The song (which you can find on their 2014 album, Westward Ho!) takes a similar scenario to the one I fantasised about all those years ago and follows it through to its (logical?) conclusion. But the memory of that afternoon has always stayed with me, and it’s what I think of now when I listen to my favourite song of the past year, ‘Crackington’ by Police Dog Hogan. At the end of the weekend I returned to London and my workaday existence. How would it be if I chucked in my dull job in London and came down here to live with her? She would paint and I would write, and we would drink in country pubs and go on long walks and be part of an artistic community…Īll complete fantasy, of course, not least because she already had a boyfriend and didn’t give me a second glance. Sitting there in the sunshine in her garden, surrounded by flowers and artsy knick-knacks, I had a brief glimpse of an alternative life. It was a year or so after their wedding, at which I’d developed a bit of a crush on one of the bridesmaids, and we spend an idyllic afternoon at the cottage where she was living a bohemian existence in a tiny village in Somerset. Years ago, I spent a Bank Holiday weekend in the West Country with my best friend and his wife. “All my friends said ‘I wish that I was you’ StoryMill simplifies the process, and I find it very satisfying to use. None of this would be impossible using ordinary word-processing software, of course, but it would be more cumbersome, requiring much annotation and cutting and pasting of text. To kickstart my writing in the past couple of months, I’ve taken a sub-plot and followed it through to its conclusion I’ll decide as I go along where the scenes that make up this sub-plot fit in the bigger narrative.
#Storymill park how to#
If I reach a point in the narrative where I’m not sure how to proceed, I simply skip ahead and write a scene from further on where I do have a clear idea of what I want to achieve. The real beauty of this, for me, is that it mitigates against writer’s block. This feels as if speeds up my progress there will be chapters where I can simply slot in pre-written scenes and add any necessary linking text. Each scene includes a ‘Notes’ tab and a ‘Text’ tab, so it’s easy to leave reminders for yourself of what you intended the scene to consist of.Īs of today, my menu includes 42 scenes, of which I’ve written 31 and assigned 26 to chapters. With StoryMill, I started by creating the scenes I knew I wanted to include, playing around with the order and then piecing them together to create chapters.
I’ve always thought of my plots in terms of a succession of key scenes, linked together with whatever is needed for the flow of the story – exposition, interior monologue, narrative links and so on. It’s this last feature that I’ve found most useful. StoryMill fits well with my methodical mindset, with the capacity to create, sort and label characters, chapters and scenes.
#Storymill park software#
I wrote my first three novels using basic word-processing software (Word, mainly), but when I started this one, I did some research to see if a package designed for writers might suit my way of working. (And no, I’m not receiving any enticement to endorse it.)
It’s called StoryMill, and I can highly recommend it. The reason I’ve been able to pick up where I left off after a prolonged period when I did no work at all on the novel is the software I’m using to write it. Finish a first draft, I mean – let’s not go crazy. As I’ve doubtless written before, it’s more a case of life getting in the way – work mainly.īut more recently, I have been working on a novel (my fourth, in case anyone’s counting), one that I started way back in 2010, and that I’m determined to finish this year. It would be nice to be able to say that the reason I haven’t written anything on this blog for the best part of a year was that I’ve been too busy writing a novel.
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