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Long ago, when I dreamed of penning my novel, I fantasized about what that future would look like. I would perhaps be a starving artist in the 11th Arrondissement of Paris. Sitting at my desk in a darkened attic, I would be typing away at a heavy old-fashioned typewriter, the lull of steady click-clacking and rhythmic dings as I hit the end of each line would soothe me into the depths of a story.
Sometimes, I dreamed about using a fountain pen that I would slowly fill with dark black India ink and then watch as the ink spilled smoothly out onto the page as I looped and whirled the letters of my story on to the paper.
I think these dreams are part of the procrastinator in me. I keep saying that until I have the right setting or the right tools, I won’t be able to properly write my story. For some tasks, the right tools are important. If you try to paint watercolors on thin paper not designed to soak in the water and the pigments, you’ll end up with a wavy, bumpy mess that doesn’t work for translating your imagination onto the page. Of course, to draw, all you really need is some type of marking tool (ink, graphite, chalk, pigment, even coffee) and some type of receiver of that marking (paper, canvas, the sidewalk, the back of a napkin).
And the same is true for writing. I had started the novel that I’m currently working on in Google Docs. I love the versatility of being able to pick up work that I’ve started on my PC laptop and then work on my Mac or even my iPad. And you can’t beat the price—free.
I have had great success writing my regular blog posts and my shorter fiction stories with Google. The built-in spellcheck is fairly accurate, and I love that it is cloud-based—no more fears that a sudden crash will wipe out hours and even days of work.
As I started working on my novel though, I found that I was looking for a way to quickly view outlines and summaries. The longer nature of a novel made it more important for me to see the different sections that I was working on and root out any early inconsistencies. I wanted to easily see if one chapter worked better at the beginning or perhaps the end. And so I looked into Scrivener. This software tool seemed to have everything I was looking for. It easily outlined your chapters and the scenes within your chapters. It had separate templates for creating character and scene sketches. It had a research section, where you could gather your links and images from your research. And you could easily see summaries of chapters and scenes, allowing you to move them around to where they would best fit.
However, the biggest drawback for me was the lack of an easy cloud option. You could use a third-party storage tool, like Box or Dropbox, but the support for Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive was very poor. This was a dealbreaker for me when it came to drafting the novel. As I was working on the story, I had a greenscreen error scare. There I was, typing away, and my computer froze. I had to do a hard restart, and I held my breath and crossed my fingers hoping that the last hour of work had been saved. Luckily, it had. But I was still too scared to continue. I ended up moving the first chapters of my work over to Google Docs.
There were some other minor drawbacks, like the poor spellcheck functionality, but the lack of a cloud option was the biggest downside for me. For now, I’ll be working on my draft in Google Docs, and I may work in Scrivener when I’m closer to the end and need to start playing with moving sections around.
How about you? What tools do you use for writing? Share them in the comments below.
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