Choosing a Writing Weapon of Choice
While taking part in the Blogging101 course over the last month at Wordpress, I have arm-twisted myself into writing more than in quite some time – which has in turn focussed my attention on the tools I use to write. Everything came into focus while travelling across the country yesterday, holed up in a train carriage with the netbook.
I like distraction free word processors. Over the last few years I've used WriteMonkey on Windows, WriteRoom on the Mac, and FocusWriter on Linux, Windows, and the Mac (it's cross platform). I've even tried out WordGrinder on Linux, which provides a terminal based word processor. If you have not seen a “distraction free” word processor before, they generally all do the same basic trick – blocking out your entire screen, and just giving you your text, and a flashing cursor. You can generally change the colour, and the font, but that's usually it. They work wonders if you have a mind anything like mine, which can be distracted by just about anything, and everything.
I read an article a while ago about George R R Martin – the author of Game of Thrones – and hispreferred writing weapon of choice – an old DOS based PC running Wordstar. In many ways he's doing the same trick – removing any distractions from the writing experience – it's all about the words in the end, and the act of typing characters onto a screen and saving them hasn't really changed in the last 30 years. I experimented with booting my netbook from a USB key for a time, and using Microsoft Word version 5 (the last DOS version), which Microsoft give away these days. It was great, but perhaps a step too far – because getting the words from the machine to the internet meant rebooting it. Not exactly arduous, but a hassle none the less.
I've pretty much settled on Ubuntu Linux, running Focus Writer. Ubuntu is much lighter on resources than Microsoft Windows, and usually itjust works. You put the installation DVD into your computer, boot it from the DVD, let it install itself alongside the existing Windows installation, and it gets on with it, no questions asked. It's pretty miraculous really. The real kicker is what Ubuntu provides once it finishes, and boots up – a free software catalogue where you can click the various apps you want, and it downloads them, and sets them up for you. This would be where FocusWriter and Dropbox enter the stage.
I can write all manner of badly formed sentences in FocusWriter, and save to a DropBox folder. I can then wander over to the desktop PC when I get a chance, and re-open the blog post from it's DropBox folder, copy it into a blog post, and away I go. DropBox wins because it keeps versions too – every time you save, DropBox keeps another version – you can login via the web and fish an old version of a file out of the history.
If you've never tried out Ubuntu, and you have an old computer around the place, I urge you to try it out. It's free. Also, download FocusWriter, and have a play. Be sure to fiddle with the “Theme” settings to adjust how it looks.