Which application, if any, are you using to write?

[Aes]

I use that handy-dandy wordpad program that comes standard with windows. Yeah, I know I suck, but the great thing about computers is, if (by some sick one-in-a-million chance) I ever produce anything that is publishable material, I can just import it into a real editor. Nobody would ever be the wiser, either.

 

[Green]

LaTeX looks nice, but like you say, it's pretty useless if you ever want to get something published. Publishers are pretty draconic about formatting, so there would be no benefit to using it at all. It's also a complete pain for proof reading.

True though, if you just want to write stuff for yourself, it's nice.

I had to use LaTeX to write a paper for a conference a while back. It looked nice and did a lot of the formatting for you, but I found that any benefits to the auto-format were wiped out when it did something you actually didn't want it to do. In those cases, you had to scrawl through the manual, looking for cryptic clues as to how you can get round the problem.

Word has its problems too, but I find it to be much easier to coax into usefulness than LaTeX.

 

[Leaf Face]

Talysia, I wrote my first 2 books in journals. It is so fun to write in journals. I thought at the time that I could type up what I had originally written in journals into computer print better than they would have been. I have been wondering recently if that would still be the case. Perhaps it would be so! Maybe I should go do that instead of surfing the Internet.

There is a lot about handwriting stuff that is so very personal. It let my writing flow easier and once I got used to it, my hand stopped cramping. You have made me want to try and give it a go again.

 

[gigantes]

i like notepad. it's available anywhere from the right-click menu and is as no-frills as you can get. plus it's tiny in size so it meshes well with other apps, unlike big bulkier stuff like the office / word package.

when i need word i just use "openoffice". it's free, open-source and does what office does.

 

[Daniel Hetberg]

Green, Latex can start messing stuff up if you use lots of graphics in multi-column papers and it places them at places where you don't want them and so on, but if you write straight text with occasional chapter breaks, you usually just end up with a well formatted text with little hassle.

If you want to go fancy for a self-produced book, you could use the 'memoir' package (as I do at the moment), where you have near complete control over a lot of margin sizes and can even output trim marks for easy cutting of normal sized paper (A4/letter) to more pocket book sized formats.

 

[smebro]

Laugh at me, I use Palm-os memo pad, ive written the last 500 pages or so on that, the only downfall being that I have to constantly update my hard-copy (in and old MS word 03). I enjoy the mixture of physically writting onto the screen, and seeing my text tidy and neat...seeing as my hand-writting is so messy and cryptic to everyone but me.
When it comes to doing my first final draft, I will pay for my sillyness, untill then...I write in the toilet, on the bus and on the couch after work.

 

[Patrick Mahon]

I'm using LaTeX with TeXnicCenter.

I don't want to turn this into an advertisement thread, but I'm happy to give people pointers towards resources and where to download what (it's all free).

Daniel,

Thanks very much. I used LaTeX years ago, during my PhD, but haven't used it since. However, I really liked it. If it's available freeware, I'd be really interested in knowing how to get hold of it, to see if I still like it as much 13 years on...

Cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Daniel Hetberg]

Hi Patrick.

If you are using some sort of windows, you will want the latest MikTeX version. Google for "MixTeX download" and just get the latest release off CTAN.org or somewhere else. Much in the same vein, grab TeXnicCenter, a freeware frontend.

Install MikTeX, then install TeXnicCenter (which includes installs yap, a minimalist .dvi viewer). TC should find your Tex files automatically, if it doesn't you will have to enter the path to the MikTeX binaries used for compiling manually during the setup wizard on your first startup (ie. C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\miktex\bin).

In TC you have the option of compiling your text to dvi, ps or pdf. They all work equally well, but I prefer either DVI (fast) or PDF (portable, everyone has acrobat reader). PS files are big and a bit unwieldy, plus you need an extra viewer (ghostview, possibly ghostscript required).

I personally use the memoir package for my writing (long term planning here), but the book standard format works equally well. If you want memoir, you can find that via MikTeX's built in package finder. You might have to update the list of available packages first, apparently there was some tinkering with memoir recently which caused my auto-update to fail before I did so.

You'll know the general procedure, but I'll repeat it for other curious people:
You enter your text (using a given header as below, or creating your own header, which takes a bit of familiarity with LaTeX) then you have to run LaTeX over it (compile it: Ctrl+F7 in TC), possibly 2 or 3 times to get things like references and table of contents right, takes only a couple of seconds. The front end I recommended helps you a lot in that it offers buttons for most common formatting options (bold, italic, emphasis, ...) or special environments (enumeration, margin note, footnote, ...), which will enter the correct command automatically. To find all of these options, browse 'insert' and 'format'. Ignore the 'math' options, these are for typesetting formulae, which you'll most likely not need in the context of creative writing. They are the best typeset formulae you will get anywhere, though. Seriously.

When you are done inputting and compiling your text, view/print the output (DVI, PS, PDF) with a viewer of your choice (F5 in TC).

If you run into any problems, ask. I'm not really a pro, but I made most mistakes already

edit:
To give you or anybody else a quick start, here's the header for my project. I'm writing in german, but don't let that irritate you. Everything after a '%' will be ignored by the compiler. If you need a '%' sign, use '\%' (I think). A must-have download if you want to do more than just write text is the (again, freely available) "Not so short guide to LaTeX" aka "Latex in 133 minutes" where you find everything you need to know. It's available in a couple of languages.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt, openany, draft, showtrims]{memoir} %possibly change 'a4paper' to 'letterpaper', or just 'letter'
%\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{book} %use this if you don't have the memoir package

%\usepackage[german]{babel} %default is english, switch to other languages if necessary

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{graphicx} %only really needed if you want to include pictures

%A bunch of custom commands. The number in the [] gives the number of arguments that have to be supplied in {},
%ie. \temp{text to be ignored} or \letter{text of letter} or \stp or \commandwithtwoarguments{write this}{in this way}
%
\newcommand{\temp}[1]{}
\newcommand{\stp}[0]{\begin{center}***\end{center}} %some time passes: centered *** as seperator
\newcommand{\letter}[1]{\begin{quote}#1\end{quote}}
\newcommand{\poetry}[1]{\begin{flushleft}\begin{verse} \emph{#1} \end{verse}\end{flushleft}}

\hyphenation{bas-tard op-era-tor from hell} %custom hyphenation rules for your cthulhoid names with 10 apostrophes in them

% Title Page
\title{Arkadia}
\author{Daniel Hetberg}
\begin{document}
\frontmatter
\maketitle
\tableofcontents


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%
% chapter 1: Anfänge
%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%actual text begins here
\mainmatter %switches to arabic page numbers
\chapter{Anfänge}
Nora kniete im Rübenbeet und betrachtete den Schmetterling, der sich auf ihrem Arm niedergelassen hatte. Seine Flügel waren dunkel, fast schwarz, mit roten Farbtupfern. Die Vordertür des Hauses wurde mit einem leisen Knarren geöffnet und wieder geschlossen. ``Nora?'' fragte eine männliche Stimme.

[... way more text ... ]

\chapter{Title of your second chapter}
This is going to be the second chapter, some day.

%your other chapters...


%possibly appendix chapters a la Tolkien
\appendix
\chapter{Dramatis personae}
Blahdor, the barbarian\\
Blahzilla, the evil monster\\

\chapter{Alternate ending my editor told me to ditch}
\ldots and they lived happily ever after.

\backmatter
%if you want to go scientific... refer to entries here by \cite{bookrefname}. The reference names have to be unique.
%\begin{thebibliography}{WWWW}
%\bibitem[BookRefAsItAppearsInTheText]{bookrefname} Author, \textit{Title}, (publisher) (year)
%\bibitem[FilmRefAsItAppearsInTheText]{filmrefname} Director, \textit{Title}, (publisher) (year)
%\end{thebibliography}

\end{document} %everything after this command will either be ignored or produce error messages

Hope that helped some people.

 

[Phil Brown]

I've found Microsoft Word is flaky with documents over 20,000 words and the Master Document feature is too. I need to be able to edit 200,000 + words, moving chunks around securely.

There are high-end apps such as Adobe Framemaker but they cost the earth. The best solution I've found so far is PowerWriter. It lets you organise your document into 3 levels and drag them around. It will cope with over 400,000 words (I imported Gone with the Wind in to test it) and it's not got too many bugs. Also it doesn't cost the earth.

I also use Frameforge Studio to create storyboards. Its a great help when trying to visualise scenes.

 

[Fahim]

I've found Microsoft Word is flaky with documents over 20,000 words and the Master Document feature is too. I need to be able to edit 200,000 + words, moving chunks around securely.

The Master Document feature is the cause of more corrupted documents in Word than anything else in the history of MS Word That "feature" is something which they never should have included. There are a lot of articles online which explain why the Master Document feature is a pain in the posterior and why you should never use it.

That said, I've used Word for lots of big documents (not sure what the word count was though - the only one I know a definite word count for is way under your 200,000+ words ) and it usually works fine. Of course, I don't actually move stuff around much in Word.

I used to use a program I created for writing. It had a treeview on the left-hand side which allowed me to break a manuscript down to chapters or scenes and then move the scenes around as a chunk fairly easily. It also had a separate area for manuscript notes (to hold research) and a section for scene/chapter notes. I wrote my first novel in it and once I had the manuscript completed, I transferred the whole thing over to Word and did all my editing/proofreading in Word.

Now I use a combination of Mind Manager (for notes/outlines/research) and Word 2007. It works fairly OK but I still miss the flexibility of my own app

 

[dustinzgirl]

I agree. I have not had problems with 2007 yet, but I learned a long time ago...in 98 to keep chapter or sections in seperate documenents under one folder. Ive never used the 'master document' feature, instead I title them : Master, Master 2, Master 3, ect... and so forth, then put them all in a zip or folder. That works best if you have large docs. It also makes it easier for me to edit, as I can see where I went and where I am going. I also copy paste into notepad just in case.

I wish that there was a tab feature in any word doc, the way you can tab browse in moxilla. I dont know why nobody has done this, but it would make life so much easier.

The new excell 2007 irritates me because the old "decriptive stats' function used to be easy, one click and boom, id get kev, max, min, avg, ect....i dont have that in 2007, but mabye its a plug in? I dont know, I just know its gone.

 

[Fahim]

The new excell 2007 irritates me because the old "decriptive stats' function used to be easy, one click and boom, id get kev, max, min, avg, ect....i dont have that in 2007, but mabye its a plug in? I dont know, I just know its gone.

I haven't had the need to use that function but I believe that the Office 2007 help has a link to a site which shows all the equivalent options in Office 2007 apps to those from older versions.

Actually, had it bookmarked. Here it is - it might take a little while to load but once it loads, it's easy to find how to do stuff in Office 2007 apps
http://office.microsoft.com/assista...t=788&type=flash&CTT=11&Origin=HA100744321033

Hmm ... just loaded the link and it looks as if that is for Word 2007. There should be an equivalent one for Excel 2007 though .... Will post link if I find it.

 

[Fahim]

I wrote a post earlier with a link to a Microsoft site which helped you find the Office 2007 equivalent command/functionality for older versions of office. Of course, that post was held for moderation since I didn't have enough posts Since then, I've found the link to the actual page which has the Excel 2007 equivalents. (My earlier link was for Word 2007). So hope this helps:
http://office.microsoft.com/assista...t=788&type=flash&CTT=11&Origin=HA101491511033

 

[Commonmind]

Fahim, if your avatar is your actual pic, I hope you don't mind me saying this, but you look almost exactly how I picture Zaphood Beeblebrox looking from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (minus, of course, that you don't have two heads, and a much more groovy pair of shades)

 

[Fahim]

LOL. Thanks Commonmind, I'm honoured to be compared (even visually) to somebody from a Douglas Adams book And yes, that's my own pic though from about 10 years ago. I don't have the long hair anymore (cut it about a week or two ago) though.

 

[Marvolo]

I was using Liquid Story Binder. It is a program which allows you to easily organize outlines, reference notes, timelines, and much more easily. My problem with Liquid Story Binder is the strange and seemingly flimsy way the margins operate; also the spell checker was extremely stupid. I went back to using Office XP.

Microsoft, the dirty devil, I can't get away from it.

 

[littlemissattitude]

I use the Microsoft Works Word Processor that came with my Windows XP that came loaded on my computer. I could probably find something that is a little more intutitive and a little more flexible, but I get along with it well enough most of the time. It has both NotePad and WordPad on it, as well, but I've hardly ever used them.