Software To Support Writing My New Novel

The mechanics of writing isn't something I've ever bothered much about. At times the technology has been irritating. Do you remember when Microsoft Word used to fall over and die when a file became large, or when PDAs and hand-held computers used to have file size limits? I certainly do and it was a pain, but I coped and it wasn't so bad. It is probably because of the technical inadequacies of older software (things like Word's 'master document' features being so flaky, the inability to do a search or 'find and replace' easily across multiple files, etc.) that I've learned to write book-sized documents in a single, linear lump - keeping the plan in my head rather than in software. It has meant that I tend to do a lot of planning up-front and have a pretty clear idea of how the whole book unfolds before I start writing. Once I start, I can start at the beginning and keep writing to the end.

Yet, lately, I've been tempted by reviews of software that purports to support writers, things like Scrivener (Apple Macs only) which is raved about by one and all. These tools let you plot, write research notes, structure the book, describe characters, include arbitrary background materials, images and so on, track progress, produce final copy, and much, much more, all within a single, integrated environment. It's the kind of thing I could really have used when I was at work, writing ginormous proposals, consultancy reports, and software designs. But would it really help me with writing a book?

To find out, I downloaded yWriter, a free writing tool with many of the features of Scrivener that was developed by Australian author and programmer, Simon Haynes. I've just started writing a new novel (Timesplash!) so it seemed like a good time to try it.

I'm not going to review yWriter (sorry) except to say it did everything it promised to, did it well, and played nicely with all my other software. My only quibble is with the user interface which was a bit non-standard in places - but then, as a usability specialist, I always find fault with user interfaces. So, my congratulations to Simon for a well-made application. If you want novel-writing software, you should definitely try it out.

Having said all that, I didn't get along with it at all. yWriter (and, by extension, Scrivener and all the others) was way too structured for my taste. I found myself putting so much effort into the structuring, it was keeping me from the writing. Maybe it's because I've become so used to working it all out in my head - for example, knowing who my characters are, what motivates them, where they're headed and why, etc. - that explicitly describing it feels like a burden, an unnecessary overhead.

But the experience of using yWriter did make me think about just what tools I do use and do need to get a novel written. Essentially, it comes down to this:

A good word-processor. This must cope with very large files, allow me to navigate around the book using a navigation panel that shows any headings I've used (typically just chapter headings), give me control over formatting through the definition of character, paragraph, page and section styles, and support check-as-you-go spell-checking. It must also do file format conversions, supporting at least .DOC, .RTF, .ODT, and .PDF (different publishers require different file formats and I must also have the ability to save in formats that will last for decades to come - I've lost work in the past because the format it was written in became unreadable after fifteen years!) It must also allow me to set up templates for different kinds of manuscript. I use sWriter from OpenOffice.org - which is not only a good word-processor but also free.

A good browser. I do a lot of research on they fly while I'm writing. I like to have my facts straight. So I tend to check things online all the time (people's biographical details, town layouts, historical facts, foreign words, science and technology, etc.) I use Firefox, which is free, fast, tabbed (I often have five or ten different pages open at the same time), and handles bookmaring well (I set up bookmark folders for the various projects I'm working on to keep all my research handy.)

A spreadsheet. This doesn't have to be fancy. I only use it for keeping track of my progress. I have got into the habit lately of giving myself a words-per-day target. For my new novel, the target is 1,000 words per day - and I'm already slipping (which is OK - there tends to be far more research going on in the early stages of a book than in the later stages.) When I worked, I used to run projects a lot so I like to see where I am against my plan. For a novel, that's just columns for plan, actual, to go, forecast and what I'll need to achieve to catch up - plus a nice chart to make me feel good about progress. For this I use sCalc from OpenOffice.org - which is overkill but its the spreadsheet I use all the time these days.

As for notes about characters and such, I put a table at the end of my novel with the names of characters and places and a one-sentence description of each - just to remind myself (mostly of the names of minor characters and settings). Being a sci-fi writer, I also include the names of invented technologies and any neologisms I've come up with. I sort the table alphabetically and it does me just fine. I give it the heading 'Glossary' so I can quickly jump to it from the nav panel.

The plot is typically done on paper, with a pencil, before I ever start typing. Nothing else is flexible enough (and, yes, I've tried 'mind-mapping' software.) For the new novel, I've typed in some plot notes at the top of each chapter but I'm finding I don't use them. Once the book is plotted, I pretty much know it.

So no purpose-built software for me - I just don't work that way - but I do require quite a bit of software support for my writing. In fact, I also like some hardware support. I like to have a very small, very light computer to carry around with me when I'm away from my home office. For this I use the Asus EeePC running the same OpenOffice.org software and Firefox browser I use on my desktop.

What I'm Listening to as I Write My New Novel

One of the strangest things I've heard of late is that fans of writers like to know what the author was listening to as he or she wrote particular books. Some authors, I hear, even produce lists of musical pieces that should accompany their novels - the sound track of the book, no less!

Anyhoo, I think I have the whole thing automated now and would like to pass on this info to any author planning their own sound track.

As a secret songwriter (secret as in nobody knows I exist) I belong to a number of 'band sites' where I can post my music and listen to other people's postings. These sites have many interesting features - they manage track sales, they provide social networking facilities, they run charts by genre, etc., etc.. One of them, Last.fm, provides a piece of software that will monitor what a subscriber is playing at home on their computer and compile their own personal chart by day, week, or overall. I have this software installed (it's called Scrobbler for some reason) and you can all go to my Last.fm member page to see what I typically listen to.

Since this data can be put into a widget and embedded in my blog page, I could easily let you know what I'm listening to right now (it's Blondie's '11:59' -- I love Parallel Lines.) Of course, I won't because this whole blogging thing is narcissistic enough already. Believing anyone wants to know what music you listen to in the privacy of your own office takes vanity to whole new heights. But, for those whose fans are clamouring for it, I suggest you do it the easy way and get Scrobbler.

Science Looks At Fiction

I love science. I love writing fiction. I even enjoy programming. So an article in last week's New Scientist was especially interesting to me. Keith Oatley, a cognitive scientist from the University of Toronto, has been studying the effects of fiction on personality and emotion. His conclusion is that there is a strong effect. He and his collaborators found that people who read fiction (as opposed to non-fiction) actually become more like the characters in the stories. He likens fiction to a simulation of a social world, created by the author, which then runs in the minds of the readers. Reading involves exercising empathy to identify with the characters and, through a kind of social learning, the absorption of some of their traits.

Oatley's finding is that reading fiction improves social skills and gives fiction readers 'substantially greater empathy.' He therefore believes it is generally beneficial to a society. Of course, he might be slightly biased. Oakley, as well as being a scientist, is also a writer of fiction.

But I like the idea that when I write fiction I am also writing a simulation of a world that will run in people's minds. It is an idea that squares pretty well with how I have always thought of writing fiction – although for me, the greatest pleasure in doing it is to create a simulation that will run in my own mind.

Yet I can't help feeling a little anxious about all this. If people are learning social skills, learning to understand people and their interactions, from fiction, doesn't this mean fiction writers have a strong moral obligation to represent the world truthfully and accurately? Doesn't it at least mean they should be intelligent and wise enough that what they write isn't stupid or plain wrong?

Many years ago, I used to study 'argumentation' – the modern incarnation of rhetoric. Ancient rhetoricians such as Aristotle (pictured), Plato and Cicero, understood that effective argument could be a force for good as well as ill. Aristotle in particular believed that only moral men should be taught these potentially dangerous skills. It is pretty obvious that persuasive arguers who might use the craft of rhetoric for their own ends and without regard for morality or truth, can do immense damage to society. Look at the way the USA and the UK were persuaded to invade and conquer Iraq.

If fiction – apparently harmless entertainments like novels and short stories – can have such a strong influence on the reader's mental construction of social reality, maybe we should be more careful about what we read – and what we write. Should only moral people be allowed to write fiction? Should publishers and editors take their share of the blame for what damage an inaccurate or untruthful depiction might do?

Oatley has not directly investigated the other kinds of fiction in our world – films and games, for example – but he suspects they will be found to have a similarly powerful effect on personality and social understanding as literature does. Now that really does make me worried.

Losing Our Heritage To Simplified Spelling

I've just been reading the Oxford University Press (USA) blog where an American etymologist, Anatoly Liberman, is arguing the case for 'simplified spelling'. I have heard this argument so often from all kinds of people but never from an etymologist!

As I said in the comments to Liberman's blog posting, I have two objections to 'simplified' spelling.

The first is that the spelling only seems simple if it accords perfectly with your own accent. For a Geordie in the north of England, spelling the word 'house' in a natural way might render it as 'hoos', for some Londoners, 'out' might best be represented as 'art'. As long as there are such strong accents in the English-speaking world, there can be no common, simplified spelling. If you pick one simplified spelling, whose should it be? The English upper-middle class (as with British 'received pronubciation'? Educated New York American? Or (to pander to perhaps the largest English-speaking population) some kind of Asian English? Whichever you pick, the rest of the world will find the simplified spelling just as odd and arbitrary as they do the real thing.

My second objection is that 'conservative' spelling retains (quite a lot of) the etymology of words. Because of this, the spelling helps us understand the word (consider 'rite' and 'right' which might be indistinguishable under a simplified scheme). 'Conservative' spelling not only helps comprehension, it also carries some of the history of the word. Throwing away the richness of this heritage would be an apalling act of cultural vandalism.

The trend to ultra-simplified and abbreviated spelling that we see in text messages and which Liberman seems to suggest is a good thing ('u' for 'you', 'imho' for 'in my humble opinion', etc.,) may indeed change the way words are 'officially' spelled. The deplorable way that dictionaries follow fads (especially American fads) in spelling, sanctifying such travesties as 'donut' with their blessing, means that spellings adopted by illiterate and poorly-educated children, trying to save a few keystrokes in their frantic haste to exchange gossip, may well end up as alternatives for proper spellings. But do we really want our language degraded like this?

Once you lose a traditional spelling, it is gone forever. Dictionaries these days give 'extrovert' as the preferred spelling for 'extravert', 'neuron' for 'neurone', 'program' for 'programme', 'holistic' for 'wholistic' and so on - mostly because they reflect American usage. All these changes have happened within my own lifetime. They all represent a loss of etymology and of history and thus impoverish the language.

Three Observations On Successful Writers

Marianne de Pierres (She Who Must Be Obeyed) suggested I write and chat to Peter Cawdron about getting published. She seems to have forgotten that I know almost nothing about it and have certainly not had any success until recently when I got one story into print.

However, in wondering just what I could tell somebody about being a successful writer, I realised that I have formed some opinions based on what I've seen of the species. So, rather than bore only Peter with my neophyte observations, I thought I'd share them with everyone and give everyone the opportunity to comment. Here then are the three things I have noticed about being a successful writer.

Observation 1. You have to be a good writer. Not a great writer. Just a good one. Pick up a book or two at random from a bookshop shelf, or browse the e-zines in your genre and you'll see what I mean. Most writers in print are competent and capable - very, very few of them are brilliant. Not by a long way. I suppose if publishers had to wait for an L.P. Hartley or a William Golding to come along, there just wouldn't be enough books printed to make a living from it.

This is good news for the likes of me, since I ain't no Michael Frayn!

Observation 2. Successful writers seem to be very much into the writing 'scene'. They go to the conferences, they belong to the discussion groups, they track the industry news. They all know one another and they all know who's publishing what, who's on the judging panels for the various competitions, and what other writers are doing. As an example of how important this is, let me tell you a little story.

I've been a writer since I first learned to hold a crayon. From time to time over many years, I have tried to get a piece published. The way I did it was to package up a manuscript, write a covering letter and send it to a publisher - or agent. This has always been a waste of time. In the end, I decided I would simply write for my own amusement and sod the publishers - and agents. I did this for about ten years - and got a lot of very pleasurable writing done.

Out of curiosity, a couple of years ago, I joined a writers' group (Crime Writers Queensland). I eventually left them - mainly because it was a very long drive to the meetings. However, at one meeting, someone had passed on the news that a new literary agent had opened up shop in Brisbane. I filed the address away and forgot about it. Then, a few months ago, I finished yet another novel - one that I thought really ought to be publishable - and remembered the new agent. My book is set in Brisbane and I thought a Brisbane-based agent might just be interested. So I dropped him an email.

He told me he'd given up agenting (already!) to focus on writing his own books but he did mention the Orbit/QWC manuscript development program that had recently been announced and suggested I try for it. I, of course, hadn't heard of it and I've always hated the idea of entering competitions - but, since he went to some pains to stress what a rare opportunity this was to ensure that a publisher would actually look at your work, I thought I'd have a go. And I did. And I won one of the places, got my book read by Orbit, had a one-on-one session with the publisher about my book, and got the opportunity to revise and resubmit the manuscript.

Now this is as close to being published as I have come in all those years of trying and it only came about through 'networking'. If I hadn't been at that writers' group meeting, if I hadn't written to that (erstwhile) agent, I would never have known there was an opportunity, let alone profited from it.

This, however, is bad news for the likes of me as I am an antisocial troglodyte who lives up a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

Observation 3. Successful writers tend to be prolific, dedicated and, above all, persistent. Even if you're a good writer and totally plugged-in to the world of writing, there is still a very big element of luck involved in becoming successful. Publishers only do so many books a year, magazines only do so many stories. They are looking for good writers, of course, but they're also looking for other things; things that excite them personally, things that will excite their colleagues in marketing and production (who also need to be convinced) things that will sell well in particular markets, things that will sit right with the other material in their list, and so on. All of these factors change all the time, even for the same publisher, so your piece better be exactly what is needed at precisely that moment in time or it doesn't stand a chance, however good it is.

This means that, if you aren't writing, if you aren't sending your stuff out all the time, all over the place, your story will not be there in the slush pile for the editor to find it when they're looking for exactly that kind of thing. You simply have to be in the game. The odds are not in your favour but if you're not in the game, you will never get the prize.

This is one of the areas where I have been letting myself down. I do the writing alright but I haven't taken seriously enough the process of getting it out there and keeping it out there. As it happens, as soon as I did start making a concerted effort, it payed off.

Not the deepest of insights, I'm afraid but they're all I have. If it seems a bit gloomy, I have only one small word of consolation for Peter and all the rest like me waiting to leap into print. When you do start networking with writers, editors, agents and publishers, you will probably discover, as I did, that they are a pretty good bunch and incredibly helpful and supportive. Talking to these guys makes being a writer a much more pleasant experience than one in which you merely swap mauscripts with publishers for rejection slips.

Rejection World Record?

Hot on the heels of placing my first short story, I have now clocked up a new personal best - and possibly a world record. I submitted a short story to a well-known sci-fi magazine yesterday by email (my post is timestamped 9:55 pm) and had a rejection from them, also by email, when I logged on this morning. The rejection letter was timestamped 2:22 am, which means the whole process took 4 hours and 27 minutes!

I am at once impressed by the editor's efficiency and shattered that my story was so easy to reject. I don't know if it is worse to wait the usual three months to get my slap in the face or whether I'm pleased not to have been left in suspense. One thing's for sure, if this kind of efficiency catches on in the publishing world, the rate of rejections per day could be quite overwhelming. I'm not sure my ego can take that kind of intensive pummelling.

Meanwhile, I at least have the pleasure of being the current title holder for the World's Fastest Rejection of a Short Story Under 5,000 Words.

Unless anyone would like to contend it.

One Small Step For Me. One Giant Leap, Also For Me

Am I excited or what? It's barely a month since I resolved (after a bit of brow-beating) to start putting my short stories out there, looking for publishers and I've just heard that one of them has been accepted! The story is a new one, called 'Skyball', and it will appear in a spec fic e-zine called Bewildering Stories - early in the New Year, I hope.

This is the first time I have ever had a story of mine accepted for publication, so you can imagine what a monumental event this is for me.

I've published a lot of stuff in my time - science books, technical papers, even comedy (in New Scientist of all places!) but never fiction. (Actually I had a short crime story read out by Nick Eales a few years ago on his national radio show - but I can't decide if that counts.) So getting 'Skyball' accepted is a huge milestone in what I hope will be my writing career.

So thank you Marrianne for pushing me, thank you Orbit and QWC for getting me excited again, and thank you Don Webb (the editor at Bewildering Stories who didn't exactly open the gate - he made me jump it!)