Hii!! I saw you said you use Obsidian to help plan out your stories and chapters.
I just downloaded it but I was wondering if you have any tips on how to organize it for story writing??
Omg of course!!
While I think Obsidian can be user friendly, it's definetly a learning curve. I'll put some writing tips and a tutorial! Here's how to get started!!
Here are some links that helped me a bunch:
Here's a link to using Obsidian for Writing and Worldbuilding
Link to using Obsidian for Notes; but still helpful!
(I'm using screenshots from a diff vault than Night Terrors)
Getting Started:
Congrats! You've just downloaded Obisidian and have no idea how the fuck this works - understandable
Your initial screen might look something like this:
So you're thinking to yourself - what the hell is a vault?
A vault helps keep your projects seperated and is a local file on your computer - YOU CANNOT ACCESS YOUR VAULT ON A DIFFERENT COMPUTER OR THROUGH A WEB BROWSER (Unless you pay for ObsidianSync) - it sucks, but that's just a con of working with it - hopefully they do create a web version soon.
From this screen, pick a vault name (let's say my fic title is TITLE1 - so I would write that.)
I don't think hard on where it's stored so I just save it to wherever it suggested.
You Made Your Vault! Now What?
You should end up at this screen, but what are all these icons?
The Top Row above the Welcome note (from left to right)
New Page: Creates a new page
New Folder: Creates a new folder
Filter: Allows you to filter pages
Auto Reveal Current File: When you toggle this on, the active page you were looking at is selected in the file navigator and nested folders get expanded (basically shows you where your note is in the file navigator)
Collaspe All: Collaspes everything into their folders
The Side Bar from top to bottom:
Open Quick Switcher: This is a plug-in (more on that later) that allows you to search and open notes using your keyboard
Open Graph View: This opens that brain looking thingy, basically allows you to see how your files are interconnected if you use tags and can be a great way to visually look at your story
Create New Canvas: This allows you to make a new canvas, I use this the most for storyboarding and connecting plot lines:
Open Command Palate: This beauty allows you to quickly run almosty any command available (navigating, opening, creating, inserting templates, editing properties/text formatting, changing themes, literally everything)
Create New Base: Lets you create a database of your files
Okay, I just learned the key tools, can I start writing now?
Yes! Obsidian is ready to go!! Let's learn what we can do with it now:
Here's an example of me starting to write a chapter and linking ideas together. I'm using the tag properties to link this chapter to other chapters and see which ones connect, also makes it easier to find chapters or notes by properties (for writing you can make this key plot points, characters, places certain events take place)
I also made a link back to the main page - World Tours so I can quickly go back and forth, you'll see me link EXO in the World Tours below:
Canvassing:
Canvassing is the most powerful tool you can use for storybuilding
You can connect chapters, ideas, everything!
Example:
How I use canvassing:
My biggest tip is UTILIZE canvas!!
Graph View:
You can use graph view to see how things are connected - you can make it as complicated or as basic as you want
Basic Graph I'm using here:
More complicated view:
Plug-Ins and More
What's a plug-in? A plug-in is a feature that lets you extend Obsidian into a custom-note taking experience. There are Obsidian plug-ins, community plug-ins, you can even create your own. I suggest you play with vanilla obsidian before you start to put plug-ins:
How do I add a plug-in?
You can add plug ins by going to the bottom left of your screen, click on the settings icon
Click on community plug-ins
Then you need to enable community plug-ins by click enable by the community plug-ins, i already clicked enable so the icon shows Browse for me
Once you click browse, you should end up here:
Best Plug-ins that I use frequently:
Fantasy Name Generator: Automatically creates fantasy names
Dialouge: Allows you to create dialogues in markdown
Example:
Word Count: Better Word Count, Daily Stats, Writing Goals
Proofreading: Red Pen, Dictonary
Editing: Commentater, Readability Score
Longform: Writing a novel? The BEST plug-in,
Templater: Allows you to create templates. It defines a templating language that lets you insert variables and functions results into your notes. It will also let you execute JavaScript code manipulating those variables and functions.
Style Settings: This allows you to create themes, MUST HAVE if you want to change your theme
Plug-ins I don't personally use but many people find useful
Typewriter, Dataview, Tasks, Kanban, Calendar,
You can always search through plug-ins to find ones you want
You just learned the core mechanics of Obsidian! So let's learn some other tips and tricks!
Obsidian Tricks:
Learn Markdown
Learn how to create links
Learn how to add tags to your notes
Learn about Quick Switcher
Learn how to create in canvas!!!!!!
Make use of core plug-ins
Start small - you can make obsidian as complicated as you want AFTER you learn the system
Create notes casually, don't worry about linking or tagging immediately, just write and do the other stuff later (write first, then build your system)
You can use the double [[]] square brackets to create a link to a page - even if that page is not created yet
Learn how to utilize MOC (Map of Contents) - this is a singular page that links back to everything, houses templates, organizes notes, all that jazz
Writing Tips:
Write, write, write! Write thoughts for new chapters, ideas, places, dialogue, write everything
Make it exist, then make it make sense, then make it good
Plan out your next four chapters before writing the next one
Example: Make sure you know the flow of Chapters 1-4 before writing 1, you'll kick yourself in the head when your story flow starts to change or need to make edits to link stuff in further chapters
Pacing: This ties back to planning out your chapters, don't get lost in one moment, keep it moving
Your writing will suck: it's inevitable, don't think about it too hard just keep writing
That's all I have for Obsidian! I hope you enjoy the platform - it's called the king of notetaking for a reason!
There are plenty of other features obsidian utilizes, I would encourage sniffiing around Youtube and Reddit to find them
Authors, writers, word-workers~
Where do you post your original fiction? Is there a recommended site for such things? Do you host your own webpage? Do you post it here?
Or do you hurl it, wailing, in to the distance, allowing it to disperse in to the background ether and become a discomnomulated floatsam upon the sea of your memories?
How write? (No really, how and where and when and why?)
I don’t know about anyone else, but writing platforms make a big-ass difference to the creative process for me. With that in mind, this past year I made the switch to using Scrivener as a writing platform, and I’ve got thoughts.
I’ve been writing since I was a young teen, so I’ve gone through a good number of platforms over the years. My first computer was a hand-me-down iMac in the early 2000s (mine was blue!), good ol’ OS 9, so I cut my teeth on AppleWorks 6. (My god, the memories.) I transitioned to MS Word 2004 at some point when my parents had a copy to share, and that pretty much carried me through for a decade or so, until the death of my first laptop in 2014, at which point OpenOffice (as was) had to step in and save the day… but by then, I was already dabbling in Google Docs.
(The classic iMacs of my youth. Ah, the good old days, when your computer weighed as much as a medium sized human child, and had less than a tenth of the memory of your average already-outdated smartphone.)
I think a lot of people of my era probably went on a similar journey. (Okay, maybe without the terrible Apple programme diversion.) These days Apple’s built-in apps are a joke (seriously, whyfor art thou, Pages?), and subscription based programmes are a hellscape that has become the norm (thanks, Microsoft), so a lot of folks have naturally migrated to things that aren’t stupid and shitty. LibreOffice is a wonderful thing, and I’m sure there are other options out there that deserve a mention.
It’s probably not even close, though, to say that the main contender versus Microsoft Office since the 2010s has been Google Docs. I appreciate Libre, it’s incredibly important and I’m deeply glad it exists, but it still kind of feels like it’s from the early 2000s. There’s a lot of good reasons for that — not bloating things unnecessarily with fancy bells and whistles is good, actually, and it’s being made for free by passionate people who want to do the right thing, not by marketers — but it’s not going to attract people for its polish, or its user friendly interface.
Docs went the other way.
It feels weird now to look at Google and think about how it came across fifteen years ago. Like… I can’t be the only one who remembers when Google was supposedly the good guy. The young, fresh, up and coming underdog who was rocking the boat and sticking it to the lumbering old-tech big-business ‘man’. Excellent work from the marketing team, let’s be real there. Absolute best case, applying the barest minimum of cynicism humanly possible, we can probably look at its steady progression into evil overlordship and say ‘dang, capitalism sucks’ yet again.
Anyway. I’ve been pretty settled with Google Docs for ten-plus years now as a home base for my creative writing. Definitely not a perfect platform as a user experience, but it has an awful lot of advantages that can’t be overlooked. The convenience is a huge factor, here.
Pros include:
Free.
Cross-platform between all Apple, Microsoft, Android, etc devices
Auto-saving, extremely robust backup and history system
Excellent sharing, change tracking, and suggestion systems for collaborating
Comments with user, time, and history tracking
Very handy outlining/header function that lets you navigate your documents smoothly
Cons, however:
It not perfect system. Customisation is a bit lacking, short on font variety, formatting options, etc.
No dark mode without an external plugin
Doesn’t play well with a lot of other apps (copy-pasting to or from another app will generally result in significant formatting jank and other errors)
Slowdown can get pretty bad if your document gets longer than about 20k words, especially on mobile
Threats of AI scraping, plus horror stories about works being deleted or hidden due to automatic spam filtering (and unverified, allegedly automatic adult content detection)
It’s fuckin’ Google, man
Whatever $$$ CrapSuite Microsoft is shitting out these days, they really can’t compete with the pros here. Docs is just smoother and more effective at everything it’s good at, and again, it’s free. The barrier to entry is non-existent, and it has a lot going for it if you’re a creative.
…But those cons, tho. Particularly the last couple.
The last straw for me was another scare going around about Docs’ auto-moderation early last year. It seems to be rare, and the only verified cases appear to be situations where the user was sharing with a large number of early readers or similar and got caught by some kind of anti-spam filter, so it’s unlikely to impact most people, including myself — but the potential of it being an option at all was just too much for me to face. And while no cases of the adult content situation have been confirmed, the TOS really do say no adult (pornographic) material is permitted, so in my case, I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if they decided to pull the plug. We’ve all seen how that’s been going lately with the payment processor vs gaming content hellscape.
So I decided it was time to get going while the going was good.
I’ve been hearing about Scrivener for a long time. I initially knew very little about it beyond ‘it’s by writers, for writers’, but enough people I respect creatively have mentioned using it that looking into it was a no brainer. It’s not free — but to my mind, at $60USD flat fee forever, it’s also very fairly priced, in this day and age of subscription based ‘services’ where a product used to be.
(That’s another con for Docs, really — free as it may be, my works are only safe there for as long as Google decides to keep the service running, and while it’s easy to say ‘oh, it’s making them money, it’ll be there forever’, they’ve shuttered other systems before now. My trust in the live service business model is not at its highest, I’ll cop to that.)
Bonus feature of Scrivener, it’s a multi-device license, so you can use it on more than one computer, so long as they’re the same OS. (If you want to use it on both Mac and Windows, you can buy a bundled version, but unfortunately it’s a lot more expensive, as you effectively purchase two versions with two separate licenses.) Mine is shared with my best beloved, as we both wanted to upgrade and we both have Mac laptops as our primary writing devices. The only downside of that is that there’s no automatic cloud system, so you can’t actually choose to share works easily between devices. Coming from traditional apps like Word or Libre, that’s not a big change, but it did feel like a bit of a downgrade from Docs.
I’ve been using Scrivener for about five months now, and overall, I’m happy with the change.
Compared to Docs, it feels a lot more like a product specifically for creative writing, which makes sense, given its mission statement. On the other hand, it feels a lot less polished, which I think also makes sense, given the obvious difference in development budgets. There have been remarkably few rough edges, considering, but it does have a few flaws I’ve struggled with so far.
Pros:
No ongoing subscription, affordable pricing compared to other competing products aimed at writers
Smooth running and frequent (customisable) autosaves
Great organisational tools for managing drafts, chapters/sections, outlining, research, and external media
Clean, customisable user interface, robust dark mode options for those (like me) that partake
Distraction-free ‘compose mode’, side-by-side splitscreen mode, comments, bookmark system, hyperlinking to jump smoothly between pages, etc, all built in
Ebook composition functionality
Customisable targets and wordcount tracking
Find by formatting (e.g. search for any text in italics, bolded, etc)
A firm anti-AI policy by the creators, so you can rest assured your work won’t be scraped in-app without your knowledge or consent
And many more handy dandy features I’m sure I haven’t even discovered yet
Cons:
One-time up-front purchase (after a very fair free trial — 30 days, but counted by use time, not install time, so if you close the app between sessions, this will last you a good while for testing)
A little visually busy and complicated for newcomers (though there’s a solid tutorial to get you started, and you can get going with a pretty rudimentary understanding and explore additional features later)
No cross-device functionality, and not designed for sharing
…And a little bit of jank that probably comes from being built by a small team. Elaborations below.
Features I’m coming to really appreciate include the filing system — it’s really great to have my whole project in one place for ease of jumping back and forth between sections, and it’s a lot more smooth running than Docs in that regard, with a 550k word project running just as seamlessly as the freshly created 10k word ones, aside from a slight increase in initial loading and final saving times.
I also really appreciate the built in split-window option that lets you have a reference doc and a writing doc up at the same time, or multiple copies of a chapter for comparative editing, etc. I think I’ll definitely start to rely on the daily wordcount function when I’m tracking my output, too.
I do miss some aspects of Docs, though. Some things are apparently just programming issues — on Mac at least, there’s no keyboard shortcuts for some of my commonly used formatting preferences, like alignment (I’m used to being able to hit shift-command-E or R to centre/right justify text, for example, which instead leads to the export menu or nothing, respectively, in Scriv) and strikethrough (shift-command-X on Docs, but sadly persona non grata in Scriv). By the sounds of it, these are Mac-specific issues for the app, so I have no idea if they’ll ever get added. It might sound minor, but it’s a frustrating additional hassle to have to go to the formatting menu for these features, especially in the otherwise very clean and useful ‘compose mode’ that hides screen clutter and is designed to let you focus. I’d love to use compose, but it means I have to stop and switch back to normal, or else open up an entirely separate formatting window and fiddle around with that, if I want to use these key formatting features. Not by any means a deal breaker, but if, like me, you use these functions frequently, it’s a frustration to get used to.
There are also some minor details that I assume are probably just low priority, like the cursor not changing visually when text is regular vs italicised (in Docs and other apps I’ve used, the cursor will slant when italicised formatting is applied), which makes it hard to tell whether it’s applied or not on a new line, after spacing, or on a smaller piece of punctuation like a full stop. You have to check the formatting bar at the top of the screen to tell, and in compose mode, with that hidden, you can’t tell at all unless you start typing.
Speechmarks are also a little erratic when changing from straight to curly, sometimes choosing an unintuitive direction — I haven’t worked out a definite pattern on this one, but it seems to be attempting to guess whether you’re using it as a shortening at the beginning of a word (say, ‘salt ’n pepper’ — sentences beginning with N seem to be particularly susceptible). I suspect this is less of an issue for US English writers, as they’re not as likely to be using single speechmarks as UK/other commonwealth English users.
They’re also oddly slow to change from straight to curly, with much more of a visible delay than I’m used to in other programmes. That wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the aforementioned issues where they often seem to get it wrong, so I don’t always catch the error until I’m several words on and have to go back and sort the problem.
The Docs system of in-document navigation is another feature I really loved and used a lot, as it let me essentially create bookmarks for myself to jump from top to bottom to middle, depending on where I was working at the time. I’d use that to give myself a header, a current working line, a references and/or outlining section to remind myself what I was doing, sometimes an outtakes section for quick chopping and changing while working, and an end of document. This smoothed my workflow so much more than I can describe, letting me move around intuitively and almost instantaneously while I was writing. Scrivener’s binder system has its own perks, but it doesn’t fill that gap, and I’ve been doing a lot more laborious scrolling and searching to find where I want to be since switching over.
But the biggest thing I miss is undoubtedly the sharing, both between my own devices and with collaborators. It’s been a tough off-ramp to travel, coming away from a decade of being able to read and write on my laptop, my phone, my PC, and occasionally even my tablet, interchangeably or all at the same time. That feature’s undoubtedly just not on the cards, given the massive programming scope required for full cross-platform realtime editing compatibility. I’m gritting my teeth and learning to live without it, but it does mean I still have one or two running documents on Docs for my AFK note-taking.
I also really miss the ease of sharing with my proofreader, and the incredibly robust suggestion and comment system built into Docs.
Scrivener does of course have comments, but it’s missing some quality of life aspects, such as the simple visibility of who wrote it and when. You can have that information on your comment when you make it, but only if you remember not to overtype it — and it doesn’t seem to travel well, so comments I made don’t show up with my name on them when my reader views the document on their computer, reverting back to the default message instead. Not the end of the world, but harder to visually distinguish when you’re working through a long list, and frustrating if you have more than one collaborator to work with.
There seems to be functionality for colour coding comments, but I haven’t been able to make it work myself, so I’ll call that unintuitive at best, if not broken. And there’s no comment history or tracking that I’ve found, so if you hit the ‘close comment’ button but later change your mind, other than an immediate undo, you’re SOL.
Likewise, Scrivener doesn’t seem to have functionality for ‘suggesting’ in the same way as Docs at all, and additive to that, there’s no in-built convenient way to share projects or documents for review. I assume the assumption is that you’ll be exporting the document to an entirely different format at certain specified draft stages or some such, but if you’re a regular collaborator, that’s not necessarily how your workflow looks. It also makes it tough to re-import feedback back into the main document, at least for me, so my proofreader’s comments either have to stay in a separate document that I awkwardly shuffle onto the screen side by side, or I have to constantly be updating which file is my main working document — a surefire way to start losing track of editing progress, in my experience.
All that said, there’s definitely a tonne of functionality in Scrivener, and I’m almost certainly missing things that would make my life easier. If you’ve had the same issues and figured out the intended fixes, do let me know, I’d love to iron them out. I guess all I can really say is that no system is perfect, and there’ll be frustrations wherever you go.
I should add that of course I’m very much aware that I’m pitting two opponents of entirely different scales against each other here, and it really isn’t a fair fight in some respects. Google is such a massive entity that nobody can really compete even within its own echelon, and Scrivener’s isn’t even in the same universe when it comes to size and financial backing. What their small team has made is incredibly impressive, and a truly excellent product. I’m mentioning it not because ‘goddamnit why haven’t they done XYZ’, but because the transition was never going to be perfectly smooth, and I think it’s worth talking honestly about the friction points. But I’m well aware the teething troubles are mostly from my end, not any fault of theirs.
I guess the takeaway is that I’m glad I made the move when I did, and if you’re on the fence, I do think Scrivener is worth your money and your time. When I was assessing my non-Google options, it was really a toss-up between Scrivener and LibreOffice, with ‘free’ on one side, and ‘potential upgrade’ on the other. I’m tentatively happy to say that the upgrade thing seems to be true, now I’ve been using it for a while, and I think it’s very fairly priced if you’re able to afford that initial outlay. I can see myself relying on Scrivener for years to come.
NaNo's 50k writing challenge is no more, but there are other communities offering writing challenges for November! Here are the two I know-
StoryForge
StoryForge is an anti-AI platform dedicated to writers sharing their stories with each other and giving each other feedback. They have a 30k in 30 Days challenge starting tomorrow!
KDWC
For female Christian writers, King's Daughters' Writing Camp is a fun community that gets together THREE times a year for a month of setting your own writing goal and working toward it. KDWC is every March, July, and November.
If you know others, feel free to add them onto this post!
Where do you write your stories? Like what apps or websites and like, they are not linked with AI right? I'm just looking for an app or website to write stories and stuff and I can't find one that doesn't have AI related stuff :(
I write mainly write on Tumblr now but I've used Wattpad for years in the past and I also have a side account on AO3!
Idrk about the AI stuff, but I'd say your best bet is probably either Wattpad or AO3 since that whole thing with Tumblr using our creations for AI purposes, but again, I'm not the most intellectual on the subject :) Hope this helps!
As some of you may know, in addition to writing fanfiction, I write original stories as well, mainly fantasy and sci-fi. I was releasing them in serial format on Kindle Vella.
Amazon recently announced that they are closing the doors of the Vella program, leaving me and many other authors scrambling to find places where we could still offer our wonderful and loyal readers our stories.
I'm working on getting them moved to another couple of platforms, mainly RoyalRoad and Tapas, but I've also created a patreon for those who are not interested in either platform.
I'll leave the link here for anyone who might be interested. https://www.patreon.com/theseekerfiles
Wishing all of those affected by this change, either readers or writers, the very best.
And to whomever is reading this, I wish you a wonderful day, because you deserve it!
