Finn update: Did you think I would actually take a break? Ha, I say. Ha! I did actually try. For one whole evening I tried to sink my mind back into Emmie and Brody, two sweet, flaky dopes whom I adore. Then the next day all I could think about was Finn.
But before you shake your head at my complete lack of will power, hear this: my fixation has paid off. Maybe. Probably. Signs point to yes. Finn is slowly and begrudgingly divulging aspects of his background and things are in the beginning stages of falling into place. A lesson for everyone: obsession always pays off.
In the list of questions no one is asking me about my writing process, what writing apps/software I use seems like it would be a big one. So, here goes.
In the Before Times I think I only ever wrote in Word (except for the brief time when I was around thirteen and had a second-hand Mac with a tiny beige and grey screen on which I wrote, chiefly, erotica, or what a sheltered thirteen year old considers erotica). The two longer romances I was working on in high school both started with lists of notes and questions for myself but otherwise everything I wrote had no kind of organization.
In the After Times I’ve used two different tools: Bear and Scrivener.
I bought Scrivener at some point in the Between Times thinking that having super slick, fancy writing software would encourage/trick/shame me into actually writing. Unsurprisingly, it did not. It was overwhelming and intimidating and even if it wasn’t, it didn’t really matter because software was not the reason I wasn’t writing.
When I did start writing again, I didn’t actually go back to Scrivener. I think I might have opened it again, tried to go through that giant tutorial document, got overwhelmed, and started looking around for something simpler. Something minimalist if you want to be trendy. Somewhere (and I really can’t remember where) I read about Bear. I liked the way it looked, so I decided to give that a try. Then I ended up writing the entire first draft of Imogen & Finn in it.
A couple of disclaimers up front. First, Bear is a Mac-only app, which is lame. I have a Mac, so it’s not a problem for me personally, but it’s hard to recommend something that a good chunk of people can’t actually use. You can use it on your phone, so if you have an iPhone but not a Mac, that’s something. But writing long form (or just at length) on a phone is no good. (For me anyway. Is that a generational thing? Are the youths writing novels on phones?)
Second, I got an annual subscription—yes, it’s a subscription based model. That should actually be second. Second, it’s subscription based. (There is a free version but you can’t do much with it.) This is also not ideal, to my mind, but pretty standard these days.
Third, when I first signed up for an annual subscription, it was about half the price of what it is now, and I’m evidently locked in at that price (thank you, Bear). In all honesty, I’d probably still pay the current price ($30/year) even though it’s not my primary writing software anymore, but just something to keep in mind.
Bear is technically a markdown app, which, frankly, I still don’t understand. I understand what markdown is (using simple notation like surrounding a word or phrase with asterisks to denote bold), and I can do that in Bear. But I can also just hit COMMAND+B to make things bold, which is what I actually do.
That said, the formatting options are very limited and the display is spare. But I like that! When all you want to do is write, it’s great having nothing to distract you. It also has a bunch of different darker themed interface options that aren’t the super harsh contrast that a lot of dark modes are.
Each note you write can be appended with a tag so that various notes can be grouped together. Tags can then have subtags (and subsubtags and so on) to effectively mimic a folder system if that’s your jam. This worked really well when I was drafting and jumping around from scene to scene. Each scene got a new note and I could throw an Imogen&Finn label on all of them and worry about how they all fit together later. I didn’t feel like I had to know how I wanted to organize the story before I had one.
On the flip side, tags cannot exist without notes. So the labels you see here only exist because I have at least one note for every one of those tags. If I deleted the only note that had the Nerd-Do-Wells/2-Audrey&Theodore/Campaign tag, that would disappear from the navigation. I also can’t manually rearrange the navigation or the notes themselves. It’s either sorted by name, creation date, or modification date.
Around the time I was wrapping up my draft for Imogen & Finn and getting into Audrey & Theo, I switched to Scrivener. How come?
Well, “questions no one is asking me” is not quite accurate. Exactly one person has asked me about the writing software I use, the same person who is as of now the only one reading this blog beside me: my sister! She asked me to explain to her why I liked Bear better than Scrivener. I shared my screen and showed her the beautiful organization of my series, where each book had it’s own “folder” and Imogen & Finn was broken down into different sections (what would become episodes) each of which contained around six to ten scenes.
And then I showed her Scrivener, ugly ungainly Scrivener and all its folders and structure. And then I thought, “Oh.”
Yeah. I realized I was basically doing my best to make Bear look like Scrivener while Scrivener, once you knew how to use it, made that much simpler. And also did some things that, now that I’d gotten through one draft, I was finding I wanted. Like, for instance, compiling all those individual chapters into a single document to print out to revise at a later date. Can Bear do that? Technically, yes. But it’s not pretty. Scrivener can take that 80K draft and put it into something that looks like an actual published novel. And when I’m pouring over scenes and paragraphs and sentences, I know which one I’d rather be staring at for hours.
So, I took a day (or a couple hours), pressed play on the massive Scrivener for Mac playlist on YouTube, and just let it run while I had my laptop out to mess around with things. Way better than reading through that tutorial (for me). I learned a lot! And ignored a lot that I didn’t have a need for just yet, or maybe ever. It made the software way less intimidating and I figured out that I could make things as simple or as complex as I wanted.
Mostly I use Scrivener in much the same way I had been using Bear. The vast majority of the features I've yet to work into my process. (I really want to be the kind of person who uses Cork Board view, where each section or chapter gets a little index card that you can put a summary on, and I periodically tell myself "Yeah, let's do it!" But it never actually is helpful for me. Maybe one of these days.) I do like having the Outline view where I can see a top level organization with things like word counts for every section/chapter.
Pertinent information about Scrivener: it's available for both Macs and PCs (which is great) and is also not subscription based (also great). It is a heftier price tag: currently $60.
Aesthetically, I still prefer Bear. The simpleness of the actual writing screen is so incredibly inviting to me. I don’t know quite how to explain how or why but it just makes me want to write in a way that Scrivener or any other software can’t quite manage. Scrivener does have what’s called Composition Mode which essentially, technically is the same thing, especially since I switched it to dark mode. But it’s not exactly the same and I just don’t like it. I pretty much always work in split screen so that I can have two scenes up side by side which is really helpful.
At the moment, I can’t imagine not using both Bear and Scrivener. Going back to Charlie Jane Anders’ idea of going on lots of first dates with story ideas, I think of Bear as the place where I keep it casual. Any time I have a random idea or scene pop into my head, I drop it in there. And if I have multiple ideas or scenes around a single idea, then it gets its own tag. But there’s no pressure to make anything into something more. It’s just good times.
When I’m ready to commit to developing a story, then I shift to Scrivener. (Getting my completed Imogen & Finn draft into Scrivener was a massive pain in the ass that I don’t plan on repeating again, so the less I have to import, the better.) That’s the best place to really dive deep and figure each other out.
This is very specific to me and my process. There are tons of features that are essential to others that don't matter to me. For instance, I'm not a mind mapper. Love the idea but it's chaos and it makes my brain hurt looking at it. But, for whatever it's worth, this is the process I've carved out for myself.