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Or why you should think less about gimmicks and more about reducing friction.
‘What program do you use to write on?’
If you are a starting your journey as a writer, you have probably asked this question. If you haven’t, you should. If you are well on your way in the word-slinging profession, then you quite possibly ask yourself this question daily, usually as a way of distracting yourself from your latest manuscript.
There are a lot of options, and all kinds of devices, from iA Writer to Scrivener via Google Docs, Pages, and Freewrite, and a few more. It is a dazzling choice, and faced with that choice, most of us do one of two things: we default to what we know, or we get what think has the most impressive, professional features. Both of these approaches will cost you, maybe in money, but more importantly in time. So, my standard, boring – but tested – answer is to… use the tools that are closest to what you are going to use to submit your manuscript.
And that means Word.
This is why
Publishers, agents and clients are going to ask you to submit your drafts in .doc or docx file. There are exceptions, because there are always exceptions. This is Word’s native file type.
Most of those publishers/agents/clients are going to open your manuscript in word. Yes, I know, not all but a huge majority.
They will also have format standards, and those standards will be calibrated for .doc/docx (again in the vast majority of cases)
You do not want the person receiving your manuscript to reject it for not being in the correct format, or to have to grind their teeth as they wade through a work set up in a strange way.
You can, of course, convert manuscripts written on other programs to the correct format. But to be certain that everything is good, you will more than likely be using Word. So why not use it to begin with?
And this comes to the biggest case I would make for using the not-trendy but eternal work horse that is Word – efficiency through reduced effort.
Use the program you are going to submit in, and set it up so that you spend less time on formatting. Which brings me to something that you have to do…
Set up your styles and formatting
Publishers and agents ask for manuscripts in a very particular format that covers font, type size, line spacing, indentation size, and justification. Most of these are very, very similar: Times New Roman, 12pt, 1.5 or 2 line spacing, first indented, no tabbed indents, margins set to 2.5 cm. Vary a little and season to taste. Spend the time to set up those formatting pre-sets. It will mean that you are working in your submission ready format right from the start, and can format the whole document with just a few clicks. It will save you lots of small slices of time, and that time adds up. Use the simplest, most commonly used tool, and set it up so that you have to spend as little time on formatting as possible, and as much time writing and revising as you can.
But, I hear you scream, what about all those other programs and devices? Are they useful?
The simple answer is yes, but they are tools for particular jobs. Do I use them? Yes, apart from anything AI (No. Thank you, no. Please stop). I have used Scrivener, I have a Freewrite, and used Google docs, and Final Draft and several more. Here are why and what I use them for:
Final Draft
Find it here: https://www.finaldraft.com/
It’s the industry standard for script writing, the equivalent of Word. I use it for live action and animation scripts, and sometimes for audio. Most people require scripts in .fdx file format. All the same advice as using Word applies to using Final Draft – learn how it works, and set-up your styles and formatting.
Scrivener
Find it here: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
The program that most people mean when they talk about specialist writing software. Scrivener allows you to plan out stories, to attach notes and research material to bits of your work, to reorder sections, to tag characters, locations and almost any detail you like across a manuscript. It has a lot of functionality.
I have used Scrivener for over a decade and written multiple books on it. I am a fan. But… I don’t use it for all my books. If a book has a lot of different point of view characters, stories happening in different locations, or at different times, I will use Scrivener. Why? Because it lets me write in a non-linear way and then move elements around without copy and pasting. All the tagging functionality also lets me keep track of where characters are, and even what the time it is if that is key to the structure of the book. There are even integrations with timeline databases like Aeon Timeline, which let you build detailed timelines and then synchronise them with Scrivener. Very cool. But also complex, and that’s what Scrivener is good at – making complexity manageable.
If you are going to use it and get the most out of it, you are going to have to learn how. There is a learning curve. Top of the list of things to do is set up your styles and export settings, because – guess what – you are going to be exporting to a Word .docx file and you want what comes out to be as close to submission format as possible.
Freewrite (and other minimalist writing platforms and programs)
Find them here: https://getfreewrite.com/
I love these. They appeal to me as someone who wrote their first stories and tabletop games on a StarWriter 60. They are though, a tool for a particular job, and that job is getting words down. They are useful when you need momentum, to pile into a story without looking back or overthinking what you are doing. In fact, they come into their own as a solution to overthinking, re-chewing what you have already written, and generally prevaricating. They are not designed for editing, in fact they deliberately make editing difficult to stop you doing it. Which means that yes, you guessed it again, you are going to be editing and finishing the work in another program, and yes that program will likely be Word.
Google Docs
Useful for collaborative work and for documents that you want to share easily, or update regularly. It’s a tool for work in progress documents: for the outline that you are dropping ideas into from your phone, for the concept bible you are working on with other people, for your author bio. People can and do use it for longer work; I know people who write novels in Google docs. It is possible, but… yes, you’ve guessed it, you are going to be submitting in .docx, which means that you are going to be exporting that Google Doc and checking it in Word, so you might as well use Word and save yourself the time.
Pages
Is a good Word Processor. I have used it. In some ways it is arguably better than Word. But… and by now you know what I am going to say. You are going to have to save that file in a .doc or docx format and hope that all the formatting set up has worked.
And the contradictory bonus…
Pen and Paper
Ok, yes, this is not software, but I’m going to include it anyway. Pen and paper is the other best way to write.
It’s portable, you can literally carry a notebook and pencil at all times.
It’s incredibly durable; I recently went back and dug through notebooks I had used twenty years ago.
It’s freeing. There’s something about writing on paper that makes what you are writing feel more exploratory, like what you are doing is automatically a work in progress rather than an attempt at the finished article. That goes absolutely against the advice I have given in this article – that you should get as close to the format you are going to submit in as possible. But this is a feature, not a flaw. Like the programs I have mentioned here, pen and paper is a tool that is useful for a particular job and that job is letting you be free of the pressure of the keyboard. It lets you write on a chair, on a bench, standing at a bus stop. It lets you jot down dialogue which seems great at the time, but which you will look at differently when you type it up. It is the most freeing tool, more so than a minimalist program or device.
Which means, if you have Word and a notebook and a pen you have the two poles of freedom and technical format, and that is all you really need. Defaulting to these tools will mean that you are working with the minimum of friction, and using the fewest and most effective tools for the job, the job being writing your best work.
Last thing…
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Edited by Greg Smith
Written without AI
