Occasionally there are posts here asking about software designed for writing either nonfiction or fiction. My son writes both and I finally was able to corner him and ask what he uses:

MS Word (on both the MAC and PC) and NOTHING ELSE, except, perhaps, some notes on paper. He said that using special software requires learning new commands and operations, which slows down the writing process.

He creates a separate Word file for an outline of the document (book, article, etc.) and for each character or topic, as needed. (I assume he ALT-TABs between them.) He said that publishers require each chapter to be a separate file, in his case a separate Word file. He also said that each publisher has its own codes that it requires an author to use to indicate special formatting, such as italics. He adds these codes last, but to make this process easier, he uses Word's WISIWIG formatting as he writes, and often will enter a special symbol just before specially formatted entries so he can find them easily using the FIND function. (He searches for his symbol and then enters the appropriate publisher's code(s).

I'm not sure, but expect that if he had to include a large bibliography, he still would use Word.

An interesting and unresolvable issue - except on the basis of "horses for courses", "diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks", "each to his own", I suspect.

One can happily waste an immense amount of time finding, learning and testing book-writing software, when one should be writing. This is a hybrid sub-species of the Crimp and Procrastination viruses, with added bragging rights: "I use X, so I can call myself an author!" And all the while there could be a very obvious answer to the quest staring one in the face: Microsoft Word.

For me, versions of MS Word from a few years back seemed to be hugely bloated but nevertheless deficient as outliners, couldn't smoothly enable re-arrangement of chunks, didn't hold research as well as writing, lacked desirable long-form writing features such as custom meta-data and, worst of all, sometimes choked unpredictably on longer documents. There used to be several guides on the Internet to help one strip down Word for long-form writing, which essentially meant abandoning most of its features. And even then one feared a crash that would destroy one's work.

The version of Word I now use occasionally is 2004 for the Mac, which is still a bit of a pig. But I'm told that the latest version for the Mac is much better, and the latest version for Windows is very good (although of course there remain desirable things it can't do). And of course, Word does have one feature which as far as I know is better than anything comparable in similar applications, and that is "Track Changes". That feature, plus the insistence of publishers on receiving manuscripts in .doc or docx formats make Word almost indispensable for editing and polishing of books and similar projects, in my view.

Future versions of Word will probably incorporate some of the features that its upstart rivals in the book-writing field already have. Of course those could make it even more bloated. But I think it will still be worthwhile for authors and would-bes to keep a close eye on it to see if MS can come up with a real winner for them.

With respect to long form writing, that doesn't seem to be a problem for my son, as in the novel he is writing (over 400 pages) he still has to have a separate file for each chapter.

The advantage of a single pane outliner in allowing one to move things around I fully agree with. As I said, I once used GrandView for everything. (I subsequently used NoteMap until it permanently lost a large chunk of text. Now, I occasionally use Inspiration.)

As to Word bloat, I don't know what version of Word my son uses (I'm still using 2000), but I expect that he just ignores what he doesn't need or want.

The nonfiction book my son authored was on producing video games. He actually was the lead author. The second author was more of a reference for information my son didn't know--my son would meet with him weekly with an outline of questions in hand to garner information that my son didn't already know. So there was relatively little research in the academic sense. (My son had been in charge of the development of a $35 million video game until the "Crash" caused his company to lose its financial support.)

As a copywriter (and translator), I'm sympathetic to the KISS argument: you just want to get words down, you don't want to faff about with lots of complex commands, structures etc.

But I do find it's good to be able to scatter words around so you can gather them together again afterwards. Which is what led to my interest in outliners in the first place - you can have lots of fragments in an outliner, but you can restrict the ones you work with and/or move them about into more coherent groups as you start to isolate the main traits of a specific concept.

Which means that increasingly, I've looked for outliners or similar software that use columns or other side-by-side metaphors, so you can easily compare stuff, move it around, delete/expand it etc. But columns are also rather restrictive.

Word, for me, just doesn't hack it: it's the last link in the chain, the final output engine - if indeed I use it at all.

For shorter stuff, I generally use TreeSheets (www.treesheets.com) - especially now that the Wonderful Wouter has added folding - or OpenOffice Sheet (which is far more powerful than Excel when used as a word processor). Both programs allow you to drag stuff around all over the page.

Increasingly I also use stuff on my brand spanking new iPad, and the two things I use most often are Numbers (which I've already eulogised elsewhere) and OmniOutliner (which has just been released for iPad). I've also experimented with Circus Ponies Notebook on iPad, but it's still hampered by a number of minor but annoying stability issues. I also occasionally use Pages, which has many of the same strengths as Numbers (but doesn't allow you to run multiple worksheets simultaneously, which is where Numbers definitely wins out). The main benefit of both Numbers and Pages is the ease with which you can create text boxes, then drag them around on the page - the Word text-box approach is horribly clunky by comparison.

Once I've got something together I'm happy with, I'll import it into Word - if I really have to. For the last couple of creative projects, however, I've exported my ideas directly out of Numbers (to PDF) for forwarding to the client. In fact I also posted the end-results for the last one up on iWork.com, which was an interesting departure.

I confess that I do use a keyboard with my iPad, so you could argue that I'd be better off with a MacBook running the full versions of Numbers and/or OmniOutliner. And I wouldn't entirely disagree... except that as a creative writer, it's enormously useful to be able to drop what you're doing and jot down a brilliant idea that's suddenly occurred to you, and that's where the iPad wins out - instant on, instant off. Come to think of it, it's what I used to do on my ancient Packard-Bell handheld PC (still running, although it's now over 10 years old). I actually preferred Pocket Word (basically equivalent to Windows Write) to the full version of Word, because it's much faster and simpler (and a couple of small MS plugins give you wordcounts and spelling).

My other favourite on the PC is The Guide, which is one of the simplest, neatest two-pane outliners of all.

But I'm a sucker for new software (you may have noticed!), and I use plenty of others like Smereka TreeProjects, Zim, UV-Outliner, NoteCase, AM-Notebook and EssentialPIM, depending on what I feel like and what structures the project takes on. EssentialPIM, for example, has unrivalled support for HTML export - it's spectacularly good for storing/outputting the results of previous work, especially translations.

All of them do have this in common, however: they're relatively simple, and don't rely on complex tagging/categorisation/linking/filtering to work fast and well. Until the ultimate semantic application has emerged, such simplicity - coupled with a reasonably competent search function - is (for me) the best option. Things like tags, categories, filters etc. are nice (I love them in ListPro), but can also act as a constraint.

Writing vs. info management - it's a really tricky balancing act!

Exceptionally interesting topic!

As Hugh says, different strokes for different folks. But I'll take that one step further in that I use different software solutions depending on what I am working on. I lead a dual computer life. In my day job I mostly write shorter pieces -- catalog copy, press releases -- using a Windows (XP) PC. Here I often find the clean and simple interface of the plain-text editor NoteTab is the best choice. It has fewer distracting features, and since most of my copy is meant to go into a design application like InDesign, it is better to use plain text. I don't need to track changes in most cases. Sometimes I do need to do some brainstorming or structuring before hand, and I'll do that in Brainstorm or NoteMap. I don't need to do much if any research for these projects, other than extracting information from author bios, or book proposals from these authors. I organize that information in OneNote and/or PersonalBrain (I really should pick one or the other of these two excellent programs, but they each have different strengths). I don't suppose any of these applications would technically be called "software for authors." Once the Windows version of Scrivener is out of beta, I'll give that a try. I suspect, however, it is more application than I need for this work.

In my free time, I do more fun and, hopefully, creative work, using a MacBook. This work tends to be longer and require genuine research. In this venue, Scrivener is invaluable. The research that I grab from the web goes first into Yojimbo, just because it is easy. Depending on the complexity of the writing, I may use Tinderbox as a place to brainstorm, plan and initially structure the work before bringing it all into Scrivener, where I usually find myself deleting and adding material as my thoughts on the project change.

I'm grateful for these tools. But, if I didn't have them, only had Word, I'd find a way to make that work. I've probably written this before, but I got through college using an old Royal manual typewriter and Corrasable Bond paper. If someone had given me a computer with no software on it but NoteTab, I would have been ecstatic. The difference between a typewriter and even the simplest of software editors is like the difference between monks hand-copying books, and Gutenberg's printing press. By comparison, it is a much greater leap than NoteTab to Word, by miles!

Steve

The only big mistake I made in this area was trusting single Word files to hold large chunks of text (tens of thousands of words). The scars still remain. Don't do it.

Using a different Word file for each chapter can make sense, particularly if you use a nice organisational tool such as Chapter by Chapter (http://sites.google.com/site/sebberthet/chapter-by-chapter

I think Scrivener is a more elegant solution. I've played with the Windows beta, and it's promising. You can export finished work to Word docs for sending to editors etc. I'm also starting to use Noteliner for some things (http://www.noteliner.org/i/Main.html

For shorter pieces of writing, I tend to use WriteMonkey (http://writemonkey.com/ Like Steve, I'm also a fan of Notetab.

And also like Steve, I'm also old enough to remember a very different way of working -- while at college, I was given permission to use the college's pre-PC "computer facilities" to write a paper. It was a dumb terminal, attached to a mainframe the size of a small house. All formatting was entered in code (as would become familiar in later years using DOS word processors). It was agony...

Atlantis Word Processor is very good for writing, exporting to EPUB, and has a built in projects module. http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/

Looks pretty cool, I must say.

JohnK wrote:

The only big mistake I made in this area was trusting single Word files to hold large
chunks of text (tens of thousands of words). The scars still remain. Don't do
it.

Using a different Word file for each chapter can make sense, particularly if you
use a nice organisational tool such as Chapter by Chapter
(http://sites.google.com/site/sebberthet/chapter-by-chapter

----------------------------------------------------
I absolutely agree with JohnK on NOT creating long Word documents. Too great a chance that a corruption in one part of the document will corrupt the entire document. This actually happened once when I was at the FAA. An editor who was compiling different sections of a document written in Word by different contributors suddenly found that the entire document was corrupted because corruption in one section had spread to the entire, combined document. She ended up retyping the entire thing.

Another danger is emailing a Word document as an attachment. I once emailed a Word document to an editor two floors up. Usually, she made no changes, but this time she emailed it back with numerous changes. I asked her why and she said she hadn't made any changes. The email did!!! I had to reread the entire document and fix all of the changes (corruptions) as there was no pattern to them. Thereafter, I hand-carried each chapter to her on a floppy.

Even when I completed a large technical report, I never put it in one file. I printed each chapter separately. (This was before our print shop had the capability to print directly from an electronic file.) I ALWAYS kept one or more "pristine" backups of each chapter, just in case of a disaster.

-cassius

I'm sure there's a simple division here between fiction and non-fiction writers. Fiction writers may be able to get away without using MS Word (although round-tripping documents with an editor without "Track Changes" may be difficult). Non-fiction writers are much more likely to need all the bells and whistles that Word can provide (or may even need to go as far as a desktop publisher such as InDesign). Self-pubbing may also make demands for formatting and layout that only Word or something like it has available.

By the way, for Mac users there's an upgraded Word replacement just launched:http://www.nisus.com/pro/ Nisus has a long and respectable Mac history, and as far as I know has never been accused of corrupting lengthy documents. On the basis of a quick skim, its latest version appears to have all the features for final formatting and polishing that an author might need, including "Comments" and "Track Changes".

Hugh wrote:

I'm sure there's a simple division here between fiction and non-fiction writers.
Fiction writers may be able to get away without using MS Word (although
round-tripping documents with an editor without "Track Changes" may be difficult).

I'm sure there are alternatives that allow one to focus more on the actual writing. Though I don't write fiction, I've seen tools like PageFour http://www.softwareforwriting.com/ that can take Snapshot Copies of work in progress. And with disk capacity being cheap these days one can afford saving versions as separate files.

Non-fiction writers are much more likely to need all the bells and whistles that Word
can provide (or may even need to go as far as a desktop publisher such as InDesign).

I know academics that swear by Tex/Latex and can't even imagine writing in a WYSIWYG environment.

A problem I see in Word is that anyone can use it, without having the slightest idea of what constitutes a good layout. I remember a professor I worked with, who produced an official report of brilliant content, laid out in Comic Sans MS font.

Just out of curiosity, why does your son have to submit each chapter as a separate file? I'm a fiction writer myself with an agent and I've never heard of a requirement like this. The only reason I can think of for why they would want him to do this is if they were running his novel as a serial, chapter by chapter.

The standard novel manuscript is very basic and I've never had any problems with creating long (100,000+ words) manuscripts in Word 2003. Granted, Word is bloated and you don't need ninety per cent of its features, but this is a non-issue. And the only time I've ever seen Word crash is with extremely complicated documents using master-documents and sub-documents and so on, none of which applies to writing fiction.

After screwing around with almost every kind of "novel-writing software" out there, I've decided that they're completely unnecessary and more trouble than they're worth. Writing novels involves creating lots of different files for research, outlines, etc., but I've never found that I have to have all of these files instantly available. If I have files I need to reference while I'm writing, I just print them out. Problem solved. And the novel-writing software I've seen (Scrivener for Windows, for example) almost always uses RTF format, which means you have to do a lot of reformatting when you're finished. Why bother? Just write the thing in Word and be done with it. (The Scrivener for Windows Beta I tested has a "Standard Novel Template" you can use for exporting your copy to Word, but it doesn't work. A flaw like this is so basic that I have to wonder what all these writers who have been giving the program rave reviews are actually doing).

The best purchase I've ever made to increase my writing productivity wasn't software at all, but hardware, namely a second monitor. You can put one draft (or an outline or whatever) up on one monitor for reference and work on the manuscript on the other. It works great. As for keeping my files organized, I just use Windows Explorer. I create a master folder for the book, then subfolders for research, outlines, etc. No problem at all.

OMFG, who remembers Waterloo Script? We had to schlep down to the engineering campus to pick up the printouts, which came out of a laser printer the size of an SUV, which you could see in a separate glassed-in enclosure. The staff put them in ziploc bags and pushed them through a window. What a hoot!

Great topic. Thanks to JohnK for the link to Chapter by Chapter. It looks useful. I also want to plug (again) Edwin's Writing Outliner for Word, which is very nice.

Cheers,
David (critStock)

JohnK wrote:

And also like Steve, I'm also old enough to remember a very different way of
working -- while at college, I was given permission to use the college's pre-PC
"computer facilities" to write a paper. It was a dumb terminal, attached to a
mainframe the size of a small house. All formatting was entered in code (as would
become familiar in later years using DOS word processors). It was agony...

I'm amazed at how many writers (primarily fiction writers) end up looking for minimalistic, "distraction free," full-screen word processors like Dark Room or Zen (is that what it's called?) and even do things like add "realistic typewriter sound effects" to re-create the typewriter experience. If that's what they're looking for, they should just go back to working on real typewriters. I've been doing this a lot myself lately, just to get away from all the distractions involved with working on a computer. I like manuals, but at the moment, I'm working on an old IBM Wheelwriter III, the best electric ever made, in my opinion. There are ZERO distractions with a typewriter. It can be quite a jolt to the system after working on a computer for years, let me tell you.

Gary Carson wrote:

Just out of curiosity, why does your son have to submit each chapter as a separate file?
I'm a fiction writer myself with an agent and I've never heard of a requirement like
this. The only reason I can think of for why they would want him to do this is if they were
running his novel as a serial, chapter by chapter.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Both the nonfiction, semi-technical book my son wrote and the novel he is currently finishing were contracted for by the publishers. They came to him. They wanted each chapter as a separate file. I don't know why, but it might have been to speed the publishing process by allowing the editors to work as the manuscripts were being written.

A problem he has sometimes encountered is that editors change things they don't understand and their changes are incorrect. (By the way, rumor has it that some editing work is now being farmed out to India.)

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Hugh wrote:
>I'm sure there's a simple division here between fiction and
non-fiction writers.
>Fiction writers may be able to get away without using MS Word
(although
>round-tripping documents with an editor without "Track Changes" may be
difficult).

Three words: footnotes, footnotes, footnotes.
Non-fiction writers of the scholarly subspecies cannot get by without them.
I love simplified writing environments, but they never seem to implement footnotes. Incidentally, my understanding is that RTF has footnote capabilities by design; but none of the RTF editors/writers I have come across (or RTF-based simplified writing environments) seems to implement this feature. Can anyone more knowledgeable shed any light on RTF and footnotes?

A problem I see in Word is that anyone can use it, without having the slightest idea of what constitutes a good layout. I
remember a professor I worked with, who produced an official report of brilliant content, laid out in Comic Sans MS font.

Ah, Comic Sans: the joke of fonts and font of jokes. CTRL+A and change the font. Problem solved. When word-processing first became widespread, my students often handed in papers with motley arrangements of font styles and sizes. By now we professor types have learned to specify font style and size in paper assignments. Another problem solved.

Possibly really off topic ..... I'd love to go back to using the 1950's manual typewriter that I learnt to type on, but I can't find any shop/online supplier that sells typewriter ribbons. Where do you/others find theirs?

Cheers,

Graham

Gary Carson wrote:

I'm amazed at how many writers (primarily fiction writers) end up looking for
minimalistic, "distraction free," full-screen word processors like Dark Room or
Zen (is that what it's called?) and even do things like add "realistic typewriter
sound effects" to re-create the typewriter experience. If that's what they're
looking for, they should just go back to working on real typewriters. I've been doing
this a lot myself lately, just to get away from all the distractions involved with
working on a computer. I like manuals, but at the moment, I'm working on an old IBM
Wheelwriter III, the best electric ever made, in my opinion. There are ZERO
distractions with a typewriter. It can be quite a jolt to the system after working on a
computer for years, let me tell you.

Gary Carson wrote:

Just out of curiosity, why does your son have to submit each chapter as a separate file?
I'm a fiction writer myself with an agent and I've never heard of a requirement like
this. The only reason I can think of for why they would want him to do this is if they were
running his novel as a serial, chapter by chapter.

The standard novel manuscript is
very basic and I've never had any problems with creating long (100,000+ words)
manuscripts in Word 2003. Granted, Word is bloated and you don't need ninety per cent
of its features, but this is a non-issue. And the only time I've ever seen Word crash is
with extremely complicated documents using master-documents and sub-documents
and so on, none of which applies to writing fiction.

After screwing around with
almost every kind of "novel-writing software" out there, I've decided that they're
completely unnecessary and more trouble than they're worth. Writing novels
involves creating lots of different files for research, outlines, etc., but I've
never found that I have to have all of these files instantly available. If I have files I
need to reference while I'm writing, I just print them out. Problem solved. And the
novel-writing software I've seen (Scrivener for Windows, for example) almost
always uses RTF format, which means you have to do a lot of reformatting when you're
finished. Why bother? Just write the thing in Word and be done with it. (The Scrivener
for Windows Beta I tested has a "Standard Novel Template" you can use for exporting
your copy to Word, but it doesn't work. A flaw like this is so basic that I have to wonder
what all these writers who have been giving the program rave reviews are actually
doing).

The best purchase I've ever made to increase my writing productivity
wasn't software at all, but hardware, namely a second monitor. You can put one draft
(or an outline or whatever) up on one monitor for reference and work on the manuscript
on the other. It works great. As for keeping my files organized, I just use Windows
Explorer. I create a master folder for the book, then subfolders for research,
outlines, etc. No problem at all.

I agree with most of this, although I did experience the Word long-document issue several times with earlier versions. I can't believe that Microsoft will have left this weakness in the code in more recent versions.

Fundamentally, writing really isn't about the software. It seems unnecessary to say this, but many (not here!) seem to believe that it is. (I can sort of see how it can become so, just as, say, favourite fountain pens become touchstones.) And it certainly isn't about the template. The fiction templates that are based on commonly required publishers' criteria are just about some of the simplest special formats there are, and I've never quite understood why some debutante writers seem to think they're so important. Rolling your own seems to me to be the best approach.

As regards Scrivener for Windows, I recommend waiting till it comes out of beta before making a final judgment. I think the templates it currently includes were just moved across from the Mac version, more or less as placeholders and signals of what was ultimately intended.

I can see the value of a second screen. My own favourite piece of hardware is at the other end of the scale: an Alphasmart Neo.

critStock wrote:

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Hugh wrote:
>>I'm sure there's a simple division
here between fiction and
>non-fiction writers.
>>Fiction writers may be able to
get away without using MS Word
>(although
>>round-tripping documents with an
editor without "Track Changes" may be
>difficult).

Three words: footnotes,
footnotes, footnotes.
Non-fiction writers of the scholarly subspecies cannot get
by without them.
I love simplified writing environments, but they never seem to
implement footnotes. Incidentally, my understanding is that RTF has footnote
capabilities by design; but none of the RTF editors/writers I have come across (or
RTF-based simplified writing environments) seems to implement this feature. Can
anyone more knowledgeable shed any light on RTF and footnotes?

There's been quite a lot of discussion on the Scrivener forums about RTF and footnotes. My understanding is that RTF isn't a completely fixed standard; it comes in different flavours, depending on who is writing the code. Even then the functionality is usually limited; I've read for example, that creating footnotes to a single page that can then lay themselves out over several pages is particularly complicated. The Scrivener developer Keith Blount has hacked the standard Apple RTF code to enable it to create and export footnotes -- but there's then the question of which word processors can import them. From memory, in that case Apple's Pages (paradoxically) cannot, whereas MS Word and its clones can.

I expect that the same may apply to some other developers.

Take a look at http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/help/footnotes.htm

Is the memory in my 70-year-old brain failing? As I recall, Word has both footnote and endnote capabilities. ... Well, I just checked my Word 2000. Phew! My memory is still OK! Word DOES have footnote and endnote capabilities!

Hugh, thanks for the info.
Steve, thanks for the link.

Graham,

There are still a lot of typewriter stores in business, usually run by ancient codger typewriter mechanics who have been in business for centuries and are still holding out. They can supply you with ribbons and the like. They also sell reconditioned typewriters. Office supply stores still sell ribbons for IBM electrics like my Wheelwriter and they also sell "universal" ribbons which may or may not work on your machine (I don't like them myself. I never could get them to fit and they don't have much ribbon).

I bought some ribbons for my Olympia SG1 recently from Cambridge Typewriter Company, 102 Massachusetts Avenue, Arlington, Ma 02474. The guy who runs this place is great. He doesn't have email, but you can call him direct at 781-643-7010. (I have no connection with him). He inks his own ribbons (so does Dan Puls--see below). You want to make sure you're not getting an old ribbon which has been sitting around for years. That phone number should be current, but if it isn't for some reason, you can look up the company on the internet (he doesn't have a web site).

You can also get ribbons (and all kinds of typewriters) from Mr. Typewriter, Dan Puls (http://mrtypewriter.tripod.com/ He used to have a business in St. Louis, but I think he's moved to California. His email and contact numbers are on his web site. I've bought three manuals from him and a couple of cases of ribbons over the years. The typewriters (two Olympia SM9's--the best manual ever made for usability--and an SM4--very nice, but it has a basket shift which I think is clumsy to operate) were all in perfect working condition. He sells a box of 12 ribbons for about $60, I think, which is pretty cheap. See http://mrtypewriter.tripod.com/ribbons.htm for details. I've got to warn you, though. If you call him (the quickest way), he'll probably talk your ears off. Note that a couple of ribbons will probably last you for a year. I'm told that the best way to store them is to keep them in one of the drawers in your refrigerator, but if they're sealed and fresh, they should stay fresh for a long time.

Also, check out the Yahoo Portable Typewriter forum, a fantastic resource. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theportabletypewriterforum/

Lots of people still use typewriters even though they're not being manufactured anymore (I think the last company--in India--stopped production just this year).

Other links that might be of interest (these are from the Portable Typewriter Forum):

Operational help (tips, buying ribbons and manuals): http://willdavis.bravehost.com/

Basic typewriter operation:
http://www.geocities.com/wbd641/OnlineManual.html

Portable typewriter research/reference:
http://www.geocities.com/wbd641/PortablesIndex.html

Will's Internet Typewriter Links:
http://www.geocities.com/wbd641/links.html

ETCetera, a quarterly collectors' magazine:
http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/typewriters/etc.html

I like the idea to use a good old typewriter for writing. But I personally prefer to write with a pencil. This is the model I am using every day:
http://www.caran-dache.de/Writing-Instruments/Graphite-Pencils/Edelweiss/Pencil-Edelweiss--1114.html

Remember, I am a software addict and I am suffering heavily of CRIMP :-)

Dominik

Thanks for the your typewriter ribbon supply response Gary. Many of those sales points are on the wrong side of the Atlantic for me, but the links do give me a place to start looking for supplies over here. Cheers!

Graham