Printer-friendly version
Forums:
Taxonomy upgrade extras:
I'm wondering if I can conduct some sort of straw poll here.
The question is:
Do you use any special computer programs to help you when writing?
I'm not talking about word processors!
It seems that there is a variety of 'other' software (besides word processors) which some authors use as part of their writing process. For example:
- Fiction Sketch
- yWriter5
So, I'd like to know if (aside from word processors), there is any writing software (commercial or shareware/freeware) which you would consider:
- essential (you can't write without it)
- nice to have (occasionally useful)
MTIA for any contributions you are able to make.
Potential Scribe
gedit
It's a standard part of any GNOME installation (Linux), but there's also a Windows binary and Mac OS X package available.
It's officially a lightweight text editor, but it offers search/replace, syntax highlighting (for programming), manual/automatic line indentation, a spelling checker, document statistics (lines / words / characters (no spaces) / characters (with spaces) / bytes) - both for the whole document and whatever's selected, "snippets" (similar concept to AutoText in Word - you can configure macros to insert frequently used chunks of text) and a tabbed interface (so you can work on multiple documents at the same time without needing separate windows).
http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
But it's still a word processor!
Word processor/text editor—same horse, different jockey!
Processing Software
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
I don't think so
These days the distinction between a text editor and a word processor is getting vaguer and vaguer, but gedit isn't a word processor - unless your idea of a word processor is WordStar.
A text editor doesn't put anything into the file that isn't text. That means:
- no formatting information
- no font descriptions
- no colour information
- no headers or footers
- no printer information
- no graphics
- except for the abomination that is XML, of course, which is a crude compromise designed to reduce everything to text (unless you're Microsoft, but I digress).
If you're lucky, your chosen text editor may wrap your lines at the last space available on the right-hand side of the window. You should be able to turn that feature on or off, especially if like me you use gedit for writing code or bash scripts, where spaces might matter.
There's no concept of paragraph justification, indeed, no concept of paragraphs. You get line breaks wherever you hit the return key. When you save the file, it gets the extension (ie file type) you give it in the Save File box, not some default the program's maker decided would be good for you.
I don't use gedit for writing my stories, but I do use it for editing the HTML before I post them here. It's the one way I can be sure of what's going up the line.
Penny
I don't use any writing
I don't use any writing software, per se. I use the OpenOffice word processor for the actual stories. But I found that the spreadsheet is actually easier to work with for background information. Easier to insert new data than in a regular text file. If I set it up right, I can also sort things in various ways, which can be helpful. I used to have several separate files, some text, some spreadsheet, but I've combined them all in one now (The spreadsheet has tabs at the bottom, so I have a separate tab for Kittyhawk, for instance, and another for Venus Cursed, and so on). So I have access to all my background information for all my stories from one file. So if I'm working on one story and get stymied, I can open another and all the extra info I've written up is right there. Since I sometimes have as many as four or five stories open at once, that's really handy.
__________________
[url=http://moviesonlineworld.com]watch free movies online[/url]
[url=http://moviesonlineworld.com]watch free movies online[/url]
I like...
Lots of 4x6 cards* and a clothesline strung across the room. Maybe two or three of them.
I write things on cards, notes on characters, settings, situations, motivations, problems, and whatever else I think of. Because they're on cards, I can shuffle them into new orders, put different cards next to each other, move them round. If I want to see the overall arc of the story, I can pin them to the clothesline and walk up and down thinking about them.
When I start writing, I wait until I have a bunch of pages and pin them up as well. It encourages me to think in at least a couple of dimensions, rather than the rigid can't-see-the-whole-picture structure imposed by a linear text file. Cards and clothespins are low-tech and cheap, and much more flexible than any software.
It's difficult to "think outside the box" when you're staring at a rectangular screen.
Plus, all your friends will see that you're totally crazy, which is halfway to being a great writer.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-----------
* If you write really small, 3x5 might be ok, or you could go up a size to 5x7 if you want more room.
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Thanks Puddin'
What you're describing sounds a lot like some of the computational features offered by Writer's Café with its pinboard.
Admittedly, anything you do on the computer won't have the same three dimensional properties as clothesline and cards. However, real-world tangible stuff is (unfortunately) prone to interference from pets and other family members or persons—all of whom may invade your creative space.
Funnily enough, I've been to lectures where people have described their attempts at Glaser's grounded theory research, and the analytical aspects are sometimes akin to your card system, with lots of bits of paper being arranged in lots of different ways to try to tease out potential theories.
In posing this discussion question, I guess what I'm trying to find out if there's any writing software out there which people like and use. I've done a bit of fiddling with yWriter5, but some aspects of it don't really impress me.
Physical Systems
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
Writer's Cafe
It does look like that, doesn't it?
I still recommend real cards, though, because they're three-dimensional as opposed to flat. If you can't string them up, it's not quite as nice, but one can also lay them temporarily on the dining room table and reap many of the same benefits. They also have the advantage that one can carry them around in a pocketbook, fiddle with them in odd moments, and easily draw little pictures or diagrammes, all of which let you walk around and look at things with different perspectives.
There are a few tools one must eventually use in a professional context, like Final Draft for screenplays, or MS Word for other text, but there are no substitutes for either one if one wants to make a living at that sort of thing. Sooner or later one must needs submit the work, and submission requires one to obey the rules imposed by publishers. An astonishing number of publishers require one to submit stories in manuscript form, even if you will eventually be required to submit the electronic equivalent using Final Draft or MS Word. One can flip through a manuscript, look at random sections as one can a book, so a physical object allows the editor to properly visualise something approximating what will eventually be sold.
Here are typical requirements:
I'm not a big fan of trying to merge computers and creativity, because they force one to conform to their rules, whatever those rules might be, which is inimical to free thinking. The vast majority of the great literature of the world was created using pen and ink and paper, and the tangibility of those things, the manipulations, the ability to touch, lies at the very heart of creativity and accuracy.
If your story carries you outside, into a restaurant or a museum, roaming through woods, or out into a driving rainstorm, even underwater with SCUBA gear, you can carry around things to write with and things to write upon, and the movements of your hands help to mould the reality you're trying to depict, the weight of them gives a heft to what would otherwise be mere chemicals floating around in one's brain, or electrons wiggling around in an apparatus.
At some point, one has to sit down at a typewriter, or a computer keyboard, but the more widely one can range before one does so, the more likely one is to catch those fleeting moments of pure inspiration, to overhear that perfect rhythm of speech or arrangement of words that sets fire to mere words and makes them live.
I'm also a proponent of reading aloud. There are a simply amazing number of mistakes one can avoid by doing this, and an equal number of happy accidents one can discover. The storyteller's art was developed and honed around campfires and under open skies, and doesn't stuff well into studies, sitting crammed in chairs in front of desks, wiggling one's fingers on narrow spans of plastic buttons.
Unless your story starts out:
there's little or nothing a desk and keyboard can teach you.
You're better off boarding a bus, and looking at one's fellow riders, listening to them, or walking under trees, looking at how the world moves, taking note of breezes and snatches of sound.
Mind you, there are some things a computer can do for one that may be hard to arrange in real life. You can use Google Street View to visualize walking down the streets of New York City, or London. You can print out a map, or look at photos of places all around the world, so if your story requires you to describe a real place, you don't necessarily have to take off on a road trip, even though that might be the better option. On a typical writer's income, one is lucky if one has the wherewithal to pay for a bus ride. Don't give up your day job, if any.
I saw a cartoon once, of a artist before an easel, brush in hand, with a half finished portrait of a rat sitting in the corner of what was obviously the very shabby studio he was painting in. He was turned slightly, talking over his shoulder to a young girl watching his creative process.
Under the picture, the caption read:
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Addendum
On the Mac (also iPad and Windows/Vista, yada yada), there's a programme called Scrivener, which partially duplicates the file card environment, and seems fairly handy, in that it allows one to quickly shuffle the virtual "cards" around and look at them in various ways.
Another interesting programme is Contour, which is basically a screenplay writing tool, but offers a template that malkes quite a bit of sense for stories, offering examples of the sorts of thing a reader often looks for, including characters, story arc, setting, and so on.
It's available on the Mac and on Win/Vista...
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
not on the ipad
I got into Scrivener after a recommendation from Erin. It's great, but alas it's not available for iPad yet. Instead there's a hack you can use to edit files on the iPad in Plaintext and sync back to the Mac using dropbox. I love Scrivener, but that drove me nuts, because it was very difficult using the editor on the iPad to see other chapters etc in the story. I suspect if you were only working on a very short story it would be fine.
I have (temporarily) gone over to a program called Storyist, which is available for Mac and iPad (although once again using it on both requires Dropbox). It's not as full-featured as Storyist, but there's a lot of commonality between the Mac and iOS versions, and I've used it a lot. I've just finished the first draft of a 130,000 word story with it, and I estimate that 90% of my revisions were done on the iPad.
When the iOS version of Scrivener is available I'll go back to using it. It's the best writing software I've found.
Bec
not as think as i smart i am
old
Heh. I only just realized how old this thread is - sorry!
not as think as i smart i am
I don't use any writing
I don't use any writing software, per se. I use the OpenOffice word processor for the actual stories. But I found that the spreadsheet is actually easier to work with for background information. Easier to insert new data than in a regular text file. If I set it up right, I can also sort things in various ways, which can be helpful. I used to have several separate files, some text, some spreadsheet, but I've combined them all in one now (The spreadsheet has tabs at the bottom, so I have a separate tab for Kittyhawk, for instance, and another for Venus Cursed, and so on). So I have access to all my background information for all my stories from one file. So if I'm working on one story and get stymied, I can open another and all the extra info I've written up is right there. Since I sometimes have as many as four or five stories open at once, that's really handy.
Having background information, even if some or all of it will never be directly used in the story, can be really useful. A lot of times anymore, I write up information on the main characters and the world they're in before I write any of the story itself. In some cases I've had thousands of words of writing invested in background info like that before I wrote a single word of the story. It helps me get into the story, and also helps me get the characters and world fleshed out more before I start writing. Since I don't use outlines (They really don't work for me), this is really helpful.
I hope that's of some help.
Saless
"But it is also tradition that times *must* and always do change, my friend." - Eddie Murphy, Coming To America
Spreadsheets—yes...
...I have to confess that's a potential application that I hadn't considered.
I like it!
Thank you for your contribution—really appreciated.
Powerful Spreadsheets
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
No problem,
Oh, I just remembered something else I've been using lately (still on the spreadsheet, though). I have a timeline going for VC & Kittyhawk to help me keep track of when things happened and in what order. Especially useful with all the side stories I have, and now a spinoff! Anyway, I made all the chapter numbers/names links. That way if I am, for instance, looking at where the next chapter of Toil & Trouble fits in, I can look it up on the timeline and then click the chapter I think it fits into and bring it up instantly. I've found this to be very handy. Too bad I didn't think of this stuff from the start!
Just thought that might be of some use.
Saless
"But it is also tradition that times *must* and always do change, my friend." - Eddie Murphy, Coming To America
Spreadsheets really work for me
I have several tabs in my spreadsheets, one with a table of the characters and their traits (age, occupations, relations, hair color, chapters in which they appear, etc...), another for each sub plot with a list of actions/activities and what chapter they're in, and finally a calendar which shows what chapters cover which days and a summary of the day's events. I'm finding that it takes discipline to maintain all these pages, but in a complex story they are essential.
Tiff Q
Tiff Q
Spreadsheets!
Oh, how I hate spreadsheets. Or I did, until I started learning to use them. There's one for the Morisettan Irony Meterâ„¢ ;-)
I have Office '07, but I haven't actually USED a spreadsheet that wasn't pre-made since the 90s when I kept the books for my dad's extremely short-lived used tire business. I do have a few pre-made ones I use to organize data though, so not only am I seconding (thirding? Fourthing?) this as I re-read this topic, but I have google on another tab looking for a good Excel tutorial. Think I found one though.
As Robin's adventures continue, I add more characters, both major and minor, and it occured to me that there's no way I can keep up with everything mentally as I have been so far, so this is an absolutely brilliant solution :-D
~Zoe T.
Become a Patron for early access ♥
Spreadsheets?
You don't have to use a spreadsheet if you don't want to. I think that it's overkill for a lot of the things people use them for. (Word processors are much the same.)
For State, I have an OpenOffice Writer document with tables in it to remind me who does what when. That means I can review and change things easily without having to worry about the different conventions that a spreadsheet uses. It's also just another text file, which means it's easy to print off if I should need to.
My take on this: if you're not adding numbers up, you don't need a spreadsheet. If you just want to tabulate stuff, use a table in a Word-style document.
Penny
Scrivener
I use Scrivener, which I find helps me keep track of stuff with it's outlines and notes in the research section. It's Mac only, though, if that matters.
Scrivener
Hi Miranda
Thanks. I also received a PM suggesting this program. The website for Scrivenor is Literature and Latte. You're quite right though, it is Mac only, which is a bit of a concern as I'm running on Windows here.
The Scrivenor site recommends PageFour for Windows people, and I've downloaded and installed it. PageFour has some restrictions on the number of pages/books you create until you register and pay for it.
PageFour Scrivenor
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
I know this thread is a bit
I know this thread is a bit old, but I use Scrivener on my Mac, and there is a currently a public beta of the Windows version.
Kayla
honestly
I've never seen the need, I do it all in my head. Sort of messy at times, but the typos are at a minimum. I've read a few of these, 'what do you use thing's', over the last few years and the only program I ever felt inclined to try was Rough Draft. It looked like a great programme and I think it is, but... well I did download it and it's still sitting in my Downloads file... like I said, I do it all in my head. I'll fiddle plotlines and dialogue wile I'm on auto pilot at work and elsewhere. I use an old version of word, 2000 in fact, got it with a Works programme, cheap. I've fiddled with Open Office, which is basically the same thing with a few differences, so I'm torn between new and maybe a pinch better vs what I'm used to.
So, it's all up there and I just write and fiddle as I go, tweaking here and there. Now and then I'll use a separate Doc (oh all rtf's not Doc's for those interested in such details) to keep characters and plot details listed as reference points. I guess that's an on screen (in 'pute?) variation of Puddin's card system. Not as visually catchy though.
Puddin' and Holly helped me with Fonts and stuff when I felt the need to play pretty a while back, so I can mostly do that without blowing up the site, but Sephrena did have to rescue one some months back, just a minor explosion. Pictures? Bloody hell, I don't know, I's a simple soul. In fact KIS, Keep It Simple, is my motto for almost everything.
Umm, that probably doesn't address your question at all really PS, but that's the facts Jack, or something...
Kristina
RoughDraft
Hi Kristina
Thanks for your contribution. I hadn't heard of RoughDraft. Version 3 would seem to be where the development stopped, and it's downloadable from the author's website: Richard Salsbury's Home Page.
I've grabbed a copy, and I'll take a look at it.
Patchy Sketch
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
Given my expert status
in toad sexing, or dormouse overlooking, oh and my technophobic abilities, I have one thing to say - "Duh!"
Angharad
Angharad
And I suppose...
...a couple of centuries ago, you'd have been a Luddite?
Funnily enough, one of the first ever paying jobs I had was during a Christmas vacation working in a chicken hatchery.
There were three or four people whose job was chicken sexing. Can you imagine being paid to look up chicken bums all day? Come to think of it...didn't we have a bit on Bike recently about chickens and their bums?
Protested Smashingly
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
General Ned Ludd
I see he could easily have benefited with a few fashion pointers from Dr. Dennis "Tip" Wilkin as seen below. That colour's simply wrong for him.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Och weel hen
whit a funny job, sittin' on eggs tae hatch them!
Angharad
Angharad
Scribus
It's a layout and desktop publishing software that works for getting your writings in the format you want for any sort of publication - electronic or print media.
You might want to look into genogram software as well. That's for mapping relationships between people, specifically family members - from what I've seen, you can use it for friends and acquaintances as well .
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I use a buncha things...
Here's my two cents on the topic. We all know how much two cents buys today, so take this for what it's worth.
I use a buncha things on a day-to-day basis for my story telling. (I increased the scope a tad, because I've come to realize that I was involved in story telling - back when I "dungeon mastered" & wrote synopses of the adventures.) The tools HAVE changed over the years.
Back in the '70s, I used:
Some of the stuff was hand written, some I hammered out on my Smith-Corona (Yes, it's still alive, but sitting in the basement inside it's case. Come to think of it, Betsy's probably gotten a tad lonely in the last decade... With nobody pulling her out to use.)
Today, I'm not totally computer oriented. Sometimes I put notes on yellow sticky squares, and cover my wall with them. This allows me to rearrange and group them in different ways. This is just a temporary tool. Yes, I know there are PC tools that let you do this, but, my wall's a LOT bigger than my screen. LOL.
I occasionally still resort to graph paper, but more often, it's Visio (for quick & dirty drawings) or SmartDraw (It's got some nice tools for quick floorplan layouts.). I don't have a GOOD layout tool (probably because I'm too cheep and not willing to take the time to learn a good CAD program, or even a cheep one). In at least one of my stories, the "building" is effectively a character, as it's quite large and the characters spend a lot of time moving around. I don't know about you, but I find it more than a little distracting to hear about a room in the East Wing in one chapter, and suddenly it's in the South Tower or some such in a subsequent one (at least when not talking about something like the Harry Potter "Room of Requirements"). So, I try to at least ROUGH OUT a floor plan in such situations. Adding one later is REALLY HARD. Another thing is that when you rough out the floor plan, you sometimes discover that your mind's eye plan just can't work... I try to minimize those things a reader has to "suspend disbelief" on as the more there are, the harder it is for many readers to keep going.
Other tools? Of course:
Simple Editor: I use WordPad, NotePad, my PDA's editor, A pad & Paper (later transcribed to electronic form) and whatever's handy, to jot down ideas and even write out whole scenes.
Another thing I do, is organize my "notes" and such in a folder structure, so I can (usually) find the piece of information. I almost always recall that I wrote it out, I just, sometimes, forget which file I put it in. This serves the same purpose that my tabbed binders did in the old days.
One thing I don't generally use is a graphics tool. I think I have a little skill as a writer, but I have NO skill as an artist. (Can we hear stick figures people?) Both of my daughters can draw - and they DO draw pictures of the characters they create. They say it helps them keep them straight in their heads and doesn't require so much writing to describe them - they can just describe as much as they need to at any point in time, look at the picture and keep it consistent. The older one can even make her figures seem to show emotion. I certainly can see how this would help... Maybe one day, if my writing ever gets good enough, I can find an illustrator that can & will help me add this to my bag of tools.
One thing I've thought about, off and on, for the past few years is a text-to-voice tool. Spell checkers are nice, BUT, they only check if a word is spelled correctly... Not if it's the right word. I've been thinking that if I added a text-to-voice and listened to the result, I might HEAR some wrong words, and catch some glaring mistakes. No, I know it won't help with homophones, but I think I'd recognize the difference between desert and dessert or cloths and clothes, when spoken.
Have I lost anything in my transition from paper to electronics? Perhaps, but I've gained even more, I think. I type much faster than I can write or print. I touch type, so I'm not distracted by having to hunt and peck to find the write letter. I just think and type. Yes, I go back and correct a typo every now and again. I also go back and do full edits and have been known to chop entire pages. All of this makes getting the story idea onto paper easier and faster for me, which helps me actually get it done.
As I said, two cents worth.
Ann
Text-to-Speech
I'm very fond of it. I even went to the trouble to buy a fairly expensive bit of software, AssistiveWare's InfoVox iVox, which has the advantage of having multiple accents available, as well as a reasonable selection of languages, including American English, British English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, French Canadian, German, Greek, Icelandic (not with Snow Leopard, unfortunately), Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (Castilian), Spanish (American), Swedish, and Turkish.
Not that I need anything like all of them, but it's nice to know they're available.
http://www.assistiveware.com/infovox_ivox.php
I do quite like Lucy, though.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I thought about this thread today,
Specifically recalling talk of using Text-to-speech, so I grabbed one of the free ones off the 'net, and already I love it.
The voices can sound a little robotic, but I've found, working on my latest chapter of Robin, that it REALLY helps to spot superfluous and unnecessary extraniously excess bits of extra text.
... Sorry. Couldn't resist a bad joke, but that's about what some of those extra lines felt like as I started listening. Plus, being visually impared, these readers lessen risk of eye strain immensely.
I'm checking out the trial of TextAloud right now, and I'm about to try NaturalReader Free. I've played around with ReadPlease 2003 in the past, but I'm not sure if it'll play nice with Windows 7.
This was an absolutely wonderful suggestion. I only wish I'd paid more attention sooner :-D
Become a Patron for early access ♥
Thank you.
With mine -- which uses the standard Mac interface for control -- I particularly like the fact that I can highlight a passage (however short or lengthy) and use a "hot key" combination (I use Option Escape, because I can do this hi-tech mudra -- through pure coincidence the American Manual Alphabet symbol for "L," which I take to mean Lege! = the Latin for Read! -- with one hand) to have that passage read without extraneous garbage, so it never gets in the way, as it often will in default mode, where it starts reading things as soon as the focus moves to a particular page or window.
If I want to listen again, I just press the hot-key combination again, almost like magic.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
What will it do?
I have used MS Word for many years, and with a few exceptions, it suits me fine. There are a few more formatting things I'd like it to do, such as when I change the order of clauses in a sentence, to automatically recapitalise.
It would be useful to have a built in ability to cross-reference, for example, show me all the sentences including Character A, so I can find out what s/he said somewhere back near the beginning.
I am not a great one for writing out a plot in advance, preferring to let the story write itself, with just a little help from me. I find the stories much more spontaneous that way
I've taken a look at yWriter5, and it mainly seems to be made to manipulate scene order, which is something I don't do a lot of.
What kind of things were you looking for it to do?
Useful
>> It would be useful to have a built in ability to cross-reference, for example, show me all the sentences including Character A, so I can find out what s/he said somewhere back near the beginning.
Most programmer's editors can do this:
That's the "Find All" screen from BBEdit for the Mac, but almost all of them do the same general thing, because finding all instances of a given string is a common need for programmers.
You can just click on each instance in the list of lines and the edit cursor will be placed on the word searched for. You can go back and forth between line list and edit screen at will.
Alternatively, you could just select the first line and use you cursor key to scroll up and down at will, and the edit screen will follow along to show context. It's very handy for exactly that sort of task, although one does have to take care to spell the name correctly every time.
Since programmer's editors typically allow "grep" style searches using "regular expressions," you can search for reasonable misspellings at the same time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Not quite what I was looking for
Thanks for this Puddintane, but I was looking for something a bit more sophisticated than the Word "Find" command, such as perhaps bringing up a new window with the found text in it, being easily able to expand the amount of visible text around it (since the character name may only be used once, with s/he being used thereafter), and scroll easily between the different finds. Perhaps have a different window for each character.
Of course, this may already be somewhere in MS Word. Having used it almost since it was first introduced, I still sometimes find new features.
One other thing which Word does give is password security, which is important since my computer is used by others who I do not wish to share my work with! That would be essential for any other software I started to use.
More sophisticated than Word
Perhaps I gave the wrong impression. Word highlights all the instances of a given word or phrase in a document, and leaves one to scroll around looking for them.
A programmer's editor such as BBEdit creates a separate display window showing where every instance of a given search pattern occurs, and shows the entire edit window surrounding the particular instance selected from the display list to reveal the full context, within which one can scroll around and edit to one's heart's content, and the display list remains visible at all times.
As soon as you actually do anything with an MS Word search, all the highlights disappear and you have to perform the search again to make them reappear.
Further, MS Word allows one to look for unique words or phrases, but only one.
With BBEdit, and any editor that supports searching on regular expressions, you can look for any or all of Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky and Countess Natasha Ilinichna Rostova's various names, titles, patronymics, nicknames, and familiar variations with a single search. Plus, you can vary the behaviour of a replacement string based on what's been found.
Here's a slightly more complex search, with the open search and edit window. One can open many search and display windows using different search parameters, and switch between them at will, so it can, in fact, do exactly what you ask for in your post.
This particular search looks for either the word vitae or libero, but more complex phrases and searches are easy. I overlaid the search expression to keep the display compact enough to make sense of the picture when shrunk down to mandatory site guidelines, but normally one wouldn't bother with it unless one wanted to perform a second or third search or more, and normally it tries to arrange itself off to one side. I had to drag it back.
The result display window on top shows a single line of context for each hit, and the edit window below shows the line highlighted, with the search word highlighted within it, and will more or less instantly readjust itself to look at any particular instance.
Mastering regular expressions can take some time, and there are (slim) books written about the subject that may prove helpful if one wants to explore all the things they're capable of, so I dare say there's enough sophistication there to make one reluctant to fiddle with the shabby tools provided by MS Word ever again.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
That sounds impressive
I have just looked at BBEdit's site, but realised it is for Mac systems only. Can you recommend any similar product for MS operating systems?
Thanks
Charlotte
The one I own for Windows is Visual SlickEdit
Visual SlickEdit works.
http://www.slickedit.com/
But I got it mainly because it provided emulation of the Brief editor by Underware (seriously) which I loved, and not *just* for the name. I quite like SlickEdit as well, and it's customisable, so if it doesn't have a feature you wish it did, you can write it, which was also one of my favourite features in Brief. I love that in both of them, although it was annoying converting my hacks.
It's probably overkill for your needs, and is rather pricey, US$299 for a single-user license. I did this sort of thing for a living, so my ideas of what was handy and reasonable might not mirror yours.
There are many alternatives, although I haven't looked at Windows editors in a long time, so can't vouch for their feature sets. As far as I know, without exhaustive search, all of them offer free trials, so you can download a few and see how they work for you.
A search of text editors or programmer's editors will turn up bunches of them, but here are a few plucked at random:
ConText is free.
http://www.contexteditor.org/
HTMLKit has both free and pay versions US$59 I used to like it for quick and dirty HTML work, because it was well-integrated with Tidy, and I like the guy who made Tidy, Dave Raggett. I see I'm still on his acknowledgments page... Nice guy.
http://www.htmlkit.com/
UltraEdit is US$60
http://www.ultraedit.com/
Boxer Text Editor is US$60
http://www.boxersoftware.com/
Notepad++ is free
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
Arachnophilia is free, but won't do what it ought do, as far as I'm concerned. The Arachnoid part of the web site is interesting to explore, though. He's one of those opinionated guys who has all the answers, but isn't as stupid as most of them.
http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/
Amaya is free, but I find the interface obtuse and it's relentlessly designed for Web development. Some people might like it. As far as I can tell, it won't do find-alls.
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/Amaya.html
Crimson Text Editor is free
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
MetaPad is free
http://liquidninja.com/metapad/
Best of luck,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Bending the definition...
Notepad - no, not notepad.exe, a notepad. You know, the thing made from dead trees.
OK, you can't submit stories on it, but it certainly counts as soft-ware (well, individual sheets - an entire pad may be closer to hard-ware) and can aid people when writing. And a computer doesn't necessarily have to be an electronic device...
And since the entire world is based on mathematics, you could say there are mathematical operations involved in transferring ideas to paper, so you could technically describe notepad.paper as a "computer program" :)
Did I ever tell you lot I have a warped imagination? :)
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Oye!
I never knew I was doing this writing thing all wrong. Wow, I mean, here I thought all you needed was a word processing program and a computer to run it on.
Gosh, maybe if I spend money on one of these special writer's programs some of my stories might actually make sense.
Nancy Cole
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson
StoryCraft Fiction Software
When I first started writing I found the Jarvis Method to be quite helpful. This software is more about story structure than, but quite useful.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
A nonwriters comment
So far I have not published anything here, even if I have some ideas for the future. A help that I will use is to have the information that I might need on a separate computer with it's own screen. I would hate it to destroy my typing by having something else poping up on my screen. The facts, pictures, maps and so on will be availible side by side on the secons screen. As word-working is a fairly slow process, this second puter might be the one thought to be discarded when the new entere my home. Slow, sturdy but still having one or more of the above mentioned aiding programmes.
But in the real world I do not care which methode you use as long as the final result keeps to be as good as it has been for all time I have spent here.
Ginnie
GinnieG
>> destroy my typing
That usually doesn't happen, even in Windows systems, and can be easily worked around by saving constantly. Many editors allow one to turn on an "autosave" function.
On the other hand, I always found it useful to have two or three computers on at once, because I didn't have to fiddle around with cycling through open programmes or separate workspaces. Lately, I've been using one at a time, because I worry about the heat death of the planet, but every once in a while I turn one on for doing things that take a lot of time and might slow down other work. Video renders, for example, are best tolerated when one doesn't have to look at them running.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Like Barbara Cartland?
Oh, you mean one of those formula story generators like Barbara Cartland used?
Part of it is that I am not smart enough to use anything but Word 2007 and some of its features just leave me gobsmaked. My editor just loves to use all sorts of editing tools, but I am afraid that they cause me panic attacks. Tooo much gagetry gets in the way of the creative implulse, I think.
Much Pease.
Khadijah
Barbara Cartland
She probably did it all herself at the start of her writing career, but in order to churn out the immense volume of work she did, she latterly employed a dictation secretary to do the actual writing for her.
That meant: she didn't care about what software, etc to use, let the secretary figure it out; and she could just blather away all day and not be bothered about mundane things like spelling, etc.
Come to think of it, she must have had several secretaries operating in relays. Must be nice to have money, mustn't it?
Penny
Backup software
My recommendation is not a tool specifically for helping while writing, but I think it is important for anyone to have. A good backup solution.
Dropbox gives 2 GB of free internet storage space (250 MB more space for me and you, if you sign up with my referral link)
Dropbox creates a folder where anything you save to it will be copied to the dropbox web site. If anything happens to your computer, and you lose your files, just re-install Dropbox, and restore them.
It is actually meant to keep multiple computers in sync. If you have multiple computers you work from, you don't have to wonder about if your latest changes are on the machine you are working on. If you a working with another author, you can choose to share a folder, and you can both make changes to a file, and be kept up-to-date.
Dropbox also keeps a history of file changes. So, if you don't like some change you made, and want to go back to an older version, you can easily go back to a previously saved version.
--Brandon Young
--Brandon Young
Backup is a VERY good suggestion
Back in the late 90s, when I was young and stupid, I believed that computers were infallable marvels of technology. I had, literally, hundreds of thousands of poems and short stories on my hard drive. They weren't any good, but they meant a lot to me.
Spring of 1999, my senior year, lightning struck our house, taking out three different appliances in one go, including the living room TV and ... you guessed it. My computer, including hard drive.
I didn't have any of it backed up either.
Currently I have an external hard drive casing as well as keeping copies of my writing on a flash drive, but I'm supremely paranoid about losing data these days :-)
Become a Patron for early access ♥
Gmail
For stories, Gmail makes a very nice backup.
You get 7455MB and it's free. Be a while filling it up.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I'll second that
I'll second that recommendation. I've been using Dropbox ever since Erin mentioned it in a blog. I write on three different computers, so the synchronization aspect was what I was mostly concerned about. But the backup aspect is also really handy.
Saless
"But it is also tradition that times *must* and always do change, my friend." - Eddie Murphy, Coming To America
Google Docs
isn't a bad tool for backing up -manually. It also has the advantage of facilitating getting it to my editors.
It also makes my stories available to me anywhere I can find WiFi (even if I forget my USB Flash memory drive...
Ann
RoughDraft
There are at least a couple of ways to think about this, but to take a step back:
First of all, there's writing stories with actual plots, good characterization, a theme, a bang up intro, powerful conflict, a great ending, snappy dialog -- all of those things that make up what most people consider a "story" -- and the sort of thing people expect in mainstream, commercial fiction. Depending on the story, authors are sometimes able to use a TG element while still following the "rules," which can make for a powerful tale that has appeal across a broad spectrum.
Then there's TG fantasy writing, which doesn't follow those rules, but creates a world and a situation where the author's particular TG boat is floated. In essence, the author creates the character she would like to be, and puts her through the dreamlike paces (the fantasy) she would like to go through.
While both types of stories usually require some sort of organization, a lot of the writing software concentrates on helping the author develop her story according to the accepted rules of fiction writing. I never bought the Jarvis software, but I read something about his philosophy, which is designed to produce commercial, marketable fiction. A free-thinking TG fantasy would probably have a rough ride in a Jarvis environment, which concentrates heavily on keeping the story on track, trimming away non-essentials. I heard of other writing software packages that do about the same thing, constantly asking the author if she is really advancing the plot or the character, or if she is going on a side trip. I can see how such software could be efficient for those who want to write commercial fiction, or for those who don't have the greatest grasp of the "rules."
Then, there's the other kind of software that organizes a story, period.
Cards on a table has already been mentioned in an earlier comment. I've read this before in one of my how-to-write books. A prolific author of juvenile fiction uses just that method. She has a nice long table where she lays out 3"x5" cards. She'll have cards with biographical data, timeline cards, cards that show the points she is trying to make, chapter start and end cards, overall theme cards to keep where she's going in mind, and, of course, cards that show the action. She spreads the cards over the table, changing and moving them around as necessary, until she can "see" the story she wants to write, making sure that it maintains a logical, coherent structure. Only then, does she start writing. If she decides to change her story while she's writing it, she need only go back to the table to see how her changes affect the story, and make changes as necessary. Very disciplined and effective.
The other kind of writing software, when you get down to it, attempts to simulate this method. The problem is that a screen or screens are never as big as a table, so you can't look at the whole thing, you have to open different files and/or have a lot of open windows. I think it's whatever does this best for you that's best.
I like a free software package called RoughDraft. It's a word processor without many frills, but is perfectly adequate, and designed for writers. Its main feature is its tabs, which makes it very fast and easy to open and close files, so you can switch from a chapter outline to a timeline, to a bio, to a chapter you're writing in a flash, or keep a couple of open instances to directly compare one file against another.
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
Aardvark Is Right
The Jarvis method brings comfort to the reader by structuring the story in a way that is expected. Most TG readers are expecting almost nothing in the way of formal structure. They will forgive even the most obvious gaff if your story meets their ideal of a meaningful fantasy.
Aardvark is an extremely logical person whose writing is a lesson. If you want to know how to write TG literature try Sappho,
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Pages