Question Bev - What Writing Software Do You Use?

BevVincent

Hope you don't mind my asking but I'm pretty sure you mention using MS Word with some formatting tools or styles you favour.



If its not giving up any state secrets could you expound on your choice of software, tools etc? I'm curious as to how you ended up making the choices you did. How do you track characters etc throughout a novel?



Maybe you've covered this already in an essay at Storyteller's or elsewhere. Or maybe it could the source of your next Storyteller's installment.

BevVincent

I use Word without any special bells or whistles. When I start a new short story, I simple start with a document from a previous story, save it under a new name. I don't use templates or special formatting. 1" margins all around, 12 pt Times Roman font, double spaced, 1/2" indent at the beginning of each paragraph except for the first paragraph of each section, which I do not indent (for no good reason).



Writing a story or novel manuscript requires little of a word processor, so I use the one that most people use and that doesn't get in the way of the writing at all. I used Word Perfect to write my thesis back in the 80s; however, the first Windows versions of WP were very unstable. Documents would get corrupted and it crashed a lot, so I switched to Word back in the 90s and I've seen no reason to go back to WP, even though it's on all my computers and it's much more stable. I haven't yet found something that I can't do with Word. Like I said, it's not desktop publishing, so as long as I can change fonts, line spacing and running headers, I'm good to go.



When I do screenplay work, I use Final Draft, which is industry standard and fairly intuitive. It has all the offsets built in for dialog, narrative, attributions, etc.



Sometimes I keep a notebook on characters, but often I just wing it. If I can't remember a specific detail, like hair color, middle name, kind of car they drive, I just search through the document until I find it.

Lou_Sytsma

Your approach makes sense Bev. Keep it simple. There are so many fancy packages out there which promise to streamline and/or enhance the process but actually add distracting layers between the writer and the blank page.



Of course different strokes for different folks. Some swear by the more enhanced packages.



Thanks for the quick response.

BevVincent

The best writing package is still the pen and a notepad, and I still make use of that from time to time.

Lou_Sytsma

So true.  One can not be more direct than that.