Four weeks into the summer project, halfway through to having an actual paperback and e-book, only now do we get to do some writing. Maybe in the olden days, you could just get out your quill pen on day one and craft a masterpiece, but now that you're taking on the production of the book, you have a lot of other concerns.
Ultimately, though, nothing matters as much as the writing. You can and you may well hire people to do parts of the book production work, like design your cover. You will certainly ask people to proofread your book for you. Yet the actual words on the page or the screen, that's you, that is.
Nobody else can write like you, and you don't want to write like anybody else. Mind you, I've often said this: I wouldn't kill to write like singer/songwriter Dar Williams –– but I'd maim.
Given that I'll never be as good as her, and given that no one ever writes in the same way as anyone else, it's tricky to now tell you to buy
Microsoft Word or Apple's
Pages. What suits me may very much not suit you, and this is a big deal. You are going to be spending a lot of time writing your book, and you want all of that time to be devoted to the writing -- and not to your turning the air blue because Word just crashed again.
So finding the applications that suit you is important, and it's worth putting in some effort. It's worth money, too: I've spent a lot over the years. Hand on heart, I still haven't settled on any one word processor, and I would like to. Every book I've written has ended up in Microsoft Word -- but not because I like it, just specifically because that's what every publisher has required.
I've done five books before this one we're working on together here --
The Blank Screen: Blogging -- and I think only two of them were actually written in Word. The rest were done on the hoof in whatever I had on my iOS devices, they were often done in Pages and converted later, and most recently I've moved to
Scrivener and
Ulysses.
Writing on the hoof
Writers never stop writing: we're completely boring like that. There is a part of our brain that is working forever, and if we manage to fool you that we're listening at parties, still there will come a time when we have to get that thought written down.
Whatever you end up writing your book in, keep something on your iPhone or iPad that you can reach at all times, and specifically that you can reach quickly. You can now run Microsoft Word on iOS and it's very good -- the iPad version of Word is the best Microsoft's done in many years -- but it's big. You want something smaller, faster, scrappier.
I think you want
Drafts 4. If there were a Mac version of Drafts, then that would probably become my one word processor of choice: it's not brilliantly powerful on iOS at word processing features, but it is at everything else. Getting from "excuse me, I just need to make a note" to "thanks, that's done" is quickest when you use Drafts 4 in between those points.
I could rave about Drafts 4,
but I already have.
There is also
Evernote, and specifically the steadily improving iOS app for it. Get out your iPhone, swipe down on Notification Center, tap the Text button in the Evernote section, and you are off writing a note. Since so much of my research is stored in Evernote, this has the added advantage that it is saved right there alongside everything else.
Get a system
Saving to Evernote is a good idea, so long as that is what you always do. Be consistent, be regular, and you'll build up a system where not only can you make quick notes, but you always know where to find them later.
This is more of a deal than you might imagine. The trouble with books is that you can't hold the entire thing in your head at once. I did a coffee table reference book recently, and it was so massive, I couldn't handle it at one go. That was a horrible fact to accept: it was the first writing project I'd done that was so big I could not grasp all of it at the same time.
When I write short journalism pieces, it's easy to know the whole thing in your head. When I write dramas, like two-hour
Doctor Who radio ones, you have to have it all in there, it's crucial. With this project, I was lost through the sheer weight of words.
One thing that helped was that the publisher hired a copyeditor. I could tell him that I woke up at nights certain I'd introduced someone in the book twice. The other thing that helped was taking the outline I'd agreed on with the publisher, and making folders for each chapter.
I began making notebooks in Evernote in the same structure, and I wish I'd finished that. The folders were great, though, because they felt to me like buckets. Here's the bucket of all material to do with Chapter Seven.
If you're writing fiction, then you might well prefer to have just one single Word document with everything in it. With non-fiction, it's wiser to separate things out. You are backing up everything, right? If it's all in folders, you can drag a copy to an external drive every now and again, or rely on your usual automated backup system like Time Machine or whatever you prefer. No excuses, a backup is a must.
What was a particular boon with that copyeditor on that reference book was that we shared a Dropbox folder. If I dropped a chapter into that folder, he knew it was ready for him, and he'd take it out. When I'd see it was back, that meant he'd finished, and I could work on any issues that had come up.
Folders in Dropbox help keep collaborators up to date
A friend produced a collaborative novel working with ten writers, and used Dropbox throughout. That wasn't just for the convenience for him, it was for the certainty that he would get the writing he needed. He didn't say this, but having hired writers before I imagine the logic was that if everyone wrote in Dropbox, he always had the latest versions of everything. Come the deadline day, whatever's in Dropbox goes in the book. No waiting for anyone: everybody knew that's what would happen, so everybody took the deadline seriously.
In my case, the work was going back and forth between myself and this copyeditor. When things had gone around a few times, we would add our initials to the filename so that we could see who "owned" it at any particular time.
Make your names really clear, even if you're not sharing with anyone, because you will be. You will be sending people chapters to read and comment on, for one thing. Then over the course of a long book, you will not remember that "Ch1.1" is about Vegemite sandwiches, and "4.1" is turtle gymnastics. Work out a naming convention, and stick to it right from when you're beginning your first words.
Heavy lifting
Books have a lot of words in them. That's why you need something more than a note-taking app: just physically handling a lot of words needs some power.
The Blank Screen: Blogging is probably going to be 50,000 words, which makes it quite a short book -- but still, in the editing, I am flying all over that manuscript, making myriad changes and adjustments and additions. Being able to leap to a particular point quickly is a huge productivity benefit.
It's why the "regular way" of writing books is to get out Microsoft Word and Apple Pages and begin typing. I did that for my first books, but I've stopped doing it now.
Curiously, back when authors could only realistically be printed by publishers instead of doing it themselves, Microsoft kept adding features to Word that were supposed to help publishers. Then, publishing applications like QuarkXPress would add features to undo what Word did, because publishers (and particularly book designers) hate it when authors try to format or lay out their own books, particularly if they're not talented in that area.
Now that we have the option of producing a book ourselves from start to finish, you'd think we would exploit the world out of Word's publishing features; but no, not so much. The object is to get a book's text done -- all the formatting comes later. Remember that.
So you can just open a blank Word document and start writing. Or a blank Pages document and do the same. If you haven't ever looked at a feature called Styles, though, do so. Pages and Word both have extremely useful Styles features, and they help you manage the book as well as produce it.
Quick example? I don't care much what the font is for a chapter title versus body copy. I like writing in certain fonts, and I just use those. However, it's a good idea to tell Word or Pages that this line is a chapter title, and that section is a normal paragraph of body copy. The reason for this is because later on, you can tell it that you want every chapter title to be displayed in giant pink text, and with one click that's what you've got throughout the document. The alternative is to go through, selecting each chapter title individually, and picking the colour.
Styles are your friend. If you've ever wondered what the difference between a word processor and a text editor, this is one of them: word processors have styles. Text editors just have flair.
There are other writing tools, and right now your best route is to work in one of these instead of Word or Pages. There isn't a term to describe the particular tools, but there really are only two contenders in the field: Scrivener and Ulysses.
Scrivener and Ulysses
At their very broadest, these are two word processors that know you're writing a book. They give you tools for seeing the whole book, or focusing just one current chapter. They are great at handling all your research, alongside your writing: no juggling different Word documents, you get everything in one place.
That doesn't sound gigantically useful in theory, but in practice it is. I'm writing
The Blank Screen: Blogging primarily in Scrivener, and any given time I will typically have a single screen that shows me many things. There will be my current writing in the middle, where I'm working. To the left I have a contents list that I can drag around, that I can move blocks of text into.
That contents list does show everything that will go in the book in sequence, but then it also has sections that never print out and never get shared; sections that include chapters I've deleted, research I'm using, and more. To the right, there's a panel for notes and general information. My concentration is on the center pane where I'm writing, but I'll refer to the section of an OmniOutliner document that I've saved in notes. I'll drag in text from the research pile on the right.
What I unfortunately won't do is write on the iPad. At the moment, there isn't an iPad version of Scrivener -- though one has been promised since just about when the device launched. There's every reason to think it will come this year but, you know, chickens.
What there is on iPad is Ulysses. In the broadest ways, this does the same as Scrivener, and as we've said on
MacNN before, its presence on the iPad is a killer feature. Ulysses is a lot newer than Scrivener, and despite all the updates to the older software, you can see the difference. Ulysses feels modern next to Scrivener -- but it lacks features and just isn't as powerful. The Mac version of Ulysses is the same.
Ulysses for Mac
You know Word and Pages, there's a good chance you've heard of Scrivener and possibly Ulysses -- but if you're a writer and you're familiar with all of these, then you must also be wondering about the missing applications.
Specifically, it should be possible to write books in Apple's iBooks Author. I've used it a lot, and I like it very much, but I like it for designing and laying out the work, not for writing into it. It'd feel like writing a novel in Photoshop. You could do it, but you won't.
Similarly, one of the reasons for this entire Summer Project is that there is now a promising application called Vellum which produces iBooks, Kindles, and Nook e-books from your finished manuscript. You can definitely write your book directly into Vellum, but again, you won't. That's not its job.
It's great for me that I can use all these word processors, but I bought them over many years and it's been well worth the money and the effort. Right now, I can turn to whatever feels like the right thing for the job. So far, that has never been iBooks Author, or Vellum, for the actual writing part of the job.
However, it is very much part of the rest of this Summer Project. We're going to look at when you do -- and don't -- use iBooks Author or Vellum (or something else) next time.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
If you are just arriving to this series, it continues each Wednesday through to mid-July. If you'd like to read the earlier entries, you can find them through these links: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
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