CAMPFIRE writing software SOLVED My Novel Organising Problem! | Using Campfire Write

it's been an interesting couple of weeks a particular problem that i'm having is figuring out how to organize this hole to learn how to structure this entire thing which is a problem all of its own which i'll get it's a lot of stuff to keep just in your brain i need somewhere to put it down so i made a community post what a pickle now i'm not exaggerating when i say that organization has been a massive barrier to me in some of my previous novel writing it's really weighed me down in a lot of ways and maybe you know how it feels i've kind of developed this problem as i've developed my writing so my first novel didn't really have enough plot that it needed any organizing and subsequently wasn't really enough plot to fill out an entire book same really goes for the second novel by the third novel i was thinking about different layers of story and subplots and i was trying to organize characters and build them out and make them feel a bit more real and i started to develop this pattern all the big moments of the story the plot and the themes and the motifs they would all come to me at the start and i'd have them locked in write them down good to go but then as the small details you know those little things that just come to you as your writing that make the story better as those came to me i had nowhere to put them down i didn't know what to do with them i'd write them in a notebook or just forget them and as my stories got more and more complex my organizational deficiency grew along with that complexity i definitely lost ideas that would have added value to my stories just because i didn't have an accessible tidy place to record those ideas but now i think i found the solution to that problem and if any of that sounded at all familiar to you then this could be the solution to your problems too for a bit more context here's something else i said a couple of weeks ago but a few of you also suggested stuff like software and gave me a few examples of the stuff that you use i'm definitely open to software like that in the future i really wanted a place where i could assemble the skeleton of my story and at the same time a place where i could flesh it out and that place turned out to be campfire and i know this is a sponsored video thank you so much to campfire for sponsoring it by the way but i genuinely do think this software is great and it's already solved loads of problems for me i just got back to novel writing after spending years writing short fiction and the single biggest problem i was facing was how to organize multiple strands of story at once to create this bigger narrative until a couple of weeks ago i was stuck in a confusing google docs and post-it notes hellscape of my own invention i needed a way to look at my story and figure out how it all connected and when i started my project on campfire i noticed immediately that it does that and a bunch of other stuff and it's the most customizable writing software that i've ever seen so let me show you my project so this is my project project ventus and that's not the real title of the book by the way it's just a code name i suppose this is the project home page it's the first page you log into when you open campfire and as you can see it's got some useful stats which i really like so i've already spent over 17 hours writing this story just within campfire there's also a note section down here i've just put remember why you're writing in that because that tends to be something that if i forget and i just automatically auto write the quality tends to dip so i need to bring myself back to remembering the purpose of the story i'm trying to tell and it's just nice to see that on the very first page when i just log in all these boxes you can resize and move about however you want it's customizable so if you've watched any of my other videos i talk about the fact that i'm a visual person all the time and the way i approach story is kind of visually really and luckily for me campfire really supports that in a big way as you can see i've got this kind of logo thing that i put together from some stock photographs and a typeface that just like as a nice banner to the opening of the project you can customize quite a lot about how the software looks to suit your particular project in fact you can apply a theme that covers all the fonts and all the colors and the backgrounds and stuff for every project that you do so i've created one for project ventus so i'll put that on now so just go to details and theme and i change it to project ventus so as you can see the fonts and the text color and the background and stuff has changed this actually matters quite a lot to me i really like to feel immersed in whatever project that i'm working on and just to be able to create an environment that represents my story is really useful for inspiration for me but of course it's not just about how the software looks it has to actually help you write that's the most important thing all of these options down the left-hand side these are the things that help you write and over the last couple of weeks since i started using this software it's been some of the smoothest and most productive novel writing ever for me it's helped me realize that there are a lot of aspects of writing that i've always just internalized for some reason the main one being characters in my previous novels i've thought a lot about characters you have to but that was the extent of it i thought about them i didn't really get anything down i didn't really collect any information about them i've always tried to think up a floor for my character that matches in with the narrative of the story but the thing is novels take ages to write they take a long time so some of that nuance and some of those little ideas can get lost along the way sometimes the shine went off things before i even had a chance to use them just because i didn't have them in front of me the other day i used campfire's character element to actually put something down about my character and capture all that information and at the risk of sounding a little bit dramatic it helped bring those characters closer to life for me that's what it felt like anyway so the most striking thing first of all is probably that you can add images and a lot of writers i think would use actors for this i just didn't think to do that i just grabbed a stock image but you definitely can and because everything in campfire is customizable i went down here and i added a bunch of different elements to this character profile that i thought would best fit and help me to write my character a bit more accurately so i added this plain text box essentially and i've called it history and i'm just going to put the history of my character in this box it's actually already there but i've just deleted it for now because there's some inaccuracies in it and i want to make sure if i'm posting it anywhere that it's actually up to date and relevant for the story but other than that there's a physical traits box and as you know well you may know if you've watched any of my videos about description or novel writing or flash fiction i don't really describe the physical traits of my characters ever all but i left that panel in there just because i know so many people really love that they love to read it and they love to include it in their own writing i'm very much in the minority by just not engaging with character description very much at all but it's there anyway so you can add in whatever physical traits you want but what really impressed me about the character section when i first started looking at this is the the attributes thing it's just extensive so obviously you can have the name and their age and that origin country all that stuff but there's also all of these different attributes and you can change the values for each of these so you can build a character however you want the cool thing about this i think is that i would never have thought about competence specifically as relates to my character it's just kind of abstract you kind of tend to think in choices would they do this would they do that but with this you can actually add an attribute for how sympathetic someone is and that can help inform your story i think i've also added a box here for fears and flaws you have to have a fear and you have to have a flaw for every character they need to be vulnerable and they need to be human and that's fears and flaws tend to make that so i've put a few things in there and then i've got space elsewhere in here in the history section for example to draw on that a little bit more and just flesh it out i also added another custom text box at the bottom for personality type but my approach to that i'll talk about a bit more in my next video but essentially instead of all this information being kind of abstract and known to me in a vague way but not written down anywhere now it's all here when i need to think about how a character would react to a situation or what they're most likely to do on hearing bad news i can go through and if i had set all these attributes which i haven't for laziness then i'd have something to go off i'd have something to inform that decision we'll know what it's like to look at a blank page and really anything that stands out and can give you a little leg up to carry on with your story i think is is great to have and essentially this is just going to help me stop forgetting things which is really valuable obviously there is even a separate tool just dedicated to creating an arc for your character which is further down here imagine having all of this information at your fingertips without having to remember it all or flick through notebooks for it there's a place dedicated for it you know exactly where you're gonna find it takes just a few seconds to open it up campfire is browser-based so you write your story into it and it gets saved privately server-side at campfire that means you can open and close your project on multiple devices and just carry on where you left off that's perfect for me because i spend the majority of my writing time at this desk on my windows pc but of a morning i do generally tend to wake up grab my chromebook and just carry on writing while i'm feeling productive and not too tired what i like about the fact that it's browser-based is that there is no saving there's no version 1.2 final version dock there's none of that crap it just saves and works and how it works is really straightforward the biggest problem i had with project ventus and i've talked about this at least 10 times in the past couple of videos is those separate strands of story that i was trying to write simultaneously or in parallel with each other i needed to know how to actually set them out on the page the system i had before was a google docs document where i would write a chapter then switch to a different strand of story and then switch to a different one after that and then by the time i came back to go into the first one it was buried some way down the page and i'd have to bring it back and paste it underneath but then if i did that how do i know what order i want the chapters to go it was a nightmare essentially is what i'm saying it was a nightmare campfire's built-in manuscript feature makes that really easy you just create a new chapter and then you write in it and then you get a list of all your chapters you can just move them about exactly wherever you need them to be it's simple you can write straight into campfire as you would with any other writing software obviously as you can imagine but one thing that i like about it is this navigator panel which allows you to bring up separate elements of your story just as a quick reference instead of having to go to the actual page front come out of your writing stop what you're doing check something make your way back and carry on writing you don't have to lose your train of thought or your little burst of energy with this navigator panel you just open it up and check something oh there's the history of my character that's the thing i wanted to know about you just go back to writing you don't lose any of the flow i really like that in my last video i talked about project ventus and said that it was probably sci-fi and i was having a hard time figuring out if that was really the case and then i had a funny realization this week i was looking at my new bookshelf which my wife has kindly organized for me beautifully thank you haley and i realize just how much sci-fi i actually own and read so probably makes sense that i'm writing a sci-fi story and if i'm gonna write sci-fi then i'm gonna have to learn some stuff quite a lot of stuff i was a humanities kid english was always my best subject science not so much i just got by but luckily within campfire there's a research element too here for example i've made a research entry just about the setting of one of my research bases and the neat thing about this is you can actually add links to external websites and it will pull the contents through for you and then you can tidy it up a little bit and you have all the information that you need right there in the research documents so i can keep track of everything that i need to learn about and i can add things for a later date when i know i need to come back and learn a bit more about what i'm writing that's really useful and i don't think it's just the research element that helps you with genre-specific stuff either it's all really friendly to sci-fi but i think if you're writing something like fantasy it has a lot of stuff that you might need you can use campfire to create your own languages or religions or species and keep track of your magic system there's so much stuff you can create all within one piece of software but what if that stuff doesn't really apply to you what if you don't need any of that well in that case you can just go up here and you can just filter the elements that you don't need so if i didn't need magic or species for example i just filter them out and then they disappear from this list but to go a step further what if you're like me what if you'll never need to plan a magic system what if you'll never need to create your own religion or your own language then there's all this functionality within campfire that you're never going to take advantage of well i said that campfire was customizable and in fact it's modular if you don't want to use the species element for example then you don't have to use it and you don't have to pay for it you can outright buy the software for life or you can get an annual subscription or you can get a monthly subscription but whatever the case you don't pay for the stuff that you don't want to use personally i think that's great it makes the software less bloated and more useful and more accessible my other favorite elements or the ones i found most useful in my project so far are first of all the locations tab and i've used that to create a page for each of the research bases that form the setting of my story so i just created this image yes in ms paint of the main floor plan for one of my stations and i've added a little bit of atmosphere by putting in some snowy photos that kind of thing here i've also used a box to link the characters from that particular storyline so that i know which ones they fall into and speaking of characters and how they relate to each other i've also used the relationships element to create this web of characters for my story so you can see the white lines connect who knows who or who it interacts with who while the coloured lines represent each strand of the story in each different location but most of all above all others the element that has answered my organizational prayers is the timeline element i've been looking for something like this for quite a while i mentioned it in my community post recently and in my last video i banged on about it a bunch but i was looking for a place where i could create plot points and move them around and reorder them and connect them in different ways to see how the story just i wanted a place to visualize the entire story and timeline does exactly that here's my timeline those strands of story that i keep banging on about here they all are these horizontal bars are each of the strands of story and this one this one and this one are all the comings and goings at each of these research bases and the other three are just separate branches of the story that might be less frequently seen um but no less important to the story each box within that is a chapter or a plot point these are designed or they're called events in the software and they're designed to be exactly that plot points bullet points beats of the story whatever you want to call them now i might have come at this slightly unconventionally because what i've chosen to do is make each of these points actually a chapter from the story and those chapters are linked to the manuscript feature so if i zoom in a little bit we'll see that this one for example links to that document there the dotted white line represents time essentially and how these um events or chapters in my case link into each other chronologically the coloured lines i just used to help me keep track of the different regions and because there's a line between them you can see there's one further on if you're looking at a certain point so if you're looking for something that helps you to figure out where it is you can just grab chapters and slide them around and the ability to do that has made a massive difference to me and how i'm able to visualize this story if i need to add another chapter for example i just add an event and then i can move it anywhere on the timeline that i want and it just fits into the story overall it just really helps me monitor the pattern of this book which is something i haven't been able to do before with previous novels i'm making great progress with this book and i'm finding it just really fun to sit and write every day i can't help but work on it and i think i'm doing a decent job at being accurate to what i want the story to end up being i'm already looking ahead to things i want to do with it at the end of the story and how it's all going to end up looking but i'm trying not to rush through it i want to write it purposefully kind of slowly really so i can keep an eye on the overall quality of the writing but the ending of the story brings me to one thing that i think could be improved about campfire and that's what you do when you finish your story if you're looking to send your novel to a friend or a literary agent or an editor then you need to be able to export your work and while campfire does have an export feature and you can export to docx or pdf or html any of that stuff you can do that however you can only do it chapter by chapter there's no option to export the entire manuscript in one go so while it's completely possible to do that and you could just export your chapters like that and then put them together elsewhere i think the better solution right now is to just copy and paste them into another document just so that you've got it all in one spot for the export tool i'd love to see a list of the elements in your project that you could tick or untick depending on whether you wanted them to be included or not in your export and to export it all at once in bulk along the same very specific line another feature that i'd love to see is the ability to print your manuscript because when i finished my first draft of anything i give it immediately to my wife unfortunately for her and she likes to look at things on paper so she can write me encouraging little notes in the margin so having the ability to print that would be really cool as well having said that i would of course have to finish the book first overall though i am genuinely impressed with the the detail and the functionality within campfire it has no doubt about it improved my workflow and increased my productivity when it comes to writing i definitely encourage you to have a look at campfire there's a link in the description of this video if you want to check it out there's a free version to look at and there's just so much to it that i didn't even realize i needed and i've barely scratched the surface in this video of what the program can actually do i'm well underway with this book now and it's really starting to feel alive and i think the reason for that is that i've recently discovered a way to almost have characters make their own decisions within the story it's this one thing that i never considered doing before but i think it's going to add a load of depth to my characters really easily so that's going to be my next video so don't forget to subscribe if you don't want to miss that thanks so much for watching as always and happy writing

Channel: Kieren Westwood

Views: 18,750

Keywords: campfire writing, campfire writing software, campfire writing review, novel planning campfire, novel planning solution, novel organisation, novel planning, novel organising, novel writing vlog, writing software for writers, writing software for windows, best writing software, best writing software for authors, creative writing software, campfire writing tutorial, campfire write, campfire novel planning, how to plan a novel, how to organise a novel, kieren westwood writing

Id: pJZqoniR1Ak

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2022