I keep trying Scrivener and bouncing off. Something about it runs athwart my writing brain. Then again, I write nonfiction, so I usually work with one core text editor surrounded by all kinds of tools and documents.
Fascinating reading! When I first started writing for real (I'm excluding the embarrassing hand-wringing poems from junior high about boys and unicorns and dreadful mothers that were written in school notebooks), I wrote almost exclusively in steno pads. If you remember those, the spiral was at the top, and there was a line down the centre of each page. The way you used them was that you wrote, then you flipped the page, and wrote on the next page (you didn't use the back of the same page). When you got to the end of the steno pad, you'd flip it over, and write on the backs of all the previous pages. Consequently, every poem I wrote was narrow and short. I felt constrained by that column divider, and also by not wanting (for some reason) to go to the next page! My poetry changed a lot when I moved to regular notebooks, the electric (memory) typewriter, and eventually computers. Funnily enough, I seem to have bypassed regular typewriters entirely, though we definitely had one in the house. I don't know if I'd have the stamina to write an entire novel longhand... then again, I've never tried it! Mind you, I've got a bit of mild stiffness and arthritis in my writing hand now, so that elderly ship may well have sailed.
BTW, Robert B. Parker wrote hilariously of Finnegans Wake in his book, All Our Yesterdays:
This post has clarified a lot in my mind. I have Scrivener, got it on sale, but found it confusing; I think your explanation of the unit was part of what I needed to get. I will have to give it another go (while trying to avoid having learning it become a procrastination box).
I keep trying Scrivener and bouncing off. Something about it runs athwart my writing brain. Then again, I write nonfiction, so I usually work with one core text editor surrounded by all kinds of tools and documents.
Maybe I should try Obsidian.
It's free and easy to install, so why not? (Well, other than the format being markdown.)
The question is allocating time to learn it. It's a crazy season here.
Fascinating reading! When I first started writing for real (I'm excluding the embarrassing hand-wringing poems from junior high about boys and unicorns and dreadful mothers that were written in school notebooks), I wrote almost exclusively in steno pads. If you remember those, the spiral was at the top, and there was a line down the centre of each page. The way you used them was that you wrote, then you flipped the page, and wrote on the next page (you didn't use the back of the same page). When you got to the end of the steno pad, you'd flip it over, and write on the backs of all the previous pages. Consequently, every poem I wrote was narrow and short. I felt constrained by that column divider, and also by not wanting (for some reason) to go to the next page! My poetry changed a lot when I moved to regular notebooks, the electric (memory) typewriter, and eventually computers. Funnily enough, I seem to have bypassed regular typewriters entirely, though we definitely had one in the house. I don't know if I'd have the stamina to write an entire novel longhand... then again, I've never tried it! Mind you, I've got a bit of mild stiffness and arthritis in my writing hand now, so that elderly ship may well have sailed.
BTW, Robert B. Parker wrote hilariously of Finnegans Wake in his book, All Our Yesterdays:
"Did you ever read Finnegans Wake?"
"Not all the way through."
"James Joyce didn't read it all the way through."
Which made me laugh and laugh.
Thank you Karl!
This post has clarified a lot in my mind. I have Scrivener, got it on sale, but found it confusing; I think your explanation of the unit was part of what I needed to get. I will have to give it another go (while trying to avoid having learning it become a procrastination box).
Thanks,
Brian