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Writing tools of the 21st Century

Writers are maligned in ways different than their other creative brethren. If you paint or draw, people can instantly make a connection visually with your work. Art transcends language, you do not have to know the language of the artist to appreciate his or her artwork. So in many ways, writing is a creative ugly cousin to other more physical arts such as painting, drawing, sculpture or pottery.

But like other arts, writing requires mastery of its tools, control of its structure, an awareness of how to compare and contrast, how to alliterate and illuminate, a knowledge of the language of choice, the ability to weave words into a tapestry greater than if you simply wrote the words "rat, rat, rat" over and over on a canvas, and called it art. Yes, you artists know who I am talking about. You cannot simply look at a piece of writing and know it as genius. You must be able to pull it in and roll it around in your mental mouth to sample its innate goodness. But like any artists, you need tools to do your best work. This article talks about MY best tools, where they are, why I use them and why you should too.

 
My Web Tools

The Internet is a cruel taskmaster in terms of software development. Thousands of programs are created every year and ninety percent languished unloved. That last ten percent is the right stuff. All of these make the cut because they are excellent at what they do, whether they are one trick ponies or Swiss Army programs, they are relatively inexpensive or free and very stable no matter how underpowered your environment might be. Here is my list of tools that help me with my writing, my inspiration, my coordination or my time management.

http://750words.com - a writing tool short on formatting but long on keeping you focused on your objective as a writer; persistence and consistency. The site has a simple sign-on, formatting free, (meaning a white page and a word counter) interface that rewards you with simple badges based on whether you write consistently or not. It tracks every time you write, how long you write and whether you reach the magic number of 750 words per day. This number was chosen to give you a reasonable goal to reach of about 3 pages a day. If you wrote consistently every day, you could have the first draft of a 300 page novel in about one hundred days. You probably won't start out that good but there is something about getting that string of successful days that keeps you motivated to continue your writing.

You can track your entire writing experience on the site and export your work as a text file at any time. I make it easy on myself by just cutting and pasting my work when I am done with it into my Gmail account and mailing it to myself. When the day ends, the work is locked in place and cannot be edited. But it might be interesting to go back in a couple of years and see how what I created might have ended up after editing. Since I started using it in December of last year, I have written over 92,000 words in four months and almost 80% of those words have gone into my various novels.

http://writer.bighugelabs.com/ - My alternate to 750 words is using Big Huge Labs Writer tool. An old school bright letters on dark background monitor from back in the i286 days of Hercules computer monitors. It has simple tools, no formatting, you can save your work onsite or export it as a PDF, it has a word counter and that is about it. Simple, elegant and easy to use, unlike some word processors I could mention. Another great tool because it focuses you on the craft of writing. And like a blacksmith, heating and banging the metal is the only way to shape it.

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ - If you are working on your workstation somewhere and want distraction free writing, I recommend Notepad++ as a simple desktop tool that does nothing but write. (Yes, you can use it to do programming, web page design, cascading style sheets and a variety of other things with it, but those things are outside of the scope of this article.) You can do word counts and other simple formatting as well as configure your work for use on websites or modify the writing for HTML-capable sites. It is also a good tool for stripping away formatting when you move something from the web or from one format to another.

It is an open source program and free to the general public. With all of this talk about the Kindle and other formatting tools for handheld devices, for those with the familiarity and experience with HTML, this would be a great tool to layout your book because it is very format neutral, so you won't spend your time removing formatting you did not want from your work.

http://www.pandora.com - Not a writing tool per se, it is a mood-managing tool for me. Pandora is a music streaming site designed to break music down by genre and by musical themes using a process they called the Music Genome Process. So you find a song or a musical group you enjoy and create a station, then their unique process finds music that shares characteristics (that are in their database so far) and streams them one after another. You can push forward if you find a song you don't like but I find my stations have been for the most part very enjoyable and rarely have to give anyone the boot. Occasionally, I hear something I am unfamiliar with but I am rarely shocked out of my rhythm enough for it to be a problem and I keep on writing.

There are only two limitations with Pandora and they are rather small. Every five to seven songs you will get fifteen to twenty-five seconds of advertising. Its not long enough to annoy me, so most folks will be alright. The second is you will only get forty hours of streaming for free. Forty hours has been long enough for me to do my writing every day since I only write for an hour a day but if you need more time you might want to spend the five dollars a month for the unlimited meal deal.

http://www.gmail.com/ - Despite the recent issues with Google's Gmail, I still recommend it as the best free email tool on the market today. Easy to use, highly configurable, able to be themed and customized, numerous support applications have been made for it and in conjunction with Google Docs, make for a fairly useful suite of tools. Gmail functions as a repository of my writing after it leaves 750 words.

I cut the work from 750 words into a Gmail document and reformat it there. I add any italics, bolds, simple font choices, resize it for easy reading, add some color if I am using its rich text formatting and clean and edit the text while I still care about it. Once I am done, I save it, send it to myself with some tags in the subject line along with the title. The tags make it easy to search for later if I have themes and the title helps with searching as well. I use the same titles every time to ensure when searches take place, it gets everything and in order of creation. Gmail also makes it possible for me to send chapters to my editor or beta readers who might help me read and reformat ideas and then mail them back to me.

http://www.evernote.com/ - Evernote is a "capture anything, remember everything" kind of web tool. I use it to capture story ideas from articles I find on the web. It allows me to organize those captured pages, view them, go back to them on the net, clip pieces from them into new documents I create within Evernote. Complete with a simple text editing element, I sometimes compose articles or chapters right inside the program. I also use it to outline chapters because I can separate them, name them and serialize them and then make outlines I can stretch across the integrated documents.

I can save those documents and import them into other word processors, or email them to others. I can also incorporate graphic elements, so if I found an artist whose work captured an idea, I can include the image and links to that artist right within the document to mail off to an editor or other staffer to make the connection and show a sample of how I might want to use the artwork. Evernote crosses nearly every kind of tool and gadget and most good operating systems as well. Robust, stable, online, so you can access your resources from any computer with web access, or carry your archive around on your flash drive, Evernote is one of those tools once you start using it, you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

http://www.online-stopwatch.com/ - Last, but not least, is my on-screen timepiece. Downloaded to your PC, I like the Online Stopwatch because I can set it to count up or down. (I usually count down from 30, 45 or 60 minutes.) It is a Flash created tool so it will not work in environments that do not support Flash. It sits in the window next to my writing window and is the only other thing in sight while I work. I use it because I want to be in a mental space where I am totally focused on writing.

I do not answer the phone, read email, go to the bathroom or even think about anything other than my story, visualizing the scene in my head for the allotted time. I know there are writers who write for hours, but I am not one of them. I can write well for about an hour at a time. Totally focused and then I am done. The rest of my time spent writing is editing, correcting, ruminating, making outlines or researching. This tools primary goal is to help me keep my mental focus for a limited time period. In a world of distractions, this enforces my rule of nothing but writing.

Next time, we will talk about graphic tools that make the creation of web pages, content management systems, and blogs easier, less time consuming and less difficult to deal with.