1. Make a copy of your original file

You have to do a Save As right away to make your copy of The Writer’s Interface(TWI) into a Master Copy that you never alter. Do it now, please.

2. Name the copy with your own story project title

When you start a new book project here, open the Master Copy, your original file of TWI, in WriteItNow(WIN), and Save As it to your own project: Book Project Name, or whatever. This keeps your original file from us the same as ordered. Remember, we don’t send you files again without a 10 euro processing fee. It’s your own responsibility and it costs us time. We are working writers, not software sellers.

3. Read the chapters through to learn novel structure

Now that you have your own name for your Story Project on a copy of the original TWI file, you begin reading in the file in WIN. Your reading story-concepts in The Writer’s Interface should stimulate your own writer’s imagination about the story you want to write up.

4. Start putting in your own ideas

When ideas come to you, what do you do? If you have read through all the chapters you see the general Chapter Outline. You use this in a general way to plan the specifics of your story. Beginning now, your story ideas should each fit somewhere. You can always change things later when you have a Story-Plan and you review the whole of it.

5. Edit and eliminate TWI text

This means that when you read through a chapter, like the Prologue, you get what it is saying. Those paragraphs you know or are not relevant to you and your story, you cut out. You always have the original to refer to if you want this text again. This takes a lot of words away, leaving for you only what is essential. You can modify what you keep and add to it yourself. This is your Story-Plan for this particular chapter.

6. Put in the story-writing ideas into this chapter

Keep aware how your story content here fits at least loosely with what TWI suggests should go here for good story. You will see as you do this that your story-plan for this chapter starts being dramatically organized. You want this organized story-plan as your platform from which to write your actual chapter.

7. Do research internally

In the chapter you are focusing on will be key story concepts, like character, suspense, almost anything important here. You decide of course. To further give you background, you can read where these story-craft ideas are described in TWI. You can cut and paste relevant text into the chapter you are focused on. Deepen your writer’s knowledge of what you decide should go here. Even if you don’t use but half the ideas, you have a craft ground of being upon which to write dramatic story. And you are learning writing craft in interactive learning!

8. Do research externally

You have writing resources as add-on’s with WIN but you also have the Web. When you describe Place, do you need to research the kind of place first that you want to describe, and so on? Notebook, a mac program, has an important feature. When you find a Web page with information you want, select the text and photos, then from the Mac Services menu choose Notebook and the clipping page you use and Notebook will “suck” in your material for later review. It’s so simple and easy!

9. Write your first draft of your chapter

First make a divider line above the story-craft material you have. Then do a few returns and start your story-text at the top. Just write quickly, keeping in mind the story-craft techniques that you have decided to use.

10. Review your first draft chapter

Look for how to improve the story-craft level and structure, as well as the clarity and impact of the written text itself. Also, when you have story-craft ideas from your text here, link them elsewhere in WIN, like to another character, an event, place, another chapter. This linking is easy to do. Thus, you stay organized by linking.

11. Repeat the same procedure for writing the next chapter

Eventually you will have “eaten up” all the original TWI chapters and their material, and converted these into your story-text. It takes time and work, but what you have in the end is an organized body of writing. You not only can write line-for-line text, but now are a story-planner like the professionals.

Summary: build writing habit

This means the above. Have you noticed how almost every well-published writer always writes the same book, content only being different? They have unconsciously and consciously developed a thorough writing-formula which they refine and use over and over again to produce their best-sellers. Here TWI teaches you the formula:

Writer = Wonderful story idea = Computer = Organizing software = Writer’s interface = Structure and craft knowledge = Craft learning = Unique story plan = Written text = Revised story plan = Revised text = Completed story = Novel or play or memoir = Publishing and distribution = Writer with a following = Affirmation and money = Love of writing!

Writer questions – Are we OK with this? Are we committed? Are we ready to work? Do we have the right support? Where is page 1, 20, 265, The End?

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