Feb. 14, 2017 – After years of writing in Word, I switched over to Scrivener for my last book.
It took some getting used to, but there was much to love. All of that organization, imposed like magic upon my chaotic process! I could just glance over at the left-hand column and see my chapters adding up. Very satisfying.
But I spend a lot of time writing in coffeeshops, where I prefer to use my tablet, rather than toting my laptop around. And it turns out that the (somewhat) recently released Scrivener app and I, we are not friends.
So for Book 6, I’m using Google Docs, which has many of the disadvantages of a Word document – i.e, one long, cumbersome doc, with the added disadvantage of feeling even clunkier. But it’s portable. Huge up-side. And, its very clunkiness has proven an unexpected benefit. Because of it, I’m not tempted to zip back and forth in the doc, endless nitpicking as I go along. I just plow forward.
The process reminds me of that E.L. Doctorow quote in a Paris Review interview: “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
That’s how Book 6 feels, each day a contained bit of progress, all darkness and mystery ahead, but just enough light to get to the next scene.
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