Misadventures in Writing Tools
So, as I slowly, ever so slowly, gear up to begin writing anew, I'm trying out some new tools. I have several unfinished novels to complete. Blog posts to write. Gotta get writing again, somehow. As such, I did a quick survey of what is out there as of today.
Microsoft Word is in many ways nicer than ever. I still get these crazy, random horizontal lines that I can't get rid of without deep googling an answer. But other than that, it's looking pretty sweet. I particularly enjoy 'Read Mode', as it lets you massage the text to the fullest, getting exactly the layout you want. Important, to me, because I have a lot of half-assed formatted books floating around. A subscription to Office can take you a long way, and the automated back-up feature is kind of useful.
Scrivener, which I've never really actually used, seems like a decent choice, beyond that. Some of the things I'm working on now, Reduction of Forces, and Star Hustle, call for non-linear techniques. I actually found some parts I forgot about when I generated that second link, in fact.
Reduction, because some of what I'm doing involves self-contained stories from work. So they can exist as little chapters of their own, without needing a bigger context. Or much of one, I suppose. An example of this is the short story 'Burnout'. Scrivener will let you arrange and rearrange chapters and snippets to your heart's content, until things are just the way you want them.
Star Hustle benefits as well, because it's a crazy, jumbled up mess of time travel multiverse stuff, and I've employed some William S. Burroughs techniques while writing it, as befitting the feel of the story itself.
As my first test, I put what I had in my notebooks and my blog into an online writing tool, Reedsy, which offers some of those features on a webpage. Not to mention, they have a cunning business plan. Editors and proofreaders, among others, are on call for you, for a fee. In fact, you can throw your hat into the ring as an editor yourself. I haven't explored it fully, but Reedsy seems to take you from your first sentence all the way through publishing and marketing, if you so choose.
That's pretty sweet.
For the life of me, I couldn't get the first sentence of each chapter to indent properly. I let that one slide. It was probably me. (It wasn't me.)
But it did have a lot of other nice features. It set up a title page, etc. where you just fill in the blanks to get a fairly pro-looking frontend with ease. And, like Scrivener, you can drag and drop chapters all you want.
Great. And I would still be using it, except for one glaring issue.
My laptop dropped connection for a few seconds. After that, I got a warning, but things resumed and seemed okay. When I started to change chapters, I got another warning. A warning indicating something wasn't saved.
So I copied the part I was leaving, just in case. Went to another chapter, went back. I got a warning each time, but no data loss. The warning was annoying, but not as bad as losing some of your work.
I should have reloaded the entire site. I knew better.
When I started on a fresh chapter, left, and went back...it was gone. I don't have to tell you, if you had typed a full chapter into Reedsy and this happened, you'd be upset. As it was, it was only a few hundred words, at most. But enough for me to move on. There's probably a fix/workaround for the little indentation problem I was having. The data loss is a dealbreaker, even though it could have been avoided. I shouldn't have to reload a site just to keep from losing my work.
Besides, if I had kept with it, I'd be working on my novel, instead of checking out more tools.
There's a lot to like about Reedsy, silly name aside, and I do recommend you evaluate it yourself, caveats in mind. It is free, afterall. If you're just getting started in the writing game, it might be the only site you ever use. With a tiny bit more technical polish, I think this one could be a gamechanger. There is a paid app version, which would eliminate the catastrophic failure aspect entirely. One hopes.
Hemingway Editor aims to be your go-to for shorter pieces. It provides a lot of color-coded mark-up that shows where your pieces might stand some improvement. It's sort of along the lines of Grammarly, which I am not including in this review. But for bloggers and short story writers, this might be a viable option. As an example, I'll post my unedited copy of this piece into it.
True to its name, it is divided into Write and Edit portions, without distracting overlap. Write, I guess, drunk, and edit not so drunk. Or high. This can let you crank it out at a good pace, and then take a sobering look at the results. It may aid your workflow to do things this way. There are very few distractions to be found when in writing mode.
- Summary Report of Key Issues
- 19 Writing Reports
- Edit 500 words at a time
- Use online only
This...is not very compelling.
I guess if you have $79 a year ($89 for academics, includes plagiarism checking), and you're willing to bite the bullet and evaluate it fully, it might be worth it. With all these other great free tools. I'm not sure why many people would. I guess if your job or university is buying, hey, why not?
But they don't even have a Google ID log-in set up. Not worth my time and effort. Sorry, guys. This column is long already, and I'm not quite done yet.
So, at the end of a long day where my sole output was some transcribing and editing, and this blog post, I've uncovered some perhaps useful, interesting applications, and I have narrowed my main tool down to Word or Scrivener.
I intended to write up Scrivener, too, but I haven't even installed it yet. Plus it has a LOT of features beyond content analysis. Most of which I will never use. But when you're trying to psyche yourself up for writing again, your tool choice is crucial. I'll be spending more time with the app I choose than any human for the next year or so, more than likely.
I probably will do a full review of Scrivener in one of my next posts, so, erm, stay tuned. Both of you.
I sure do use the word 'but' a lot.
Full stats generated by Readable for this piece:
Readability Issues
| Sentences > 30 Syllables | 15 | 9% | ||
| Sentences > 20 Syllables | 43 | 26% | ||
| Words > 4 Syllables | 9 | 1% | ||
| Words > 12 Letters | 2 | 0% |
Text Density Issues
| Characters per Word | 4.3 | |||
| Syllables per Word | 1.4 | |||
| Words per Sentence | 10.8 | |||
| Words per Paragraph | 32.0 | |||
| Sentences per Paragraph | 3.0 |
Readability Grade Levels
Readability Scores
| Readable Rating | A | |||
| Flesch Reading Ease | 77.0 | |||
| CEFR Level | B2 | |||
| IELTS Level | 5-6 | |||
| Spache Score | 4.5 | |||
| New Dale-Chall Score | 4.1 | |||
| Lix Readability | 29 | |||
| Lensear Write | 94.8 |
| Adjectives | 149 | 8% | |
| Adverbs | 49 | 3% | |
| Conjunctions | 177 | 10% | |
| Determiners | 216 | 12% | |
| Interjections | 3 | 0% | |
| Nouns | 524 | 30% | |
| Proper Nouns | 37 | 2% | |
| Prepositions | 186 | 11% | |
| Pronouns | 210 | 12% | |
| Qualifiers | 25 | 1% | |
| Verbs | 261 | 15% | |
| Unrecognised | 16 | 1% | |
| Non-Words | 0 | 0% |
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