Tools for Writing

It's been a tough couple of weeks writing-wise. Halloween is a banner holiday around here and requires a fair amount of crafting and preparation. As I continue to squeeze writing into the nooks and crannies of my day I am paying special attention to tweaking my process so that I can be as productive as possible with the time that I have. And imma gonna blog about that soon, but today I'd rather talk about some of the various tools, apps and gizmos I  use to write.

I've always been a stationary store geek. There are cups of pens and pencils all over the house and pads of sticky notes secreted everywhere. Then there is my own *special* cup of pens, pencils and highlighters. While not under lock and key, I am very protective of it and whenever I spot one of my writing implements next to hubby's crossword puzzle I switch it out of a normal pencil while muttering quietly to myself... But clearly that's fetish territory. For practical purposes, I take a maximumilist approach and will write anywhere with any implement that comes to hand including pen, pencil, crayon, public terminal on the cloud, laptop, phone (Android), or iPod Touch. I believe you should work wherever you can whenever you can with what ever comes to hand.

Just because I'm willing to write with a sawed off crayon doesn't mean I don't have my favorites. Here are some of the tools I use:

LOOSE LEAF PAPER

For daily freewriting. I've been pursuing the practice of daily freewriting and it was getting gummed up because, I've come to believe, I was doing it wrong. I was trying to accomplish too much with it. I would try to get the next words of my work in progress out or suss out new ideas or work out a revision kink. But true freewriting wants to be - free. So for my daily ten minutes of true freewriting I've moved it out of my journal and switched to loose leaf paper. This writing is a warm up and a place where I write without stopping about anything, without a plan. Mostly it's nonsense and loose leaf pages are easily tossed into the recycle bin. Of course if I happen to blurt out a gem during a session I can always transcribe it into a document or my journal.

STICKY NOTES

I have these little pads at work, all around the house and in the car. This is for noting random thoughts, ideas and inspirations, some people go old school and use 3x5 cards for this sort of thing (e.g. Annie Lamott) but I like sticky notes because they are, you know, sticky. If I'm busy I can gather them up and just stick them on a page in my journal for later integration/transcription.

JOURNAL

This is home base for most of my working stories, notes, research, outlines, freewritten drafts, ideas, quotes. I also try write down my dreams in the morning using a different color ink. I try to put something in my journal every day. I read through it a couple times a month for useful bits and to update the index/table of contents that I keep in the first pages. I'm a visual thinker and while I don't spend a lot of time "arting" my journal up, I do keep a bottle of rubber cement so that I can glue images that I find or print out into the pages.

MY LAPTOP & THE CLOUD

The electronic home for my work. I'll compose stories from my journal notes, or do directed freewriting on the keyboard. I keep everything backed up on DropBox so that I can access it from my work computer if I should happen to get an extra few minutes there. I also use Google Drive for some drafts and projects. For random notes, ideas and web research there's Evernote. I don't pay for any of this as I'm well below their bandwidth limits. Once I finish a story I delete most of the research files and any online drafts. I usually save a couple print outs with my scribbled hand revisions for posterity. That's the beauty of research for fiction. I'm not out to prove anything -- just trying to juice my brain, so I don't need footnotes.

I just bought Scrivener and have started to use some of the writerly features for my longer short stories. I'm going to be using it to write my novel come January. I'll post down the road after I've given it a real test drive. When I am out and about and feel like noting something down with my thumbs, which is my least favorite mode of writing, a fact that just makes me feel old. I use iAwriter on my iPod, which is very straightforward, with biggish buttons and synchs nicely.

So much to write and so many ways to do it. Fun!