![]() Organising Your Manuscriptīecause a book in Ulysses is just a long Markdown document assembled from any number of sheets, there’s a lot of flexibility in how you lay out your manuscript. It can also be great material for an afterword, or when you’re promoting your book. It helps me move forward, and makes for interesting reading later on. One other thing I like to do is keep a project-specific journal in Ulysses, with my thoughts on how the book is going, or with epiphanies I have about the plot or characters. A final tip: if you start each character sheet with the character’s full name, you can use Ulysses’ Quick Open feature to jump to a character’s sheet instantly just by typing that character’s name into the Quick Open window. It’s also incredibly useful in a book series, because it lets you build up a master reference for your universe. I call these sheets faces and places.Īdditionally, you can repurpose that information online as character biographies, or via the X-Ray feature on the Kindle store, where readers can tap the names of people and locations to see extra details. Similarly, keep a location sheet for each setting, and make sure it’s always up to date. ![]() Whenever you mention something about a character, add it to their sheet, and then you have exactly one place to look things up later. Keep a character sheet for each person in your book, no matter how minor (if you invent a new character while you write, immediately make a character sheet for them too). 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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