Novel Writing Made Less Impossible -- Right Tools For the Write Job?

In writing this blog, my job is to inspire you. I'm also out to take away your excuses ... hopefully, without also taking away your will to live. Unfortunately, I make no promises. I tend to err on the side of Tough Love, probably because my best edits came from editors who were a little hard on me. So I guess I'm continuing that "cycle of abuse" thing with you. I sincerely hope you know my heart is in the right place when I become a bit terse with you.

When seeking an excuse not to start writing (which I hope you've started doing), one of the most frequent stalling tactics I receive is the question, "What equipment do I need to write a book? What's the right program to put a book or article together?" As far as hardware goes, if you can read this blog, then you have it already. If you have a computer/laptop, that's half the battle right there. You need a device that can facilitate typing (or as some of my friends do, dictate into a recording device and then run the recording through a voice-to-text program to create editable copy), formatting, file transfers, and printing.

You don't need the system to be super-fast or to contain a graphics card more suited to playing games. The computer simply needs to be able to perform tasks with sufficient speed and efficiency to get the work done. I use a PC and have never paid more than $600 for a laptop (my current system cost me around $300 because it was on sale at my local Big Box Electronics Monger). I'd suggest you have a Microsoft-supportable operating system (mine is Windows 10 when it was free) which will run most programs needed for this venture.

"Hey, Brian!" I often hear. "What's the best program for writing the book?"

Again, don't go fancy on us. I've had great luck with three different programs. The first, one I used for a number of years, was OpenOffice (at https://www.openoffice.org) . It's a free download and the program gets frequent updates as its users improve the coding. The layout is very similar to MS Word from about fifteen years ago. It's pretty basic, but does quite a bit for the money ... in other words, don't complain about what you're getting for free.

Seriously, it's a solid word processing program that plays well with others. Just make sure you save your documents as an .rtf (Rich Text Format) so if you want to work on your writing on other machines, they'll be able to read your work. OpenOffice has a proprietary format, ODF, that can only be read in OpenOffice. That's well and good, but when you save your document, OpenOffice defaults to .odf, even if you called up the file in a previously-saved format. So keep an eye on that.

The other word processing program, of course, is MS Word (https://products.office.com/en-us/word). It's the industry leader and it's not hard to see why. It's versatile and plays well with its allied programs such as Excel and Publisher. You can purchase this in various Microsoft programs, but you might consider the Office 360 subscription pack. For a small monthly fee starting at $9.99 per month (as of this date), you can have Word, Access, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft goodness, as well as some cloud storage.

Despite having to pay for MS Word, you can get automatic updates for the programs. OpenOffice does not automatically update, but will inform you when a new version has been released for download.

The only other program I use for my writing is Scrivener (www.literatureandlatte.com). A number of my novel-writing pals sword by the program so I checked it out. Scrivener helps you assemble your plot and your research, be it online articles or videos, and gather it all in one place. You can even write your story/book in the program, then export it to Word or OpenOffice for final formatting. It's got a learning curve, but there's plenty of online help. The cost is $40 for PC, $45 for Mac and you can download a sample for FREE. The awesome part about the sample is that most of them let you have it for a limited period of consecutive days. Scrivener gives you 30 days to check it out. But let's say you try it out on January 1st and don't get back to it until March 2nd. You still have TWENTY-NINE days to put the program through its paces. This is money well-spent.

You can also format for stage plays, comic book scripts (although not the format I use), screenplays, teleplays, and more. I believe this should be a vital part of your writing arsenal. There are programs such as Screenwriter Pro or Final Draft that are staples of the screenwriting community. However, I've gotten just as much bang for the buck from Celtx (https://celtx.en.softonic.com) and that's a lot of bang because Celtx is also free. The learning curve on this one is pretty narrow, but it works quite well. Finally, download Grammerly (www.grammerly.com). Again, it's FREE (my favorite F-word) for the downloading. Grammerly is not 100% accurate, but it's close enough. It checks not only your spelling, but your punctuation as well (I'm gonna wind up using that Oxford Comma yet). If you go to the Grammerly site, you can avail yourself of other services there so definitely check this out. Notice that aside from the hardware and one program, everything else is free. Now ask yourself ... many people are making their writing dreams come true. If you aren't prepared to pay the price to make your dream come true, are you willing to pay the price of regret? Told you I'm tough love. Write on!

NEXT WEEK: New Year's Revolutions

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#Writing #Scrivener #MSWord #OpenOffice #Celtx