Choices

It seems one of the obstacles to me writing anything is the amount of time I spend reading about writing. Obviously this is sometimes important and valid, but I appear to have developed this urge of reading about and then trying a variety of software in the somewhat forlorn hope the latest and greatest thing will lead to a great outpouring of creative genius, or some kind of ninja ‘productivity’ or some such nonsense. It is a sadly tawdry and commonplace complaint.

Nor do I limit myself to just reading and trying this software, I also share the agony and ecstasy of the pundits as well. I can spend ages dancing on a pin over whether Evernote will allow me to extract my ‘plaintext’ files and not hold them in some proprietary database (Macdrifter voices some concerns over this), or whether if I use Evernote all the time how will I manage to give up on the speed of searching in Notational Velocity or it's nvAlt fork, and what about Launchbar or Alfred - which one might add that extra second of productivity to my workflow? There is such wonderful software out there, in fact too many choices for my own good, and believe me, I'm particularly susceptible. It reminds me of the time when I confused cameras with photography and spent so long thinking about the former that I found the photographs I were taking had less and less meaning to me.

What then is the optimal software for someone trying to write a novel, particularly when they are now so used to working in a digital milieu they don't want to go back to collecting jottings in paper folders etc.? For myself at least I know I've got to have a system that helps me get on with the writing itself, and leaves the software critiques to those better suited to it. I need, to paraphrase Thoreau, (or was it Emerson talking about Thoreau?), to make myself rich by making be making my needs few. Though of course I'm not really making my needs few; Dickens had a quill and look what he produced. The key point for my purposes though is to make a decision and then stick to it for the duration.

Following the steps I outlined in my previous post, I intend to ‘limit’ myself to the following software:

• Evernote for my note and everything else collection process.
• Omnioutliner for my outlining tool.
• Scrivener to write my first and subsequent drafts (including publish to Kindle).

So that's settled ….

Please   email me should you have a comment or query relating to this post.

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