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23 Responses to “Stupid Writer Tricks: Choose the Right Tools”

1. # L.N. Hammeron 15 Jul 2006 at 1:59 pm

   For online storage, part of my nightly backup (also to thumb drive) is to mail the current draft to a free email account that no one knows and no spam reaches. Every week or so, I purge old incremental backups.

   I don’t like Encarta, not even as a dictionary. MW 11 + thesaurus (from CD) works for everything not encyclopedic (though the rhyming search is much more clumsy than other rhyming dictionaries). This does leave me without a desktop reference encyclopedia, though.

   —L.

2. # Kevin Andrew Murphyon 15 Jul 2006 at 2:02 pm

   David,

   Going through your list, in order:

   1. Desktop search?
   I use Wordperfect and keep all my work for a project in the same file. The search function in Wordperfect seems to work fine for my purposes. Then again, I’ve got a semi-eidetic memory, so I haven’t had much trouble keeping track of character data.

   2. Encyclopedia sets:
   I’ve got three full physical encyclopedias in my house. I usually pull out the old children’s one for most of the basic data. I do use the web, however, for a fair bit of stuff, but admit to the distraction function. The one program I use happily is Rhymer, a rhyming dictionary made by the old makers of the WordPerfect Rhymer, which I also have, somewhere, but I stopped using WP 5.1 some years ago. The program I mourn the loss of usefulness the most of, however, is the Webster’s spellchecker. It’s a piggyback spellchecker that was made for WP 5.1 and other programs, but the big bonus of it over all other spellcheckers is that it’s based on the public domain Victorian edition of Webster’s, including the supplemental dictionaries of names of characters from scripture, mythology and literature. It’s nice to know if you’ve misspelled a proper name and better to have a program that offers you the right one.

   3. Huzzah on the laser printer!
   Yes, I have one. Actually, two. They broke. I’ve been meaning to fix them. Especially since the little color deskjet I had, I’ve now burned through both cartridges. What’s the best deal on a new one you know of? My old ones are HP IIPs I’ve had since grad school.

   4. Thumb drive? Just use your iPod.
   I don’t bother with thumb drive. I just set aside one gig of my iPod to keep backups of all my writing ever, in all the multiple drafts. iPods are an external harddrive anyway, and current documents I can store on my:

   5. PDA
   Yep, I have an old Jornada with an external keyboard. I can edit novels with it. More than that, the one crucial thing I’ve found is to not rely on its internal power to save your data, since if it runs dry, it takes your work with it. The solution? A flash memory card stuck into the extra memory port. Save all your documents on that, which not only keeps them safe if the PDA loses power or fries, but also makes for an easy way to transfer them to other people’s laptops and mainframes if the PDA interface isn’t happy but the flash memory reader is.

   6. The online storage…
   Switched the order with #5 above. Ah well. The trouble I have with online storage is that the companies that provide it either charge money or else go bankrupt at a moment’s notice. Sometimes both. However, text files are terribly small. I’ve squirreled away my work on the harddrives of all the members of my family, and send updates of new works to friends and agents when significant chunks are done. I’ve done the same for friends in turn.

3. # makoiyion 15 Jul 2006 at 3:41 pm

   Desktop search: Never used anything but Google. The key to searching the web is knowing what to ask it

   Printer: I’d love a laser printer. I am saving my pennies.

   Encyclopedias: Um - The Coolest Cross-sections Ever! by Stephen Biesty. Why? Several scenes using ships and I had no idea, not really, and that book breaks it all down into understandable sections. Plus, after I’d written said scenes I had folk begging to know where I got my research from. So I’m guessing it worked.

   On-line storage: Yes, Yahoo, too.

   Flashdrives: Oh, definitely, yes. I don’t possess an ipod and where I live storms frequently fry comps despite surge protectors. I have lost countless chapters in the past. I always back on on paper, too, and disc, when I remember. I have learned.

   The other essential thing for me isn’t a physcial object, but it’s still very relevent. I am hopeless at writing in a vacuum. The best tool I ever found is a writing forum OWW as Sherwood has mentioned before. The interaction and encouragement of others writers is something I cannot live without. That and a LJ where I can whine occasionally. That interaction keeps me going when I’d cheerfully throw manuscripts out the window.

4. # David Louis Edelmanon 15 Jul 2006 at 5:26 pm

   Kevin: Good suggestion re the iPod instead of a thumb drive. For me, however much I dig my iPod, I find it to be one of the most unreliable machines on Earth. It periodically just wipes out all data for seemingly no reason. Maybe I just need to upgrade.

   And re laser printers: Haven’t looked into them recently. But the last one I bought (a Brother) has been working perfectly for about two years now, and it was very cheap too. Brother is always a good brand.

5. # Carol Bergon 15 Jul 2006 at 6:45 pm

   References: To supplement my paper Oxford, I’ll use desktop dictionaries - I really like Google’s “define” function for quick reassurance. But I’ve never found anything to rival a real paper copy of a real Roget’s Thesaurus - the one with the semantic word list in the back. I love browsing the related words, not just retrieving the one I’m after. Sometimes just looking at all the words for “competence” or “memory” or some such will spur creativity in plotting or character development!

   Printers: My 5-year-old LaserJet 4000 (with duplexer) is my gold standard. Must confess to being ex-HP employee, so I am biased printer-wise. (But I type on a Sony.)

   Thumb drive: Backup goes to other computers on the home network and novels to an occasional CD. But the thumb drive has quickly become the data transporter of choice for conferences and conventions, for getting marketing materials like bookmarks to a print shop. It has saved my bacon when I needed extra copies or I’m away from home - “egads, I need fliers to hand out to all these booksellers?!”

   PDA: Monthly calendar that sits open on my desk, available to other family members to view or add to. No comparison. And a paper notebook that sits there to jot down ideas that don’t have a place yet or draw maps for myself or whatever.

   Only half a dinosaur.

   Carol

6. # Tapetumon 15 Jul 2006 at 10:17 pm

   Huh. All this time hunting back and forth through my pages, and getting an external search program never occurred to me.

   I’m in mourning for my thumb drive right now. We had a flood, and while it was upstairs, it had a heavy book dropped on it in the general scramble to haul things out of the basement (this was last night). Suddenly I can’t move back and forth between my laptop and my desktop anymore. It’s a major pain. Plus I lost my last three pages, which isn’t vital (I didn’t like them much anyway), but is annoying.

   I’ve never gotten a PDA. I do my notetaking on an old-fashioned spiral bound notebook. I might switch if I ever got a PDA, I might not. I find I write differently longhand on paper than I do in an electronic format, and sometimes those insights are useful.

   As to printers, my trusty Brother sits beside me right now, waiting for those three pages to get retyped, along with about six more, so I can declare this draft “Done!” and get on with printing it and making it bleed.

7. # Constance Ashon 15 Jul 2006 at 11:37 pm

   Doing history, as we do here at home, we use all the tools we can employ.

   Weirdly, still, a lot of what we employ is just typing into the databases what we find coz some databases don’t allow cut&paste&save into your own file — $$$$ yanno.

   Often, at night, yours truly receives a sorta love letter — i.e. all the stuff Vaquero actually typed into his own hard drive’s data base from what he surveyed that day, and — well, vice versa.

   We couldn’t have done that lo those years ago, as we worked through primary sources.

   Love, C.

8. # Mitch Wagneron 16 Jul 2006 at 1:15 am

   I do a different kind of writing than most of you here, as well as a lot of editing. However, I’m also an unpublished beginner at fiction.

   Here’s what I use for both:

   Desktop Search: I’ve never really found one I’m satisfied with. Lately, I’ve resorted to just using descriptive filenames and a good directory structure. Then, when I’m looking for a particular document, I can find it one or two ways: Either look in the approrpiate directory, or use a tool called RecentX for Windows, which keeps track of recently opened files.

   So, the fiction story I’m currently working on has a hero named Logor, and I’ve named it Logor.Doc. I type “logor” into the search bar of RecentX, and up it pops.

   A CD or DVD-ROM dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia. Heck with that; I just use Google. One neat trick: If you type “define: word” into Google’s search bar, it’ll pop up some definitions of the word. (Carol Berg alluded to this earlier.)

   Another handy trick: When inventing fantasy and science fiction character names, type the name into Google first. If you’re writing a Lovecraft pastiche and want to name one of the Old Gods “Nixon,” well, that might sound like a good name, but did you know that there was a president called that too?

   A cheap, dependable laser printer. I have an undependable four-year-old HP. I swear at it a lot. I wonder if just taking the stuff down to Kinko’s might be more cost-effective than buying a printer.
   A thumb drive. I back up to a 250 GB Western Digital hard drive, about the same vintage as my printer.

   Sign up for online storage. Ouch. I need to do that.

   A good PDA for jotting down notes. Yup. Palm Treo cell phone/PDA with a detachable, portable keyboard. Last time we went away for vacation, I got up early in the morning, before Julie was up, left the hotel room, walked down the street to a nearby coffeehouse, had a nice breakfast, and then wrote fiction on the PDA, with the portable keyboard. It was lovely.

9. # Michael Phillipson 16 Jul 2006 at 3:04 am

   One tool that I am just starting to use is wiki software. I downloaded tikiwiki about a year ago but only really started putting information into it recently. I suspect that there is a better choice out there somewhere, one that doesn’t require me to run easy php. I do like the fact that I use Firefox to access it. (Yes, I realize that I could write it up as HTML, but the software I’m using makes me remember fewer tags. )

   It lets you build an encyclopedia of your work for each project you are working on and you can easily set up links between words in a story or article to other stories and articles that help explain them.

10. # Carol Bergon 16 Jul 2006 at 1:29 pm

    What I like about Google define is that it will get definitions from lots of different sources, not just a standard dictionary (Princeton wordnet seems to be the baseline source). It’s a quick way to find glossaries for everything from wine-making to psychology (well, perhaps those two things aren’t all that far apart.)

11. # Kate Elliotton 16 Jul 2006 at 1:59 pm

    Instead of a PDA I use a small notebook - that is, a notebook, you know, spiral bound, with lined paper.

12. # Mitch Wagneron 16 Jul 2006 at 3:39 pm

    Michael - I played around with desktop wikis for a while; the best one I found was Wikipad. I urge you to check it out.

    Desktop wikis are such wonderful tools, I keep thinking they should be more useful than they actually are. To me, at least.

    Another option, the one I use, is TiddlyWiki. I wouldn’t describe it as a true Wiki; it’s, rather, a wiki-like thingie that lives in a single file, on your desktop, accessed through your Web browser. I use it myself, to keep my master things-to-do list for life.

13. # Michael Phillipson 16 Jul 2006 at 9:51 pm

    Mitch, thank you. Both of those look better than the one I’m using. I love the fact that they are both self contained.

14. # 6on 17 Jul 2006 at 10:16 am

    First of all, since this is my first time posting, I want to express my gratitude on such an informative and interesting site!

    Now, onto the comments….

    A CD or DVD-ROM dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia.

    A good computer dictionary/thesaurus program that I refuse to be without is WordWeb (http://wordweb.info/) . The dictionaries/thesaurusi I use when not on the computer are the electronic, handheld kind, but WordWeb has basically replaced them for me.

    As for as a cheap, dependable laser printer is concerned, finding one that is cheap is difficult for me. Most I’ve seen cost around $100 or more. But I’ve recently lucked onto a good find of one around $60.

    Concerning thumb drives and online storage–I love my thumb drive. Especially since if you try to work on a floppy and use that floppy between more than one computer, the odds are the floppy is going to end up messed up (and right when you most need the contrary thing, too But instead of signing up for online storage, I tend to email myself files periodically.

15. # Kate Elliotton 17 Jul 2006 at 12:52 pm

    I’m willing to buy a not so cheap, dependable laser printer, since it is a business expense, and vital to my professional life. Most recently I bought a four in one. I don’t use the phone/fax part, but I do use the scanner, copier, and printer.

16. # Hughon 17 Jul 2006 at 1:00 pm

    Since the mid-1980s I use NotaBene for all my writing (which is not, or at least not intended to be, primarily fiction). It is a bit of a niche program, but it does and has done for years things that are only becoming possible with other programs.

    It’s a 3-in-1 writing program, intended largely for academics (humanities-based academics, at that! As I recall the story, the originator was working on a doctorate in theology and got so frustrated by all the idiocies of the mass-market word processors out there that he said: ‘I could do better than that,’ and basically designed what he wanted), but it does–and does very well–some of the things mentioned in this post.

    Its three components are: the word-processor itself, a reference program called Ibidem, and a textual database program called Orbis.

    The wordprocessor has all the features of the mass-markets and then some, the most useful for me is the ability to format automatically (using what they call “frameworks”–basically an outline function) to match any of the major academic style manual requirements. It can change to and from, reformatting all text, notations, and bibliography on the fly. I originally got it for its ability to use non-standard characters (my writing includes a lot of Czech and other ‘extra character’ Latin alphabet languages), which it does more efficiently than mass-markets (including Greek and Hebrew, the latter running correctly right-to-left). It has gone Windows, but retains a host of command-line and keystroke functions that date back to its DOS days and still work. It also includes a rich dictionary and thesaurus (though I do use wordweb, too).

    Ibidem will store the bibliographic information on any source I consult, so that I only ever type the information for a footnote once. The newest version added the ability to create a note-taking file linked to that information, so that when I refer to notes, and use a citation, the reference comes with it automatically (and these note-taking files can be indexed by Orbis, see below). Ibidem will keep track of all citations, reformat them if you change style sheets, and of course renumber them if you delete or add–and it supports three levels of footnotes (numbers, alpha, roman alpha, for example) simultaneously. Bibliographies are generated automatically and also change to match style demands if you change stylesheets.

    Orbis will index any word you have ever written and make it available for Boolean searching, but it also searches by keyword if you have the discipline to keyword your notes as you type them in.

    And the three parts are seamlessly integrated into the whole, so you don’t run into any compatibility problems among different programs.

    For a fiction writer, these things may not be crucial, but it’s a great academic’s program anyway!

17. # Sherwood Smithon 17 Jul 2006 at 4:20 pm

    I haven’t used my treo for WIP purposes–the thumb drive is too clumsy and painful for arthritic fingers, and I don’t know what a trustworthy keyboard would be even if i had the cash.

    But yes on the rest–lately I have expanded my on-line resources more, and bookmarked them (impratical in the days of dial-up, a blessing now that we have the house wired.) We still have our splendid encyclopendia Britannica bought new 11 years ago, which i supplement with Google and with my own library.

    I store offsite as well as on a Lexar.

    Notes still tend to be scrawled mostly on post its (like school concerns etc) so I end up with a zillion of them yellow-snowing my desk and then have to laboriously type them in. I think I need one generation higher of ipaq than mine–but again, it costs money we don’t have. So I don’t even know what the current capabilities are.

18. # Katharine Kerron 20 Jul 2006 at 5:14 pm

    Encyclopedias are about the worst possible place to do research, just by the way. For a quick fix or a single fact or two, sure, but they are fourth-hand sources and thus unreliable and very limited. Because of the vast amount of time involved in updating an encyclopedia, you can be sure that the information is at least 10 years out of date. It’s also been boiled down from a few tertiary sources chosen for their easy-to-skim type and layout. No, I’m not kidding — a friend of mine put himself through grad school by working at the Brittanica, so I have this straight from the source.

    What do I mean, “fourth hand”? Suppose you want to research California history in the 1890s. A primary source would be documents from California written in that period, ie, political documents, news reports, contemporary historical articles, and the like. A secondary source would be a book or article written by someone who’s read the primary sources and is using them to make a point, discover trends, and so on — ideally the point of view will be fair and accurate, but one never knows.

    With tertiary sources, you have a book or popularized article written by someone who’s read and compiled a lot of secondary sources — you’re in Textbook Land, in other words. Encyclopedias take this pre-digested material and boil it down some more. What comes out is — oh never mind that metaphor . . . Online encyclopedias, like the infamous Wikipedia, are even more UNreliable.

    With scientific topics, the problem’s even worse, obviously, as scientific information arrives in a flood daily and long-established theories fall fast and often.

    If accuracy matters to you, and it should, go to the primary sources.

19. # David Louis Edelmanon 20 Jul 2006 at 6:42 pm

    For me, the encyclopedia is really just a quick reference tool. For instance… a lot of Infoquake is set in India, and I needed to know what the weather was like in the province of Andhra Pradesh in November. Cue Encarta.

    Ditto the structure of the human eye, which also plays a primary role in a couple of chapters. I needed a basic overview, not a 300-page thesis of the entire field of optometry.

    And btw… you call Wikipedia “infamous,” Kit… but I assume you’re aware of the recent study by Nature magazine which concluded that Wikipedia is pretty much just as accurate as Britannica?

20. # Katharine Kerron 21 Jul 2006 at 4:44 pm

    Dave, I am aware of that NATURE article — which is why I now call Wiki and the Britannica both infamous. I am down on encyclopedias in general, which is why I wrote the above post.

    Neither are accurate enough for real research, in other words. Consider the structure of the eye — there has been a lot of new research lately on how the human eye works, done at MIT among other places, in the hopes of providing computers with real vision. For the details of the physical structure of an eye, Encarta is probably accurate — that is, it can show you a dissection diagram, if it has one, that won’t have changed since the days of the Resurrection Men. BUT when it comes to how that eye transmits information, and what information it’s actually transmitting — well, for that you’re going to need a newer source, I bet.

    (somewhere around here I have a copy of Encarta that came with The Machine, but I couldn’t find it to cross check.)

    For another example, possums. We have a plague of possums in our neighborhood; they get into our garage among many other places and leave by-products. Wikipedia insists that possums go narcoleptic when scared. My personal objective observation shows that when scared, they hiss and run like hell. Many neighbors can provide corroboration.

    Doubtless Britannica repeats the same misinformation. That doesn’t let Wiki off the hook.

21. # Katharine Kerron 21 Jul 2006 at 4:53 pm

    Erin, everyone in this day and age should know something about technology and science. You don’t have to have a PhD to write SF — a quick check of most SF will show you how thin the layer of science is in much of it. There are many decent books for the “general reader” out there in your public library that will provide you with the first stage of learning. Just make sure (cf. my diatribe on encyclopedias) they are recent, it, published in the last couple of years.

    (Keep in mind that a book published in Year X will have been written in Year X-1 or even X-2.)

    Most of these general books have bibliographies. In fact, don’t bother with a book that doesn’t have a bibliography, is my own personal rule. Anyway, if what you’ve read intrigues you, find some of the title from the biblio. and read them.

    If you want to write space adventure SF, make sure you know something about astronomy, for sure. I am thinking of a pseudo-SF Romance novel that came out some years back now, in which the author thought that there were 7 planets in our solar system and that “galaxy” meant “alien solar system.” She was furious when people ridiculed her, but she could have prevented the jokes if she’d only done a bit of research first.

22. # Erin Underwoodon 21 Jul 2006 at 9:42 pm

    Katharine, thank you for your detailed response on SF writing. Your post is helpful in so many ways. I love SF almost as much as fantasy. About half of my story ideas are SF, but I have stayed away from writing SF because I felt like I didn’t know enough about current and future technology to pull of the science side of the story.

    I agree that anyone living in this day and age should know something about science and technology. So I took a quick inventory of what I know, and it turns out that I know a lot more than I realized. I’m also taking a fresh look at what it’ll take to write the SF stories that I have in mind. If all goes well, I believe I can pull them off with a bit of targeted research (not from an encyclopedia ). Since I am mainly interested in writing high adventure SF, not hard-science SF, I think your suggestion of visiting the local library will help to get me over my science writing fears.

    Thanks again for your advice. I think the next story I write will be one of my SF gems that I have tucked away in my files.

23. # laser scanneron 30 Jun 2007 at 8:19 am

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