SarahAyars

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about writing tools and how I get my writing done (when I do it!). I still have a real affection for writing things out by hand, for while I particularly like Moleskines or other A5 notebooks, and sometimes just a stack of lined A4 paper. I hate writing on just one page on a hard surface, but like to have the page cushioned by something underneath. I am sometimes really picky about pens, but lately most any pen that works will do, a change that I find interesting.

But for all that I write much MUCH faster when typing, since I can type at much closer the speed at which I think compared to the relative slowness of writing longhand, so for all the pleasures of longhand, I still write most on the computer. I have a black MacBook and I love it. Someday I might graduate to an iMac/MacBook Air combo for all my writing needs, but for now the 13” MacBook meets my needs for both portability and having it be my only computer.

Like most Mac users, I love pretty, useful software and tend to be impatient with anything ugly or difficult to use. For actual writing, I tend to use a few specific programs.

Scrivener – http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

The first of these is Scrivener. When working on writing projects Scrivener is so useful I’m not entirely sure what I would do without it – probably have a complicated system trying to replicate it! I have tried every piece of writing software I could try without buying it, and Scrivener won hands down. There are so many features here that are superior to the competition and so much that I find really useful. It’s designed to be helpful and to get out of the way and let you write – and it does just that. The corkboard and fullscreen features are the ones I find most particularly helpful, but the prettiness, usability, and flexibility of this program make it worth checking out if you write on a Mac. And Scrivener alone is a compelling reason to consider a Mac if you do any writing! Scrivener is my favourite Mac application, but I do a fair amount of writing that isn’t part of a particular writing project, so it isn’t the only piece of software I use for writing.

Journler – http://www.journler.com/

The second is Journler which I am using to compose this post. Journler is basically what it sounds like – the entries can be any length and contain any media, but they are organised first and foremost by date, and then by categories and tags. I use this application for a lot of things. Primarily, I use it as a type of ‘junk drawer’ application of all the slips of paper I would otherwise have lying about all the time (and still often do anyway). It’s an excellent place for drafts of short things like blog posts, or even emails, for ideas, for keeping things I’ve cut out of other pieces or edited for whatever reason. The limited blog support is enough support for me at this stage (you need to have another program for it to interact with to blog with it, but it’s still quite easy) and I like being able to have everything in one place and have it all so searchable. So for anything and everything that isn’t a big writing project or something I need to print soon, Journler is my solution. I really enjoy the program and prefer it over it’s many competitors for this sort of thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if my livejournal (and deadjournal) history didn’t contribute to my preference for this date oriented system, but there is enough flexibility here, that I don’t feel at all limited by the date system and have found the dates extremely useful when my categorising and tagging get sloppy!

Pages – http://www.apple.com/iwork/

Finally, because these days everyone has to use a word processor from time to time, my favourite is Pages. I am, it’s true, an Apple convert and I do prefer Pages to Word almost universally. It’s pretty, easy, and does everything I need a word processor to do. Because I currently print form library printers, I tend to print to pdf to eliminate any concern about formatting and such, but prefer to do the formatting in Pages as compared to any competitors.

It may seems strange to many that I still consider myself a writer, for all that my most recent publication was in the Asheville School Review in 2002, my senior year in high school (in which they edited my story to a degree I still find offensive) and the only ‘professional’ experience I can put on a writing CV is that I was paid by the University of North Carolina at Asheville to read a story at a local bookstore/coffeeshop called Malaprops. They paid me $30, but it’s something right? A mark somehow that I am a writer. Or was. When I was eighteen.

Then university. I can’t count most of my university work as proper writing, though certainly it’s good that I was writing SOMETHING. I now have a minor in Creative Writing, though I chose an eclectic focus, rather than sticking to either poetry or fiction. I took Introduction to Fiction Writing, Intermediate Fiction writing, and then rather than applying to advanced, I decided to take Writing Children’s Fiction, Writing Creative Non-Fiction/Memoir, and Writing the Young Adult Novel. That’s my five courses needed for the minor. Despite the fact that I didn’t NEED it, I managed to wrangle one more writing course out of the department before I graduated: Independent Study in Writing the Young Adult Novel. This was more spectacular a feat that it seems at first glance, because my supervisor for the independent study and the professor of the Writing the Young Adult Novel does not generally read, like, or appreciate anything in the fantasy genre, which is the genre of the novel I proposed to work on over the independent study. However, being acquainted with the first two chapters of my novel, she liked it enough to take me on as an independent study.

So there it is, a few hardly mentionable publications in high school magazines, one paid reading, a creative writing minor. Oh yeah, and some creative writing award in high school, that I think was just because I was chosen to do the reading for UNC-A, I think, though I could be wrong on that. And some multi-disciplinary award for art, drama, and writing. Not that high school awards amount to much in the grand scheme of things. I attended a few other summer writing courses, wrote 44000 words of a novel I later discarded and started rewriting. I don’t write nearly enough, these days, but somehow I still consider myself a writer. I guess that’s because even when I’m not writing, the love of it is too much a part of me for me ever to not be a ‘writer’ in my own mind, for all that I spend more time reading books on writing now than I spend writing. (And I maintain that essays for other disciplines do not count.)

But for all that I think I write the longest emails in existence, and my solution to twitter is to tweet often (or not at all), since the darn things are so short. Character limits for text messages are maddening. It makes me think of the opposite of writer’s block as described by Alice W. Flaherty in The Midnight Disease which she calls hypergraphia, the overwhelming urge to write. Now I’m not Marquise de Sade in the film “The Quills,” but if I’m not writing an essay, once I get started writing, I do somehow find it hard to stop. I’m tempted to theorise about that and apply it to my non-essay writing as well, but I’m deciding to stop now and go ahead and post this thing, or else I’ll just keep writing.

Besides, I do have an essay I should be working on!