I hate to settle.
Ask anyone, it’s a chronic problem of mine. One of the things I enjoy about tools like Lastpass is the freedom they give me in being able to rapidly change engines without losing access to any of my data. I will routinely swap between web browsers, running Safari for weeks at a time until something annoys me, then switching to Chrome for a few days, weeks, even months, before running back to Safari. Rarely, I’ll even go to Firefox, but the old mozilla suite annoys me too quickly (memory footprints are outrageous!).
It should be no surprise, then, that when it comes to writing, I find myself flip flopping between toolsets. Really, this comes down to a matter of mobility. Not the need for it, but the illusion that I need it. Allow me to explain…
I think Scrivener is the bee’s knees. Scrivener isn’t an editor, it isn’t a word processor. It’s a home for words to thrive in. For someone like me, often changing their mind about the order and use of things, it is the perfect tool – you can quickly and easily move scenes around willy nilly, taste test new layouts, and lose nothing. Presentation and composition are two different layers, so writing in wingdings doesn’t mean you’ll need to change anything pre-production to make it work. Plus, the words flow quicker and easier in Scrivener. Your view of the text can be customized in so many ways without ever affecting the underlying product.
The problem with Scrivener is that despite year’s of promises, it still isn’t readily accessible mobile. There are options; hackneyed, squint real hard and ignore the sharp edges work arounds using text exports and difficult to track naming conventions, export syncs that squish your delicate folder structure into a single list of files and playing havoc with your sanity. They work, when in a jam, but they aren’t great.
Then there’s something like google docs, which is by no means a great word processor. But it’s easily mobile, even from an iPad. The features are really lacking, and moving from completed manuscript to submission worthy product looks terribly daunting, but if you need to be able to write from anywhere, anywhen, and retain your formatting, it’s your best option at the moment. And while google docs lacks a lot of features, it comes with ready integration into a spreadsheet and scripting environment. Taking some pre-existing scripts that Jamie Rubin wrote, I’ve expanded them to adapt to my needs – monitoring multiple folders, recording the progress of each file in each folder, and generating data charts from that on the fly via google’s thinly veiled cron engine. That’s something I can’d do with Scrivener easily.
And yet….as pleasant as the script access is, and despite the work I’ve put in to expanding the library that Jamie built, I’d gladly give it all up if I could just use Scrivener everywhere (iPad being the next big platform for me).
So here I sit on this first day of the new year, trying to decide how I want to write this year. The folks at Literature and Latte promise us this, this is the year they release the iOS version of Scrivener. I want to believe, but a year is a long time, and I’ve been fooled before. But google docs, where I can generate such amazing data quickly, is just so…clunky.
You may be wondering why I don’t just use the scripts I wrote and discussed last month that let me import word counts into google docs from scrivener. Unlike my browser example, where thanks to external utilities like lastpass, I can quickly and easily change tools without losing any data, switching between google docs and scrivener is a bit more involved. There is no easy method for synchronizing the text between the two – I need to settle on one or the other, or face the task of manually copying data over. I want to have the option of using my tablet when I’m out and about (or on a trip) without having to lose formatting.
Bah. I hate making decisions. Of course, the time I took to write this 700+ word article could have been spent working on the book. Point taken.
Related articles
- What I’ve Written In (whatever.scalzi.com)
- Scrivener or Word… it’s all about focus (davidhewson.com)
- Google stack days four: Google Docs good and bad (geekzone.co.nz)
