About Writing Tools

(The below is from May 2004; I’ll usually go with vi for plaintext these days. And Tiger has a dictionary/thesaurus built in now, finally catching up with at least one old NeXT feature. ;))

In his online journal, Neil Gaiman has been talking lately about writing certain things longhand first, before entering them in the computer. Leaving aside the (albeit fascinating) pen fetishism for the moment, I’ve remembered this very assertion recently for my own writing. When I’m plowing through a longer piece, such as a novel, I often find it beneficial to write longhand first. I say “remembered this,” because I had forgotten how much I enjoy and prefer this method.

Partly it’s an aesthetic choice. Gaiman speaks of his work feeling “not real” until a draft is typed. I feel exactly the opposite when it comes to a long work, which feels less real on screen than it does on paper. For other writing, particularly short pieces, I prefer the immediacy and, in a sense, the “typesetting” of word processing.

Once I finish an arbitrary amount of text on paper (say, a chapter’s worth), I’ll enter it into the computer and do a quickie first edit as I go, mostly oriented toward typos and obviously awkward phrasings.

As I said, other writing I prefer doing directly on the computer, as I type rather quickly, enough so that I can usually keep up with myself. Lately I’ve been paring back my tools to TextEdit (Mac OS X’s built-in basic text editor), as it does most of what I need on a daily basis and stays out of my way. Also experimenting with outliners, most especially OmniOutliner — best of breed as far as I can tell. While we’re on the subject of OmniGroup products, their free OmniDictionary is a great resource for accessing dictionary servers. But see also Nisus Thesaurus.

Oh, and be sure to check out device for taking travel notes. :)