I recently published my first book, and at its launch I spoke about how I’d written and revised it. That talk combined with some comments I wrote for my graduate students this term on how to think about writing programs and other platforms.
I’m deliberately not calling my writing program a ‘word processor’ because those are very elaborate, bells-and-whistles programs that do page formatting and what used to be called ‘desktop publishing’: tweaking all the fonts, columns, footnotes, and other features that turn plain prose into a fancy document.
As my formulation suggests, I think writers should separate writing from word processing. Programs like Microsoft Word are excellent at some things, but in my view they are not ideal for writing. What’s ideal for writing is a platform that lets you think clearly, capture the flow of ideas, turn ideas into sequential words, and review them easily. On the most basic level, your writing program should open and immediately give you a blank document and a blinking cursor, with nothing to distract you. Then it should also let you rearrange chunks of text easily — whether that’s at the sentence, paragraph, or higher level. And only when you’re ready to share that text will the program do any formatting. Separate content from form.
Those are my criteria, anyway. I’m telling you this because you should reflect on why you use the writing platform that you use. (By the way: I’m saying ‘platform’ rather than ‘program’ because maybe for you, it’s a blank piece of paper and a set of multicoloured pens, or a notebook you carry around, or a notes app on your phone, or whatever. You do you.)
Think about what platform(s) you use to start a project, and where/how you edit your writing. Think about how you chose your platforms, how they’ve changed through time, what you love or hate about them, how you formed your habits.
I’ll go first. I’m a Mac user, so I write first drafts of everything (lecture notes, personal diary entries, documents like this one) in an app called Ulysses. I set the font to a plain-text, fixed-width, old-school display (Menlo) of white writing on a dark background, that feels legible and comfortable — like a retro computer. I write far more text than I can use, typically, and I rearrange chunks (some a few sentences, others a few paragraphs long) in the editor. When I’m ready to share my text I simply export it as Rich Text and then paste that into the destination document. The advantage to doing this is that I can write in a distraction-free, simplified environment: no fiddly icons to change features, no fretting over line-spacing or indentations, no thought of how the text will look on paper or PDF. Separate the writing stage from the publishing stage and focus on what really matters: putting the right words in the right order.
That’s for informal writing, or the first draft of something to polish. But when I’m writing something that has to be perfect — i.e. for publication, or for a grant application, or for any document that I intend to edit and revise — then I print the whole thing on paper and spread those papers across a large table. I hand-annotate sentences as I read, making small revisions but also cutting recurrent ideas or noting what should be reordered. Then I rearrange those sections so that they flow better. I cross out whole paragraphs and use a lettering system (A, B, C) to restructure the flow. I then rewrite the entire text by hand — yes, I’m old-school — because for reasons I can’t explain, handwriting makes my sentences more eloquent. Handwriting slows me down, makes me a better writer — but only when I’m rewriting something, to make it less conversational and choppy, to reformulate its register and reorder its argument. When my sentences aren’t flowing I switch pen colours; there’s something about switching from brown ink to purple (or whatever) that gets me unstuck. Anyway: after it’s wholly rewritten I type up the whole thing all over again. It sounds tedious, but I know that my second draft is vastly better than my first — and nine times out of ten, that’s the draft I submit.
That’s for a single document. But sometimes you have a giant project, like a book comprised of multiple chapters. That’s when I shift from Ulysses (for writing and organizing short texts) to Scrivener (for organizing long texts). (Here’s a blog post I wrote about Scrivener a few years ago, though it’s mainly pictures.) What I like is how Scrivener allows more organization than Word, yet still focuses on the writing process. It has far more features than I can describe here, and frankly I only use like 40% of them. But Scrivener is where my big projects come together — where paragraphs comprise sections that comprise chapters.
Finally, only after all that is done do I export from Scrivener to Word. That’s where I put on the final touches: running my reference management app (my choice is Bookends) on my citations and generating the bibliography; inserting page numbers and choosing a font; adding headings and indentations and the thousand other things that turn texts into documents.
My big-picture point is that I write in programs designed for writing, and use other programs to organize my sections; to document my sources; and to design my page layouts. (If you’re writing for digital formats you follow other workflows at the final stage, or you might avoid some steps here altogether.) So, gentle reader, I urge you to think about your computer programs and your analog platforms, and to consider why and how you use them in your writing.
