Tools for the writing process

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 27, 2011 at 11:43 AM

I am in a similar situation with regard to the tools in my writing tool box. This is due, I think, to four factors:

1. I’m not a very discipline writer.
2. I fall in and out of love with various software.
3. My writing doesn’t fit neatly into a single category, ranging from press releases to short books.
4. I float back and forth between a Mac (for home and personal use) and a PC (at the office)

For a recent short article I wrote for a newsletter I produce, I had to research George Washington and some of his correspondence during the American Revolution. I gathered the correspondence from the Library of Congress web site, collecting it with Yojimbo. I then harvested that information with Tinderbox, organizing it on a pseudo timeline in Map View. I then wrote the article in Scrivener. So, some of the text went from the web to Yojimbo to Tinderbox to Scrivener.

If I had to write this article at the office, I’m not sure what my work flow might have been, as my tools for the PC are much less settled than on my MacBook. While I’ve been using PersonalBrain extensively to manage my day and keep my work-data organized, it doesn’t lend itself to the workflow described above. It isn’t good at displaying information in a time-oriented way. Nor do I like writing with PB. OneNote and or Zoot might have been involved. And I might have written the first draft with Noteliner.

Thank you for the thought-provoking post, Dr Andus.

Steve Z.