Non-Hiatus, and a Tiny Glimpse into the Writing Process · 9:00am Jan 14th, 2019
I'm back from my hiatus. The Gift of Giving should be tagged as Incomplete once more.
I also feel a bit telly today, so I'll go on and explain something.
Back while posting a chapter for A Volunteer at the Bureau, I accidentally left this at the end:
"2,977**8@^\( ..)
1. Sam visits, maybe catches a glimpse and goes around town.
2. Food truck, sees Arthur and Spaghetti Tree talk after dropping Spaghetti off at Cob after Sam’s dinner. Wants to see him to apologize.
3. Discrepancy? Paid the fine? Where did the money come from?
4. They walk to a food truck and Sam hears of her sympahthies with the HLF because of the PER turning her into a pony."
I guess the list would be self-evident enough. Those are my notes to follow... or, at least I should be following them. Many times, I'm so engrossed in the writing, I tend to forget to look at the notes.
But what about the string of seemingly random numbers and symbols at the top? Let me break it down.
- 2,977 - This is the number of words in the chapter proper. Since I'm using Google Docs and the notes are in the same document, when I check the word count, I'd receive the word count of the whole document including how long the notes were. The ideal is to periodically update the word count here after every writing session to check my progress.
- ** - What I do is I just write, and then after the writing part's done, I go do a first self-editing pass through the part just written. During the writing part, I put a varying number of asterisks after a word or section if I feel that I could've worded it better. The number of asterisks tells me how uncomfortable I feel with the current state of the word or section: one asterisk merely warrants a look at a thesaurus or perhaps I'd made the right choice after all; four asterisks means that I have to change the whole thing up in the first pass.
- 8 - ... I honestly forgot why I put this there.
- @ - Whether in the writing part or the first pass, an @ after a word or section signifies that I have to keep that part in mind when I get to a certain scene or point in the chapter—say, in-chapter foreshadowing, or having to remember a crucial detail a character brought up for later use. If that remembering has to persist through multiple chapters, I just write it down in the notes section at the bottom.
- ^ - This is the opposite of @. An ^ after a word or section tells me that I have to look back through the chapter to edit or modify this orthat word or detail—if, for example, I have a Euraka! moment in the middle of writing but I have to change a few dialogue pieces here and there to make it sound natural. Now, it comes in two varieties: ^, which is what I'd just described, and ^^ (or more, though that's very rare), which tells me that I have to look something up online to make sure that what I'd just written is actually correct term- or function-wise. An example of this would be me writing something about ponies interacting with horses on Earth; I'd put up ^^'s at certain points so I can look up relevant points on how horses are cared for by humans, how horse racing is done, et c.
- \ - This tells me where I'd left off in the writing and first pass parts (though it's much more useful in the latter since I can tell where I stopped writing by looking at the end of the chapter proper). A simple Ctrl + F press and search and I'm back to pick up the slack.
- ( ..) - The two spaces and the two periods are my perennial errors when writing. There are many times when my mind slips and I end up pressing the period and space keys twice in a row without noticing. This serves as a reminder to comb the chapter for those errors.
Since I'd said first self-editing part, there's a second one. This is when I use the Google Chrome plugin version of LanguageTool to spell-check for me and also point out to me some dubious phrasing on my part.
After that, I publish.
I hope that clarifies the mystery of the strange string of characters.
A little update: I've relied on Thesaurus.com for the longest time when it comes to, well, using different words. However, it requires an internet connection, and internet over here becomes spotty once in a while which frustrates me when even a simple word search takes, say, twenty seconds. So, I'm moving on from it to Ultimate Dictionary, which is a sort of dictionary/thesaurus aggregator program thing. The thesauruses I plan to use from there are Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus and Moby Thesaurus which I believe are top-notch for their purposes. The program is also offline, which means almost instant searches for me independent of internet service.
... so, yeah. Sorry to bother you with this. Have a good day! 
Interesting.
These are interesting techniques. I suppose it can be difficult to remember all you want to write when writing a longer story, so I can see why you use that.
And reading about these techniques here, also makes me look at myself differently. I always mourn about it that my memory is so bad (I can literally forget what I did at a certain time on the day before, in less than 24 hours), but when I write a ponyfic, I hardly need notes. I don't make markings in my story to remind me on certain things, instead, just read through it again once the first draft is finished and fix what I see.
I only make extensive notes on a story when it's either one about background ponies about which I am going to write again at some point in the future to remember their personalities that I could read while analyzing their appearances in the show, or, when I need to remember plot points for a story that I am going to write much later (but hopefully soon now).
And I just nearly finished plans for a new one-shot, plans that required a lot of thought processes to adapt certain scenes from my source of inspiration, but I did not write down a single thing. Even though I feel that the story will come out at about 16,000 - 20,000 words (estimatedly), it's all in my head and I remember it just fine.
Somehow, when it comes to writing, my memory is suddenly not bad anymore, but really good instead. I did not fully realize this before.
4996966
I've resorted to using them partially because I had a hard time using the novel-planning program I had. Coupled with the fact that my computer isn't exactly that fast, and you could see where things might've gone.
Then that's good you realized it now! Perhaps it's because you keep thinking about how to form this and that in your story so much, you don't really need to record it. It's kind of like how people forget their car keys—we don't obsess over car keys in our minds, so they tend to be forgotten if we don't take steps to remember them first.