None of them were any better (though WriteRoom at least takes a minimalist approach and mostly gets out of the way). In growing desperation, I tried text editors like TextEdit, TextMate, Bare Bones Software's TextWrangler (for you non-techies, that's an HTML code editor), Smultron (no link, that one's dead and buried), WriteRoom, and several others whose names I have willingly forgotten. Yes, he just used a typewriter, but I think he saw what was coming. No wonder Ernest Hemingway drank so much. ![]() Admittedly, some of them might have improved significantly over the last decade since I dabbled with them, but at the time they were, as Steve Jobs once phrased it, "a big bag of hurt." It was like the scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where Dolores Umbridge makes Harry write "I will not tell lies" using a blood quill. So I explored alternatives, starting with other word processors - Apple's Pages, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Bean, Mariner Write, Nisus Writer Pro - and found out that none of them were any better for the job. I won't list off all the reasons why there have been many Internet diatribes by other authors that cover that terrain pretty well - google "Microsoft Word author agony." Suffice it to say that Microsoft Word isn't well designed for drafting long documents. The fact is that when I sat down to write Red Cell, my first novel, I started it using Word. The answer to that question is, "have you ever tried to write anything longer than a one-page memo in Word?" ![]() However, regardless of the reaction, I almost always get asked, "why don't you use Microsoft Word?" Reactions to that vary, with ignorance of Scrivener being the norm. I occasionally get asked what app I use to write my novels.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |