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Red Regent

The Storyteller's Exchange - The Writer's Thread

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This one I've been ruminating on for a while now, and since this site has a whole lot of creative types just popping in and out, I thought why not go here and open this thread up?

What I want this "Storyteller's Exchange" thread to be is a thread where anyone can share their problems about whatever little story or project they have cooking with their peers, and have it commented on and analyzed by anyone with an idea they feel might help. So I'll start us off...

How the world do you guys even get things started sometimes? Seriously, I've already plotted out a 4-part anthology series of (visual?) novels with just the first one being up in the air because of time constraints and college work. Guys I may need help with this one, how do I get started and keep going? Seriously my Id grows ever crazier with each passing day when I haven't put pen to paper.

Quick Edit: I intended this thread to be used for anyone who has a writing-related problem so feel free to post about your own problems and have the rest of us have a look-see if we can help.

Edited by Red Regent
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First off, carry a pen and notebook around so that you can jot down bits of story whenever the urge hits you. Those little periods of time during breaks or while waiting for things do add up. If you are feeling writers' block, don't try to crash into it head-on by staring at the computer screen all evening--let your imagination chip away at it bit by bit on its own.

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I second carrying a notebook of some sort everywhere!  Especially have it handy when you are drifting off towards sleep and when you wake up, but I've had good ideas pop up during lectures, at the store, while reading.....write down every idea,nit just what applies to your current project.

I never have just one project going, so if I get stuck on one, I can move on to another for a while.  But sometimes, you just have to sit down and write, even if you don't feel like it.  Writer's block can end up being an excuse for being lazy.  If you can't write the story directly, work on mapping out the details of who does what when, and make sure everything is actually possible and makes sense.

When all else fails and you can't seem to write anything, write something completely different from your usual.  Write smut, write a Victorian epistolary tale, write a piece that's all dialog, write a fanfic.  Something short that you know you can finish, or a small piece of a larger work.  Just something to get the mental juices flowing.  It might be good, but will more likely suck.  Stick it in a drawer, and then once you have a collection built up, when you get stuck, pull out a random piece and try to find a way to apply some part of it to what you're doing.

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I have a major multi-volume project going (as if anyone hasn't heard already ;) ). I've edited the living daylights out of book one, put it through a five-person beta team, edited it again, begun putting it back through draft critiques, and in a couple of months I'll be putting it through yet another beta team reading. All of this is going on while I'm working on volume two. The writing never ends.

When I hit a block, I try writing flash fiction or poetry. Pick a feeling or incident and expound upon it for a few hundred words. Don't aim to have it published. Just write it. Be warned, though—it's harder to keep things short than to write long works sometimes.

Another bit of advice: choose your tools well. I chose LibreOffice and a redundant directory structure (involving local drives, Google Drive, and Dropbox) to manage my project (using Total Commander to move/backup files) for my first volume. I've also used a little piece of software called Treepad Business Edition to do outlining. Additionally, I have two laptops running side-by-side: a new one for writing and an old one for displaying critique PDF files.

Speaking of critiques, I STRONGLY recommend you join Scribophile (or a similar online community, but I would recommend Scribophile above the others I've seen). Start critiquing other people's works and learn from what you read. Eventually, people will start critiquing your works. (This will be made easier if you purchase the premium membership.) Hop on and give it a good, hard look. If you buy the premium membership, you'll be able to save your critiques to local files which you can use for editing at any time (see previous paragraph).

Back to choosing tools, give Scrivener a try. I'm using it to write the second volume of my project. Don't let the learning curve scare you away—just go through the supplied tutorial and start writing. You'll start picking up on its more advanced features soon after you start using it. Advantage: it's available for Windows or Mac.

Get yourself a good timeline tracker. Some people use Excel or LibreOffice's Calc. I use a free tool called, appropriately enough, Timeline. I've got events stretching from 2038 to 2089, and I can get as granular as I want (I have one event timed out to the minute). Other people use a program called Aeon Timeline which, while not free, integrates into Scrivener. I have not tried it, but I've heard good words about it.

One last tool that will help you edit your work: Slick Write. It's a free online proofreading tool, with a plugin for LibreOffice. The author is a Scribophile member, and it's well supported (and easily customizable).

Hope this helps.

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I looked at Scrivener and chose oStorybook. It's written in Java and available for Windows, Linux, and OSX. (When I switched from Windows to Linux as my main OS, I initially just put a symlink in my home directory pointing at the appropriate folder in my old Windows home directory. Didn't even have to copy the files. Everything worked.) It has more features than Scrivener, including built-in timeline tracking. One disadvantage is that the main website for it is in French, and the Google Translate version isn't a really great translation.

Backup is critical - and the biggest threat to your work, the thing you most need backups to protect your work from, is your own fat fingers. Which means you need frequent backups and several of them going back in time. Preferably on an external drive so it also protects you against hardware failures, and/or in the cloud if you're so inclined (I am not, so have no comment on the relative merits of various services). Strongly recommended for this purpose: Linux: BackInTime (it's free) ; Macintosh: Time Machine (you already have it); Windows: Genie Timeline (commercial, there is a free version but I didn't care for the limitations).

I use BackInTime and, for my writing, have it checking for changes every two hours. It keeps every backup for two days, a backup a day for a week, a backup a week for a few months (that actually covers the oldest backup I have), a backup a month for a couple years, and a backup a year for ten years. Other parts of the system are backed up less frequently because they are either less important or less volatile.

Time Machine and BackInTime take advantage of a characteristic of Unix file systems to make every incremental backup look exactly like a full backup - no special software needed, not even a plugin to a file manager - without consuming the requisite space or time. Genie Timeline could do the same thing if it insisted that backups be to an NTFS partition, but it's willing to write to FAT which doesn't have the required characteristic (each directory entry must be a completely unique file - Unix file systems and NTFS allow a single file to have multiple directory entries pointing at it), so it has to track stuff in its own database and use a special Windows Explorer plugin to reconstruct the directory structure on the fly. This means that a Genie Timeline backup is more or less useless on a system that doesn't have the software installed - and getting a new software installation to recognize a pre-existing backup set is a bit of a pain.

 

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Then again, FAT was designed for low space consumption and low processor demand as its priorities, having been originally designed for systems whose total memory capacity was measured in kilobytes. Keeping track of fancy multi-pointer stuff was less important than the ability to be used on 180kB-per-side floppies without a hard drive.

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4 hours ago, ijuin said:

Then again, FAT was designed for low space consumption and low processor demand as its priorities, having been originally designed for systems whose total memory capacity was measured in kilobytes.

So, in spite of its acronym being FAT, it actually was a very slim program? :danshiftyeyes:

(This reminds me of something that a compsci major friend of mine once experienced. He was experimenting with code that could modify the FAT of a floppy disk, which he knew was risky but intended to be careful with. Unfortunately for my friend, he confused one floppy for another and tested the program on the wrong disk. This disk held about a dozen programs he had coded himself for use in his classes, about a week's worth of effort. When he discovered his mistake, he checked the disk in horror and found that he could only see one program on it -- the program he had written to mess with the FAT. The rest of the programs were still there but could no longer be accessed due to the FAT having been modified...)

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5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

So, in spite of its acronym being FAT, it actually was a very slim program? :danshiftyeyes:

(This reminds me of something that a compsci major friend of mine once experienced. He was experimenting with code that could modify the FAT of a floppy disk, which he knew was risky but intended to be careful with. Unfortunately for my friend, he confused one floppy for another and tested the program on the wrong disk. This disk held about a dozen programs he had coded himself for use in his classes, about a week's worth of effort. When he discovered his mistake, he checked the disk in horror and found that he could only see one program on it -- the program he had written to mess with the FAT. The rest of the programs were still there but could no longer be accessed due to the FAT having been modified...)

Norton's utilities for DOS would, in theory, fix that. 

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33 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Norton's utilities for DOS would, in theory, fix that. 

He did fix the problem in the end. I can't remember if he used Norton or not. I do remember his priceless expression when he realised he had lost everything on the disk except the program that had caused the problem. He felt that was adding insult to injury.

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5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

So, in spite of its acronym being FAT, it actually was a very slim program? :danshiftyeyes:

Yep. The acronym stands for File Access Table.

WARNING: lots of technical stuff follows. For the rest of this post.

That is also the name of a particular component of the structure - which even a floppy contains two copies of, it's that important. A directory entry contains all the meta-information and the block number of the first block in the file. If that happens to be block #143, then entry #143 in the FAT on disk will contain the block number of the second block in the file (with special values for "this is the last block in the file" and "this block is officially empty") - and absolutely nothing else.

Originally (and possibly still, on floppies) each entry in the FAT took 12 bits - a byte and a half. They put two entries in three bytes.

There's a trade-off: with a larger block size the same size block-number can handle a larger disk, BUT, the disk space will be used less efficiently. For most purposes, even a 16K block is just silly - a huge majority of files are smaller than 8K. A larger block number, of course, means the FAT itself is larger and possibly slower to process; however, processor speed and RAM capacity grew. So eventually FAT entries were expanded to 16 bits and then to 32 bits.

The FAT file system also assumes that each block is in only one file. So if a file is deleted, every block that was in it is marked (in the FAT on disk) as empty. That's why the file system does not support what Unix/Linux folks call "hard links", and why Windows "shortcuts" were originally such a bad kludge supported by practically nothing except the desktop and the file explorer.

(Note: Microsoft could have written "symlink" capability - I'll explain what that is in a bit - into the FAT file system. A symlink is less efficient than a hard link, but it gets the job done, with both advantages and disadvantages in behavior. And if it were in the file system, effectively everything would have supported it. But they didn't do that, ever, and neither has anyone else. Even on Android, the newest major OS, a FAT partition cannot contain a symlink.)

The NTFS file system that is preferred for WinNT and its descendants is more similar to Unix file systems. I don't know the details.

On Unix-like OSes I'm most familiar with the internals of the ext3 file system (and actually I really only know ext2 - ext3 is backward compatible with it and adds journaling to protect the file system structure from damage, but I don't know the details of how that works). But other Unix file systems are written with the same capabilities, and mostly similar in general design (precise details, of course, vary).

In ext3, a directory contains nothing but hard links. A hard link consists of a filename and an inode number pointing at an inode in the same partition. That's all. The real identity of a file consists of what computer, device, and partition it's on, and the number of its top inode.

The top inode of a file does not contain a filename, but does contain all other metainformation, including a count of how many directory entries are hard links to it. After that, for the top inode, there are several types.

One type is a symlink - so the rest of the inode will contain the complete path to another directory entry somewhere, and access to the contents of this file is automatically redirected - by the file system - to that other file. A program normally won't even be told it's going through a symlink. The advantages of a symlink (as compared to a hard link) are that it can point to other partitions, devices, even computers, and that the ownership and rights on a symlink can be different from those on the file it's pointing at; the disadvantages are that symlinks consume more resources (an extra inode and the time to access it), and since they aren't counted - they cannot reliably be counted - it's possible to get broken symlinks pointing at files that no longer exist.

The next type, useful for small files, is "here are the contents of the file". Right there in the inode itself. Consuming no data blocks.

Next up is a list of data blocks numbers, for files that don't fit in the inode but occupy no more blocks than can be listed in the inode.

And then, for larger files, a list of secondary inode numbers. The secondary inodes themselves can be either lists of data block numbers or lists of next-level-down inode numbers, forming a tree structure.

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