particular group is called Writing Prompts, and the topics are story suggestions, meant as practice for writers. People reply with story segments in comments.

I was alerted to one topic by a text announcement on my phone. The topic was:

 "People gain superpowers the day after meeting their soulmate. When a hot young celebrity does so the day after a meet-and-greet, they're desperate to find every person who they even just shook hands with that day."

As I got ready for work, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. As I worked on the assembly line, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. At lunch, I read some of the story segments others had posted in response, and I plotted a continuation and thought of all sorts of details.

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Back and Forth Between Scrivener and InDesign

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The Beginning of a Long Journey

Jackie introduced me to Scrivener, a writing program. I wrote a draft script for Parts in it, using the Comic Script template provided with the program, and tips from its author Antony Johnston.

This format gave me automatically-incrementing page and scene numbers, which are adjusted on output. There were paragraph formats for character names, dialogue, narration, and more. It was a lot like the well-known screenwriting program Final Draft.

Final Draft itself is of course one of the well-known programs for screenwriting. It allows the writer to manage characters and plot points and make sure that all the loose ends are tied up. I believe that there is a detailed script output goes so far as to tabulate what characters (and therefore actors) and locations and even important props are in each scene (clearly useful in panning the shooting of a movie).

I have found that graphic-novel scripts are a lot more like screenplays than regular prose novels, and I tend to think more in pictures than text when creating story. I considered using Final Draft for my script, but decided to try Scrivener, as I found that Scrivener was a considerably lighter program, aimed more for writing.

However, Scrivener (and Final Draft) are text only. Parts is going to be a graphic novel. I decided to lay it out in Adobe InDesign, which I had used before. In InDesign I can design pages, choosing page size, margins, fonts, and so on. Then I cam import and place artwork. InDesign is much more flexible than Scrivener in the way that it can size and arrange artwork on a page. It places images and text in “frames”, which can themselves have different shapes and outlines. I immediately thought of dialogue boxes and word balloons in comics.

Ideally, I would like to write the script in Scrivener (or Final Draft for that matter), and export it in such a way that the structural information of the script is preserved. It would include not just a piece of text, but some record that the text was a piece of dialogue spoken by Character X.

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Getting close to publication!

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We have been working hard over the holidays getting the manuscript of “Nineteen Tales of COVID-19” ready for publication on Amazon.

Jackie Brown, publisher of the compilation, has been masterminding the project: getting needed material from the authors and designers, setting deadlines, and keeping things going.

Maxine Wray, marketer, has been getting promotional material going, such as graphics for posting to social media. She has also been setting up the distribution of the book.

I’ve been setting the book up in Adobe Indesign and generating manuscripts in PDF format for the others to check over and suggest adjustments. I also built a cover in Adobe Illustrator, using a graphic from Freepik (which had to be credited in the book).

Based on the others’ feedback, I’ve been making adjustment after adjustment: eliminating typos, correcting odd formatting errors, adding late-arriving material, and making adjustments to the cover. For example, two of the authors wanted to use different family names, which meant I had to rearrange the names on the cover and the chapters in the book…

We’re getting close!