Writing With Software. An Overview
Now we’re getting close to Christmas, if you want treat yourself and make next year go with a definite bang, you should consider buying Scrivener from Literature and Latte. If you haven’t done so already.
Honestly, I get no money for giving Scrivener a plug. I just happen to believe it will make your life and your writing better. I’ve been using this awesome writing software for over a decade and have no complaints about its looks, its functionality, reliability, and its importance to the writing community.
And no, it doesn’t do anything spectacular. It’s little more than an organization tool. Use it for writing novels, ebooks, movies, articles, poems, shopping lists, pretty much anything.
Now, if you want something that edits, corrects, make suggestions, and annoys the crap out of you by trying to be everything to everyone, then you should probably try other programs.
What you don’t want to imagine is that any one software will make writing easier. Writing will always be hard for true writers because the mental head-space required to write isn’t available as a download.
Even AI requires your focus and an ability to analyze text and make decisions based on what the AI creates. That process is not always rewarding because the AI generated text may be so awful you will quickly become dispirited and go back to not using software at all!.
Scrivener doesn’t try to distract you with natty tricks, though it does format for all and sundry, has links to useful tools, and even has a handy name generator.
Writing is a craft you need to master. Only you can do that through trial and error. And, as with anything worthwhile, the more you practice, the better you get.
Using AI is a bit like painting by numbers. If you’ve ever done that, you will know that the resulting canvas is often fake looking and not quite satisfying to the eye. Certainly nothing like a proper oil painting that has been lovingly crafted with skill, technique, and talent. AI might be clever but it’s never going to write like YOU, as much as you might tell it to and force it to speak in a way that you’re happy with.
My personal issue with AI is that it tends to write everything it can think of, relaying what it apparently 'sees' other writers do. But to me it’s what real writers often LEAVE OUT that defines their uniqueness and their vision.
Amateurs tend to put in as much as possible but professionals do not. They either have a better sense of balance, pace, or stylistic skill, or they have efficient editors who have the courage to delete swathes of material readers will probably find dull.
This is what you have to do for yourself. Decide what’s not worth focusing on, either because it’s obvious or because it interferes with the pacing.
I find that you need distance from your own work to really see what you’ve written but - failing that - you need to read your work as though it’s been written by someone else.
There are other writing software programs.
Dabble is similar to Scrivener. The difference being you can also set goals and track your progress, something I use Excel for if I need to. But with Dabble, I don’t like the fact that all the writing is being saved on a cloud. This is common nowadays but I prefer knowing that I have my own versions of my stories on my own hard drives - which I then (ironically) save to my Dropbox (cloud) anyway because then I can access my work from any computer.
In Dabble there’s a special function where you can speak your story and have the program write it down. It will also read it back to you. Both functions I don’t need and strike me as gimmicky, therefore distracting.
When I write I like to immerse myself in the process. That’s how I stay focused. If I have to do other things like choose AI text or fiddle with self-correcting grammar, even just looking for alternate words in an online thesaurus, all these things break the writing spell.
Some say you can benefit from using Google Docs, though probably only Google. Unless you want to write collaboratively, I don’t see the point of spreading your writing across clouds. It seems like no one wants to trust their own systems anymore. We want everything we do: our music, our writing, our pictures, our videos, to be owned and kept by other agencies and only available when the electricity is on.
Trouble is, we become more reliant on technology every day.
It’s the very simplicity of Scrivener that I like. I use it in dark mode to help my eyes. On good days, I forget where I am and lose myself in the moment. F11 will take you into “composition mode” (where only your current text is visible) but to be honest I like knowing where I am in the book, so I always have the chapter headings down the left hand side. Plus I have the Notes, Word Count, and the Synopsis boxes open too so that I can remember little things I need to include: plot points, descriptions, and also I have little pictures of things like cars, locations, and guns etc., all in front of me on the home screen.
Scrivener is great for plotting too. Moving chapters around using the cork board function, all good. Plus, I often use separate pages (files) to record character descriptions, names, places, and plot details in locations outside of the main manuscript.
There you have it, a big Xmas thumbs up for Scrivener. Next week we look at some of the more “intelligent” AI software programs available for writers.
Keep Writing!
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