writerlywitterings

Writing – Tools and materials.

Posted by writerlywitterer on 27/09/2011 · 10 Comments 

Time was, you’d write a book by buying a pencil and a lot of paper.

The Best Writing Device - A Michael Jecks Pen.

Not everyone, of course, would do it that way. Some folks went to steel nibbed pens and ink with their paper. That was a little new-fangled, of course. Then you got the modern habit of buying gizmos. People learned of pens with reservoirs, and then, ye Gods, there were typewriters.

I was lucky enough to grow up at the end of that age. And I still infinitely prefer to use a pencil or fountain pen than a biro or computer. I love the smooth feeling of the nib or lead against paper. In fact, I love both so much, I have a stockpile of notepads and jotters beside me even now. And very glad of them I am too. All the old notes I’ve taken up to eighteen years ago when I was visiting the British Library for research are still here.

I did transcribe a lot of notes onto computer. All those are lost. The computers died, the disks got corrupted – any number of little problemettes – and the records are lost for ever. Just as are three novels. I wrote them on computers that became corrupted.

One of them was on floppy disks. Unknown to me, the drive’s arm became fouled at some point, and because of that, the disks were unreadable by another computer. That was irritating.

Another was carefully backed up to a Zip drive. A great innovation, that was. But the computer acquired a bug, and the bug deleted swathes of my work. I could see something was wrong, so I backed up everything, like a good boy, and duplicated the bug over all my back up disks. That lost me two novels.

All of them were printed – but one copy I lent to a friend because he expressed interest in this unpublished book. And it got – mislaid. He’s still a friend, but I do miss that book. It was my very first, and really rather good.

Good, old fashioned work.

Anyway, nowadays all authors use computers. I bypassed typewriters. I’ve tried to use them, and would dearly like to be able to use them, because a good old manual requires no electricity, it makes a satisfying sound, and I think they’re rather handsome devices. But can I write books on them? Nope.

I started writing after selling wordprocessors for years. The idea of working straight to paper just doesn’t work. And I couldn’t afford all that paper now, either.

I met Laurence Block many years ago when he happened to be travelling, and he mentioned then that he had been away with a portable typewriter, and found it quite freeing. He took it to a cottage in Ireland and spent some weeks in a place without electricity. The next holiday, he swore, he would have only a pencil and paper. Minimalist, you see.

Today I was talking to the delightful David Hewson (and if you haven’t read his books, you should) and he told me of his latest gadget, a seven inch display tablet.

I’m jealous. I have an iPad, but it’s just too big for my pocket. A slightly smaller tab would be better.

Why a tablet?

I don’t have a need for a lump to carry around with me. The number of times in recent years when I’ve been travelling and needed a laptop could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

However, my iPad is with me (in the house) all the time. I check emails on it, I make notes, I tweet. More importantly, I plan and plot.

I use iThoughtsHD on the iPad to sketch out scenes I need, characters, plots – anything. The headings can be thrown at my computer and shoved straight into Scrivener. And of course I make huge use of Evernote, which allows me to take photos of scenes, copy maps, pictures or scanned paragraphs, and then reuse them on the Mac at home, on the iPad, or even on the phone. All these things make writing so much easier.

And finally, I use the iPad in the way I couldn’t ever use the laptop.

When the book is drafted, instead of printing a copy, I epublish it to myself. The novel goes straight to the iPad, and there I can read it pretty much as though it was a book. It feels more like a book than a laptop screen, anyway. And I can make notes, add comments, highlight text to be changed or deleted.

David’s latest tablet has two advantages over my iPad: it’s small enough to fit in a pocket. That, I like. It’d mean I’d have it with me even more than the iPad. The second item is one I wasn’t sure about at first. A pen.

Instead of typing everything as I do now on the iPad, this means you can ring text, scrub through it, add comments. Almost anything. It sounds like a really good idea. But I wonder how long it would be before I lost the damn thing.

I have often said that with two books a year which I have to write, and not Agatha Christie, 70,000 word books, either, but carefully researched books of 140-150,000 words, if I didn’t have such a good working knowledge of my period and didn’t make use of actual murders and events, I’d find it very hard to think up new stories.

Well, if it weren’t for the use of good equipment and software too, I’d find it even harder.