Desk Talk: Tools

It's quite possible to use a pencil and a pack of cocktail napkins to write a novel. Allen Ginsberg famously used toilet paper when writing "Poem from Jail." 

Bruce Chatwin is a Moleskine notebook fancier, while William Carlos Williams used the backs of envelopes. (Don't get me started on WCW and his poems. Not a fan.)

Between interruptions, Jane Austen filled thin cream paper to the edges using a quill pen and oak-gall ink. Marilynne Robinson's first drafts are in ball-point in college-ruled spiral notebooks. 

Not putting myself into that elevated league, but I prefer the smooth slide of graphite across paper when emptying my bony cauldron of thoughts.

When it comes time to organize these pencilings, I use my laptop and Scrivener, a word-processing/organizational software that has a bunch of helpful tricks not available to cocktail napkins.  

With Scrivener, ​I can make chapters and then shuffle them around without the sort of cut-and-paste formatting consequence that can drive a person to drink.

Scrivener gives me a list of chapters so I can navigate quickly—plus it builds in handy spots to stow research and background material.  I'll pop an interesting phrase or scene into "Extra words," or take notes on a character in the section "Characters,"  or add a cool website to Notes.

Scrivener also composes a de facto outline of the story as it gets written, which can prove handy if—ahem—a person neither plans nor outlines her story ahead of time.  

Of course I could make a nested folder of Word files.

I could also improvise finger-paint in the style of the Marquis de Sade. ​

But the lingua franca for the industry, and what my editor uses is Microsoft Word.  

via GIPHY

So the time comes when one must bid a fond adieu to clever and kindly Scrivener. Instead, I wince under the brutal overhead light of Word.  A software that does count up my words on this project, along with offering the odd bone-headed grammar suggestion and—IRONY!—refusing to accept the existence of new words.

Sidebar: Even now, in 2024, editing and proofreading seem to come easier for me on paper: not for the use of a colorful pen and the elegant symbols of the copyeditor, there's science that suggests we slow down and read more carefully when it's on paper.  Which tracks for me.

Science behind the paper v. screen rivalry
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7510370/

​This study on the same topic has some flaws, and is focused on non-fiction and study, but it's interesting:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X18300101?via%3Dihub

And yes, for those of you dear readers following along: a morning spent on Pass-A-Grille—that generational home-beach— brought the name for this second book a little bit closer.  

I circle it like a moth hoping to touch flame.

​That faint tang of singed Lepidoptera? Impending good news.