Reading Cory Doctorow’s “Extreme Geek” article on Locus got me thinking about my own writing tools. I write pretty much anywhere and everywhere. In the real world (because the Internet is obviously not real ;)), I write on index cards or in notebooks (Moleskines and Field Notes are my favorites), always using extra fine black Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball pens. (I can’t stand ballpoints. And I hardly ever use pencils for writing. Not sure why.)
Sometimes I write in WriteRoom on my iPhone. I originally thought writing on an iPhone would be too slow, I should add, and I certainly wouldn’t use it as my main writing tool, but it works fairly well for small bursts here and there. There’s a lot of power in that.
Most of the time, though, I use a computer (go figure). I love typing fast, so I use MacVim (a port of Vim, a geeky text editor). It gets out of my way and lets me fly. I’ve also used CeltX for playwriting and screenwriting (very cool software). I often store drafts in Google Docs as backup and for easy collaboration and feedback.
This is the old Unix geek in me, but I really, really prefer plain text. It’s ultra-compatible with everything (I never have to worry about not being able to read my files later on), it’s lightweight, and there’s no formatting, so I can focus on the words themselves. (Because believe me, if I wrote in a word processor, the designer in me would be fiddling with the fonts and leading and margins every two minutes.)
Typesetting
While I dig plain text, I also love beautifully typeset documents, so I usually paste things into InDesign when I want a nice pretty PDF. It’s worked out okay for me, but I’m trying to move to more of a LaTeX-based workflow because (1) most drafts are just temporary and don’t really need lots of typesetting time spent on them, (2) InDesign files are huge but LaTeX files are small (and plain text!), and (3) it’s geeky. ;)
To that end, I’ve been working on a Perl script called Playwright that takes a human-readable plain text file as input and outputs a PDF via LaTeX (XeLaTeX, specifically, since XeTeX is the best way to do TeX on the Mac) (I use the MacTeX distribution). Here’s what the input looks like:
Tree of Blood Benjamin Crowder Draft 1: July 7, 2008 Scene: The dark attic of an old family homestead. Knickknacks and boxes are strewn about the room, some on a table, with a small chest off to the side. FRANK and MARTHA—brother and sister, each in their twenties—come through the door holding flashlights. MARTHA We’ve got to make sure we’re back before the bus leaves... FRANK [Looking around with the flashlight, poking through boxes. MARTHA watches.] Martha. We’ll be back way before the bus leaves. (Pause.) I’ve got a watch. Don’t worry. MARTHA Mom and Dad are going to *kill* us if they ever find out we came here.
I’m using some conventions here to eliminate the need for markup codes: character names are in all caps, stage directions are in parentheses, the first line of the file is the title and the second is the author, italics are marked with asterisks, etc. This way feels more natural.
Here’s kind of what the output PDF looks like (it’s still in progress, of course):
The best part? All I have to do is type a single command and boom! Instant PDF. Less work on the typesetting end equals more time for writing, and I like that.
Once I get Playwright polished and working the way I want it to (it’s close), I’ll write some new scripts for doing the same thing with fiction (which will be much simpler :)).
Sync
When you write on more than one computer, keeping things synced can be a pain. Enter Dropbox, a cross-platform cloud that makes syncing über-easy. (All you do is put your files in the Dropbox folder and it takes care of the rest.) I’ve been using it for a few months now and absolutely love it. I can start a draft on my iMac at home, tweak it on my laptop at lunch, and then read over it on my iPhone on my walk back home. Very, very cool. You get two gigs free, which is more than enough for writing. Dropbox is so seamless that there really isn’t much to say about it: it just works.
Oh, wait, there is one more thing: the way Dropbox works (your Dropbox folder is just a local folder on your hard drive which then gets copied into the cloud) means that you get nice redundancy without even trying. I’ve got three copies of my writing files now — on my iMac, on my laptop, and in the cloud. (This also means that you don’t have to be online to edit those files. Dropbox will sync them with the cloud when you get a connection again.)
Version control
Writing on the computer is great, but one of the huge disadvantages is that you lose the history: we usually edit documents in place, saving the new versions over the old ones. You can save under different filenames if you want, but then you have lots of files all over the place. Not good. Version control is the answer.
Version control systems (like Subversion and CVS) have traditionally been used by programmers to keep track of source code, but they work quite well with normal writing, too. I use Git. It’s lightweight and feels good, and I also like how it keeps the repository (diving into geekspeak here) in a single directory rather than in all child directories ala Subversion.
What does this get you? It keeps track of your files over time, so if you accidentally delete a passage, you can easily go back and get it. Want to see what your file looked like three weeks ago? A few keystrokes and you’re there.
Now, there is one hitch — you have to manually tell it when you want it to take a snapshot — but as you’ll see in the third point of Cory Doctorow’s piece, he’s got some scripts called Flashbake that can automatically commit your files to Git every fifteen minutes (or however often you want). Flashbake also pulls in more metadata — your three latest blog posts, the weather, your location, etc. — which is cool but not really something I’m interested in at this point.
That’s all, folks
I’m interested in what other people are doing, though, so feel free to drop a comment telling us what you use for writing.
Comments
Totally amazing! Thank you for sharing.
For the past few months I’ve been writing with RTF files in Bean, which isn’t technically plain text. I love Bean’s full screen mode. Perfect distraction-free writing.
I generally type everything in Bean and then move it over to Word to add footnotes and styles and print it out. I could stick it in InDesign, but it’s pointless since my academic papers have to be 12 pt. Times New Roman all the time. Ugh.
Your LaTeX idea, though, has piqued my interest.
Since Bean is so barebones and doesn’t support styles or footnotes, I’ve had to invent my own markup–like ##Heading 1##, ###Heading 2###, %%%Footnote%%%–and run a quick find/replace in Word. The only problem I’ve run into is working with footnotes–I haven’t found an easy way to automatically replace or insert my marked up footnotes as actual footnotes in Word.
Do you know how LaTeX handles footnotes and if it would be worthwhile to set up a TeX workflow to handle my academic writing?
For my most recent two plays, I have used a Uniball Vision pen with the micro tip–black ink–in a composition book for the first draft.
Then I sit at my computer for the second draft. Wordperfect 8.0.
I am not a fast typist, using my two index fingers and my right thumb almost exclusively in the process of creating my next draft. (The thumb is for the space bar.) And my eyes are on the keyboard most of the time. This plodding pace makes it possible for me to keep my mind from outpacing my fingers too much which allows me the luxury of making my second draft a third and a fourth at the same time. It forces me to think out all the implications of my text so that I can discover inconsistancies and locigal leaps that don’t make any sense and other stupidnesses of my addled brain. (Like making up stupid words.) This way, I actually appear to work really fast because I can make a fairly decent play in just about three months. That’s with spending only an hour or two or three or four at a time in four or five sessions.
Fiction–prose–is much slower for me. And, I haven’t done it for awhile. But, I have been in enough plays, and directed enough plays, and written enough plays to know–as I am writing–what I’m writing is going to look and sound like when it’s up on its feet.
As for formatting…old school. Courier in twelve point. With the one inch margins and indented stage directions and blah, blah, blah, your manuscript really does come out to about one minute a page. For some reason, knowing how long I’m going as I write is important to me. Early on in the process I begin to get a sense of how long each play needs to be in order to tell my story. So, page count becomes an issue as I work. Weird, I know. Works for me though.
C.S.: Thanks!
Andrew: I’ve written a few plays in Bean and really love the full-screen mode. (WriteRoom also does that, but now costs money. I think MacVim has a full-screen mode, too…) LaTeX handles footnotes exceptionally well — it’s made for academic writing. (Really.) If you’re doing anything academic, I highly recommend LaTeX.
Scott: Thanks for your comments — the geek in me loves reading about how others write. :)
Throw in your two cents