![]() ![]() You’re often going to refer to your characters’ appearance, history, occupation, habits and so on, and it’ll quickly become very tiresome to search back through your manuscript for the details. I also have two categories of research that are more important than anything else: Characters, and Locations. I do my planning and research using the web and various other apps, then I distill the relevant information into a summary that I keep in Ulysses, with one sheet per topic in a group called Research. They can sometimes even be useful in future books, particularly if you’re writing a series.Ī big chunk of each project is research and reference thrillers need believable snippets of detail on technology, weapons, vehicles, and so on. Never throw anything away! Those unwanted scenes might come in handy later, or serve as an intriguing behind-the-scenes look at your novel’s creation. I also have a group called Unused Scenes where I put any scene that I decide to remove completely, or to reattempt from a different perspective. ![]() If I think of a part of the story that could take place after the main narrative and just provide some extra flavour, I make it into a bonus scene. Bonus scenes are a great way to reward your readers for visiting your blog or signing up to your mailing list, and would typically be set after the end of the story, and be entirely optional. This makes it easy to export the full book later without having to multi-select groups: I just export the Contents group.īesides the manuscript, I have two other places where I keep scenes, outside of the novel itself: Bonus Scenes, and Unused Scenes. I tend to keep it inside a parent group called Contents, which gathers together the front matter, the novel itself, and the back matter. The most important section is of course the manuscript. I create a group in Ulysses for each book, and then create various subgroups to keep things organised. I’ve refined my project structure for a novel during the past several years, and I’ve found a system that works well for me. I used various tools for the planning stages, but ultimately I moved almost everything into Ulysses, to keep all my book-related material in one place and easy to access. It’s around 100,000 words long, and required a great deal of planning, research, and organisation. TOLL is the result of two years of work, and is the second book in my KESTREL series. In a second post, Matt will talk about how he is going about reference and research related to his novel, and treat the subjects of editing and export. In this post, he covers his project structure, the manuscript’s organization, and the writing process plus he explains how he is making use of keywords and word count goals. ![]() We invited him to share a few details of his writing process and how he uses several of the app’s features to help him. He wrote his recent book, TOLL - which is out this week - using Ulysses. Matt Gemmell is a thriller writer from the city of Edinburgh in Scotland. ![]()
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