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My longform writing workflow

I've been doing a lot of writing lately and have established maybe a bit of a weird workflow, but it has treated me well so far. This is for a sort of (in more ways than one) fiction novel I have been slowly working on, the ends of which draw from a lot of personal experiences but also deep pockets of American history. Without getting into those details too much, I figured it might serve up some good ideas to others who are doing longform writing towards similar goals.

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NOTE: Obviously, these are things that have worked well for me, but some of it is purely subjective. Your Mileage May Vary, and this is my first time working on an extended narrative like this..

1. Backups and versioning with git

I use a git repo for all of my writing with this project. Files are broken up by chapter (well, most of the time) with a .txt file for each, then there are a couple of other .txt files for meta details/notes on the story's characters, timeline, etc. Those are labelled accordingly to seperate them from the actual chapters (you'll see why this is important later). It is very nice to be able to pull my work down to multiple devices via git and to make changes with a verbose-enough history logged, so that I can go back and see when I made a specific tweak, as well as why (as long as my commit dcomments/descriptions are good enough). My workflow for this is basically working from the master branch most of the time, unless there is a very dramatically large change, in which case I will use a new branch and the merge.

2. Taking notes with Anytype

When I suddenly get an idea, I want to be able to jot it down, no matter what device I am near at the moment. For this, I use a local-storage E2E encrypted notes app called Anytype, which is supported on almost every common OS (works great on Linux too). I have lots of bulleted lists, links, images, etc. The sections of my Anytype Page for this are as follows:

A section for:

- Main ideas/concepts

- Other ideas to explore

- Prose/copy snippits (drafts)

- Images

- Research (with links)

Here is the website for the Anytype Application:

anytype.io

3. Recording ideas with signal audio

Similar to what brings forth the jotting of my written notes, an idea might strike where it is not as easy to write something down (it happens during yardwork a lot). In these situations, I use Signal messenger's Note To Self message and record a quick audio snippit from my phone there. This way I can go back to this later in the day when I am at a computer, play back that audio, and capture it as a note in Anytype. I know this is probably silly, but it has saved my bacon a few times already.

Here is the website for Signal Messenger:

signal.org

4. Print it all out to examine flow

Once I have enough chapters cobbled together and I have more of an actual "novel" in my repo, it is good to connect the whole thing together and see how it currently flows. You might remember that I have the chapter files saved as .txt files and all with numeric-leading naming conventions in the anticipated order. I use a quick (and probably quite lame) bash script to tie them all together:

#!/bin/bash

# Create a new output file
output_file="full_book.txt"
echo "" > "$output_file"

# Initialize chapter number
chapter=1

# Loop through each txt file in alphabetical order
for file in $(ls *.txt | sort); do
    # Exclude the output file from the list
    if [ "$file" != "$output_file" ]; then
        # Add chapter header
        echo "CHAPTER $chapter" >> "$output_file"
        echo "" >> "$output_file"
        
        # Concatenate the file content
        cat "$file" >> "$output_file"
        echo "" >> "$output_file"
        
        # Increment chapter number
        ((chapter++))
    fi
done

echo "Concatenation complete. Output saved to $output_file"

From there if I read through the larger work and notice something seems off/misplaced, I can change the order of chapters, move content somewhere else, and so on.

5. Read it out loud

I know, I don't like the way my voice actually sound either, but you can just read this out loud to yourself if you want to! I've found this bit really does wonders for identifying awkward flow and/or sentences within a part of some writing. Maybe this is a bit of an obvious tip, but let it serve as a reminder then.