[PUBLIC POST] Tools of the trade

[ljwrites]

What do you write with? What's your workflow like? Is there particular software that you like to use for certain purposes, or do you prefer writing in longhand and transcribing to a computer later on? Has technology affected your writing process in any way?

I have a mix of processes. Generally I like Scrivener for its ability to organize snippets of writing and to keep all my research in the same place, but its lack of mobile options means I use Evernote a lot when I'm away from my computers. I'm also fond of longhand writing when I'm in libraries and on public transport. This means I have a lot of scattered notes and bits in different places, all of which I swear I'm going to transcribe to my Scrivener project someday.

A major boon for research purposes is Zotero, a citations database program where I can organize my citations and take extensive notes, with search and tag functions available for later reference. Like Scrivener via Dropbox and Evernote it's all synchronized online, meaning it's automatically backed up and available on whatever machine I log into.

The availability of cloud and synchronization technology like Dropbox, Evernote, and Zotero made things easier in some ways and gave me peace of mind in the form of automatic backup, but I also have a lot of paper notes that are one careless placement or a house fire away from getting lost forever. Better get to it, I guess.

Comments

[chordatesrock]

Scrivener is so worthless for sharing things it isn't funny, but it's not a bad tool for when I haven't shared any of what I'm working on, and I love the ability to hierarchically organize a story. OTOH, it's such overkill that often I just end up creating projects called "misc[fandom]shorts.scriv" because do I really need a new folder and a new file and all of Scrivener's many incredible features for something like The Lady's Gifts? No, I do not.

...But then sometimes I think "lol, I'll add a 63verse folder to miscpernshorts.scriv and write a couple thousand words of genderbend" and then I. Well. Do not do that. Instead I end up having to move the whole thing to a new project and that is kind of annoying. But I love how it lets me play around with subfolders and stuff. Because sometimes being able to put each chapter together in its own folder is AMAZING and I love being able to see my scene list all laid out like that and it's really the best.

OTOH, every now and then, Scrivener accidentally eats my files or becomes unopenable, to the point where I have had to open my damn fics from the command prompt to figure out what has gone so badly wrong.

But for certain projects, you just can't beat a hand-drawn handwritten tumblr mockup for demifiction in sort of an AUSJesque vein. And of course GDrive is better if you don't have consistent access to one machine or want to share things.

One thing is I actually enjoy Scrivener's ability to open two things side-by-side and compare them without having to open them sequentially or switch back and forth. I've used that twice recently. Once in putting together my notes for something, because I needed both an original work and someone's mondegreen-filled misparsing thereof (and then I needed to consult the mondegreen-filled version while writing the scene it's described). And once to make two scenes hit roughly the same beats and make sure my phrasing was just similar enough to make it sort of echo weirdly, to make it clear to the reader and to a character involved in the situation that these two scenes were meant to be compared to each other.

So yeah, Scrivener for the... something other than win. Scrivener a large fraction of the way! I love Scrivener but now and then it really does irk me quite a lot.

And I love things which autosave. Usually.

[ljwrites]

OMG SO GOOD TO SEE YOU HERE *GLOM*

Someday soon, someone is going to combine the best features of Scrivener and GDocs and make a completely shareable, portable, fully mobile-supported platform where people can storyboard and collaborate in real time, and they'll blow Scrivener and maybe GDocs for certain applications out of the water. It may be that one of those online collaboration tools out there does this, but nothing I've seen so far is nearly as good at the structuring and organizing aspect as Scrivener, not to mention those small but unexpectedly useful functions like the split pane.

[chordatesrock]

That actually gives me an idea. It could be that I can make GDocs do this already. I'm going to check.

ETA: Okay, so, this might work. GDocs can be made to sort by title, so naming the scenes "aa beginning scene" and "ab they go into space" could work, and just have different documents for each scene. However! I don't see a way to share an entire folder at once. It'd be a lot of work to then share each thing and then have both people create identical folders to put them in. Splitpane could be achieved with a workaround (two browser windows).

The metadata for this is going to be a LOT of work, which Scrivener would do for you instead of you needing to do it manually, but GDocs could totally be made to act as a hierarchically organized project folder. Yep. But the work to put it together unless I can figure out how to share a whole folder at once... ugh.

*pokes around some more*

Ooh! It's possible to share a whole folder at once, apparently! Hey, can I put together a test of this system and you can tell me if it makes sense from your end? Might be kind of a lot of work to go between scenes, though... but now I'm really excited and want to see if this works out. I'll make the thing and share it with you, anyway, and if you have time you can poke around and see if it makes sense as a way to collab in the future.

(Also, hi! :) Good to see you, too!)

[ljwrites]

That's really interesting, what a great idea! It makes sense for me, and it's actually not hard to go between scenes--on my computer I can move between adjoining scenes by clicking the left and right arrows that appear when I'm looking at a document. It's a pleasanter experience, in fact, because there's a lot less scrolling involved. OTOH I think the arrow things appear in preview mode and not in edit mode which I would need in order to leave comments and modify the text. And there's no binder to allow me to move between non-consecutive documents and see the whole structure at a glance. I think you're on to something here, though GDrive just doesn't seem built for this.

[chordatesrock]

There's sort of a binder, it being the page for the subfolder you're looking at. Though as the example I used had folders for chapters I don't know how to view the entire thing at once. The main folder shows the chapter subfolders, and the chapter subfolders show lists of all the scenes therein, at least using the display options that I'm using.

Of course it'd be a bit of work to make that splitpane with the current scene...

Thanks for poking around. I don't know if I'll do this again because it is a lot of work to set up. GDocs isn't really made for mass-creation of a bunch of similar documents. To create a new document takes an extra click and then there was the naming thing. (This project, on my computer, in Scrivener, does not have scene names.)

(And note for anyone intending to copy me: I opted to preface scene names with aaa, bbb, ccc, etc, rather than just a, b, c. If I'd used single letters, adding something in the middle would be awful; you'd have to rename everything after it. This way it's possible to, e.g., add in a bbc or bbd or bbe in between bbb and ccc. I did feel that prefacing titles with eee made them seem excessively excited.)

Yeah, this is not exactly Scrivener. It's sort of the same features but not nearly as user-friendly.

By the way, did you get a single email notif that the whole folder was shared, or did Google spam your inbox with separate notifs for every scene?

Anyway, thanks for helping test this!

[ljwrites]

It's a good attempt at seeing what would make a Scrivener-like system work. I searched around a little and it looks like wikis are the most common tools for collaborative documents. They don't have GDoc's notation tools or Scrivener's visual elements, though, and they'd still have GDoc's document ordering issues.

By the way, did you get a single email notif that the whole folder was shared, or did Google spam your inbox with separate notifs for every scene?

I got a single notification for the whole folder.

Anyway, thanks for helping test this!

No problem! Interesting concept, and interesting AU too.