We writers have many tools.

We have our words, the nouns and verbs and adjectives and even the woefully despised adverbs, poor dears. We have our talent, our rare gift for putting the right words in the right order to make our readers weep, laugh, thrill, buy — or just turn the page. We have our minds, straining through the days and nights to create and hold onto the ideas that fill our words with meaning.

And we have our word processors. The tools we use to actually capture those ideas and put them down in words, the software and laptops and notebooks and ballpoints. These tools aren’t quite so glamorous. They seem so everyday, so mundane, so… boring.

And yet, there are few writers that aren’t infinitely fussy when it comes to their physical tools, who don’t demand just the right pencil on just the right paper, or who don’t secretly thrill at the prospect of a new notebook computer to carry down to that oh-so-perfect café. (We’re a little fussy about places, too.)

And why not? The tools we use to get our thoughts out of our head and onto paper (or increasingly, the screen) are the medium of our calling. You wouldn’t look askance at a painter who demanded the right brand of oil paint and a canvas prepared just so, right? A word processor or legal pad is a writer’s canvas; a keyboard or fountain pen her brush.

The truth is, there is inspiration in our tools. Just as the heft of a good chisel can make a woodworker itch to carve, a well-made writing instrument — whether a fine pen or a beautifully-designed word processor — can make us long to write, drawing from us the creative spark.

There are writers who write just to feel the flow of ink on the page (I’m one of them). There are others who are inspired by the shape of a font, the feel of a keyboard, the image of their words spilling across the screen (I’m one of those, too). I’m not kidding when I say that I was so impressed by Adobe’s gorgeous online word processor Buzzword that I wrote a book. Just so I could play with it.

Of course, there are writers who claim to be perfectly comfortable with a chewed-up #2 pencil and a student’s composition book. (Granted, it has to be a Blackwing 602 pencil and the composition books are imported from a stationer in France.…) But writers as a whole are especially prone to fetishizing our instruments, and with good reason: the way we write, the look and feel and smell and atmosphere of the experience of writing itself, affects the outcome of our writing.

Gertrude Stein wrote on scraps of paper on the dashboard of her Ford (which she called “Godiva”). Neil Gaiman writes with a fountain pen, in a Moleskine notebook. Lillian Jackson Braun, the author of the “The Cat Who…” mysteries, writes only on a typewriter. Speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison is also a typewriter fanatic, whose devotion to his Olivia is well-known. Jonathan Lethem has given up his typewriter but remains committed to “the eternal Selectric of the mind” (as he told Slate in 2007) — he only writes in 12-point Courier, double-spaced of course.

And on and on. Some writers pick a specific tool for a specific book, like a musician who chooses just the right guitar for each song. Neal Stephenson wrote his epic Baroque Trilogy, which is several thousand pages in published form, in longhand with a fountain pen on cotton paper. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen, too, saying it forced him to slow down and get into the story.

It might be irrational to find inspiration in our tools, to bind ourselves to the way a specific pen or pencil looks or feels. After all, the words, the tone, the rhythm, the meaning — these all come up from within, right? And yet we writers are irrational creatures by our very natures. Why else choose to spend long hours locked away alone as our preferred method of communicating with people?

Rational or not, investing our tools with the power to draw forth meaning from the depths of our beings is a very human, and very writerly, thing to do. It pleases us to use good tools, especially when we use them well. It’s all well and good to meditate on how we spin the raw stuff of everyday life into complexly woven tales rich with insight into the human condition, but we shouldn’t forget the less exciting but no less essential tools we use to relate those tales to the rest of the world.

They are, after all, tools of inspiration.

I’m going to start getting in the habit of posting questions on weekends — maybe not every weeken, but now and again. So what better place to start than with tools? What tools do you love? What makes writing a joy — and how? What is indispensable for you? Let me — and the rest of the site’s readers — know in the comments.

To say that LSB is a novel-writing program hardly scratches the surface of what the program does. To be frank, the program does so much that I’m not even entirely sure what it does! Let’s start with the metaphor of a binder. In a pen-and-paper world, a writer might put together a binder with all the information they’d need about their book-in-progress: character sketches, plot outlines, setting notes, drawings, random thoughts, todo lists, and so on.

Once you get the ideas behind it, LSB essentially offers a digital version of the paper binder, integrated with a workspace where you actually write your novel.

Or your not-novel. While LSB is clearly designed with fiction writers in mind, it is easily adaptable to any sort of prose, from short essays to non-fiction monographs. Character forms can be used to store information about sources or historical figures, setting forms can be used for place descriptions, and so on. In fact, for the essayist or short story writer who may want to compile their work into a book down the line, LSB is ideal — each chapter (or essay or story) is stored as a separate file (in Rich Text Format, which can be opened by virtually any word processor on any system) so it can be manipulated on its own, but when it comes time to collating everything together, LSB automates the process completely.

LSB also includes some other nice features, like the ability to create playlists to use while writing (consider this: a “heroic music” playlist for action scenes, a “romantic idylls” playlist for romance scenes, and a playlist composed entirely of Prince songs for sex scenes — you can soundtrack your own book while you write!) and reference works like a dictionary and thesaurus.

LSB comes with an example “Book” (its jargon for everything related to a single project) that includes examples of every function and tutorials on how to get started (which are complemented by some nice tutorials on their site). I had originally planned to do a walkthrough of the book creation process, but Tom Colvin of Becoming a Writer Seriously has already written a good introduction to Liquid Story Binder that covers most of the ground I would have.

Though it has a pretty steep learning curve, which the tutorials go a long way but not all the way towards alleviating, LSB is a worthwhile investment for any writer. I’d suggest getting it at the start of a project, so you don’t have to deal with cutting-and-pasting existing material into LSB and can focus instead on working with the program’s workflow. At $45.95 US, LSB isn’t cheap, but it’s nowhere near as expensive as much of the lesser software out there that promises to make writing easy. LSB makes no such promise; it only aims to make writing more organized.

Liquid Story Binder XE ($45.95 US)

Job Profiles’ list contains several pieces of software I use on a daily basis, quite a few I’ve written about or plan to write about here, and more than a couple I’d never heard of before like the WordIt word processor and the Graviax Grammar Checker. Definitely worth checking out.

Lower left corner of q10; click for full screenshot.

q10 keeps a running word, character, and page count in the lower left-hand corner. A built-in timer allows you to decide how long you want to work. It also has a pop-up window for keeping notes while you work (which you access by hitting ctrl-h — everything in q10 is done with ctrl-keystroke shortcuts, which are listed in a cheat-sheet you access by pressing F1).

The appearance of the application is highly customizable, allowing you to select background and font color, typeface, paragraph styles, and autosave intervals. In the full screenshot, you’ll see that I made the text dark brown on a light brown background, and set the type size quite large — soothing colors and large text for my old, tired eyes. Q10 is also portable, meaning you can run it from a flash drive so you can use it from virtually any Windows PC.

On the downside, the optional spellcheck doesn’t seem to work for me. There is a text expand function, that ostensibly allows you to create text shortcuts that will automatically expand into commonly used words, phrases, or full blocks of boilerplate text, but I couldn’t figure out how it works. Neither the program nor the website offers much in the way of support — you “gets what you pays fer”!

A bigger problem (for me, anyway) is that because it’s a text editor, q10 offers no options for formatting your text — which means no bold, italic, double-indenting, etc. That’s a bit of a deal-breaker for me, but I know many writers like to focus on letting the words flow and adding formatting in a later draft; for them, q10 is perfect, minimizing distractions and letting you focus on just writing.

Oh, and one other thing: q10 has a built-in typewriter sound effect, that you’d think would be quite annoying, but it’s actually kind of invigorating, like being in the newsroom with Woodward and Bernstein or something. All in all, a cool if slightly flawed program.

q10 (Free)

The web makes working with other writers and/or clients easier than ever. Gone are the days of posting typescripts of chapters back and forth between co-authors — now you can log in and instantly see what your collaborator has written or changed. And if you don’t like what you see, you can easily check the history of your documents, reverting to earlier versions if something goes horribly awry.

There are three basic approaches to web-based collaboration:

1. Live interaction: You and your collaborator(s) gather around a virtual whiteboard and add, edit, and delete in real time.
2. Online revision: You work on a document online and give permission to selected others to see and modify your work.
3. Document management: You upload a file (or create one) and allow others to download it, edit it, and re-upload their changes.

For writers, the easiest and most likely is online revision, but let’s look at solutions for all three.

Live collaboration

Live collaboration systems allow several authors to gather virtually around a single document, discuss it, and make changes that are instantly seen by others (usually highlighted a different color for each writer). The technology isn’t very advanced, yet, but there are a few applications that offer this ability.

• Gobby: Intended for programmers, Gobby is a free program that allows several users to make changes and see others changes. Each user’s changes are highlighted in the color they select. The bottom pane is a live chatroom. The file format is text-only, so you can’t add formatting like bold or italics. Runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

  Gobby is still under development, so expect to see improvements along the way.

• SynchroEdit: SynchroEdit is an online collaboration space, allowing several authors to work on a document at the same time. Each author’s changes are highlighted a different color. Allows basic formatting (bold, italic, text align, headers). Includes a chat pane in the lower right hand corner. When the document is finished, you can have it emailed to you; at the moment, it comes in the body of your email. Hopefully they’ll add text exporting to typical file formats as they develop it.

  SynchroEdit is also under development, and at the moment runs on any operating system but can only be accessed using Firefox or its derivatives.

Online revision

Websites that allow you to invite others to revise work have become quite common as the technology has matured. Almost any online word processor will allow this, though two users cannot work on the same document at the same time (unlike the live systems described above). Here, I’ll focus on only a few.

• Google Docs: Google Docs is the current king of the online word processing space. Documents can be uploaded or created online, and you cna invite any number of partners to view or edit your documents. Clicking the “Revisions” tab will show you all previous versions of a document. When finished, the document can be downloaded in several formats, including Word doc and Adobe pdf, or published directly to the web. Simple, easy to use, and with several gigabytes of free online storage, you can keep an entire career’s worth of writing safe and secure online.

  Other online word processors like Zoho Writer, ThinkFree, and the text editor Writeboard (which offers no formatting options) work much the same way; all are free.

• Adobe Buzzword: I could have included Buzzword in the list of online word processors above, but I like it so much I decided to give it its own entry in this list. Buzzword is a gorgeous online word processor with some pretty good sharing features. Click “Share” in the lower left-hand corner, and you can invite collaborators as co-authors (allows full editing privileges), reviewers (allows commenting), or readers (allows reading only, no changes). Click the “History” icon in the lower right (it looks like a Greek statue), and you can instantly view previous versions of the document. Insert a cursor into any line and a comment bubble comes up in the right-hand margin; click it and leave comments. The same document can be open by several people at the same time; changes are collated together automatically. Buzzword’s collaboration features complement nicely it’s really powerful and attractive word processor.
• WriteWith: A full-fledged integrated collaborating system, WriteWith allows you to upload documents or create them online, edit them, assign and track tasks (with deadlines) to collaborators, and save finished documents or drafts to your computer in Word format. Changes are highlighted with a different color for each user. You can easily see who is editing a document at any given moment, and leave notes for future writers. If I could get Buzzword wrapped in WriteWith’s project management tools, I’d be totally happy!

Check-in, check-out: document management online

Document management systems allow users to check out a document, edit it, and check it back in. Well-established among corporate users, these systems are only starting to come online in stripped-down versions. There are lots of complicated systems you ahve to install and maintain yourself, but Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace promises to make much of this functionality available to everyone.

• Microsoft Office Live Workspace: Invite-only at the moment, this extension of the Office Live program allows you to upload documents and share them online, setting permissions as to who can read, download, or edit your documents. Revision history is tracked at the site. You can preview documents online, but can only edit them by downloading them into MS Office — fortunately, Microsoft offers a toolbar add-in for Office that makes this simple.
• You can also use project management software like BaseCamp or Wrike to store and share files; like MS Workspaces, you’ll download them, edit them, and re-upload them. However, these systems rarely offer any sort of revision tracking. On the other hand, they offer useful features like todo lists, milestones, task assignments, and scheduling.

Of course, you could just email files back and forth, which isn’t an entirely impractical way to collaborate if you’re comfortable suing Word’s “track changes” function (or the equivalent in your word processor), and you’re using the same word processor as your collaborators.

If you do anything more complex than reviewing what others have written and sending your won writing for review, you should take a look at shifting from email to an online system designed for collaboration. You don’t have to worry about what software to use, or about someone forgetting to send an email or attach a file, or about getting lost in the sea of tracked changes. Instead, you can just focus on doing your writing — which is a pretty good deal, I think!

photo credit: spcummings

These days, you can’t go anywhere without seeing people typing away on their laptops. In coffee houses, parks, airports, trains, college campuses — anywhere you go, people have laptops out and are, ostensibly, getting work done. (Or, more likely, playing Desktop Tower Defense.)

Good for them. They’ve got maybe two hours before their battery fails, and then they’ve got to lug around that 6 extra pounds until they get it home. Hopefully — laptop make excellent targets for thieves, too.

I have a laptop — I work all over the house with it. But I never take it out of the house. Even though it’s not very heavy, it’s heavy enough to kill my shoulders, and I’m terrified that something will happen to it.

Instead, I have an Alphasmart 3000, an absolutely amazing device.

Designed for schoolchildren, the Alphasmart is a no-frills, single-purpose word processing machine. It has a full-size keyboard, a 4-line black-on-gray LCD screen, and storage for up to 8 files of 12 1/2 pages each.

Because it’s built for schoolchildren, it’s tough as heck. Because it doesn’t do anything fancy, it’s small and light — maybe two pounds. And because it’s essentially a keyboard with a screen and a little memory, it barely uses any power — it gets up to 700 hours of use on 3 AA batteries. And it comes on almost instantly — no boot up time.

The Alphasmart isn’t just practical — it’s also, dare I say, “spiritual”. OK, I don’t dare — that’s too much. Still, it has a Zen-like simplicity. All it does is write. You can, with some difficulty, cut-and-paste, but I don’t advise it — remember, you can only see 4 lines at a time. It has no fonts, no paragraph styles, no italics or boldface, no bulleted lists, no section headings. You can’t play with it, is what I’m saying.

All you an do is write. You sit down with the Alphasmart in front of you and you write. No email, no Minesweeper, no distractions of any sort. When you use an Alphasmart, you’re just writing. You don’t even have to save — the Alphasmart saves everything automatically (until you clear the file).

Later, when your writing is done, you can easily import it into your favorite word processor. You connect the USB cable (any USB cable with the appropriate end will work — I take the cable out of my scanner) and the Alphasmart automatically goes into “send” mode. Your computer — PC, Mac, doesn’t matter — sees it as a generic keyboard (you can even use it to write on your PC, if you want). Open any program — Word, OpenOffice.org, Notepad, doesn’t matter — and hit “send”. The Alphasmart sends your keystrokes to the open program. It’s like watching a ghost typist type up your story, article, or play.

The latest Alphasmart, the NEO, sells at the Alphasmart website for $219 US. (They also sell the Dana, which is something different — an Alphasmart built around the Palm operating system. You don’t need it.) But there are plenty of used Alphasmart 3000s and 2000s (with slightly less memory than the 3000) floating around; they tend to show up on eBay for around $80 US. Definitely a worthwhile investment considering the benefits they offer for writers!

To get an invite to the beta, just email me using the contact form on this site. I’ll send an invite to the first 10 people who ask — first come, first served. If I get any more invites to EverNote — or anything else of interest to writers — I’ll be happy to share them, but for now, it’s only 10. The beta is free, but I have no idea whether they’ll be charging for the online features once the program is officially released (I believe the desktop software will always have a free version).

photo credit: *L*u*z*a*

In honor of the launch of The Writer’s Technology Companion, I put together a huge collection of resources for writers at Lifehack.org today. Topics covered include:

• 10 Free Apps Every Writer Should Consider
• 10 Online Apps and Services Every Writer Should Check Out
• 10 Sites Every Writer Should Bookmark (Besides Lifehack)
• 30 Lifehack Posts Every Writer Should Read
• 5 Online Communities Every Writer Should Join

Here’s a little bonus, an online community I didn’t include in the Lifehack piece:

Nothing Binding: An online community for writers, with a forum and a special emphasis on audio and video content by writers and about writing. They also run a kind of “review exchange”, where writers can send a copy of their book to a reviewer and get a review they can use in press kits, on their website, or wherever they want. Nothing Binding is still pretty new — they have about 500 members so far — so there’s not a lot of content yet (and, less forgivably, the blog is still empty), but it seems like a fun and knowledgeable community.

Check out The Ultimate Writing Productivity Resource, and leave your own suggestions in the comments.

The Writer’s Technology Companion is now open for business. Starting tomorrow (Monday, March 31) I’ll be posting software and hardware reviews, tutorials, marketing tips, writing advice, and whatever else I can think of — all focused on how writers can make their tools work for them.

For the most part, posts will come three a week, though there will be times I’ll be posting every day. The focus is on the free-to-cheap range of products and practices; I’m assuming you’re on a writer’s budget.

Feel free to suggest any products you’d like to see me cover, or any other topics for that matter. My goal is to make this site as useful as possible for you, the working writer. Since my own writing exists mainly in the how-to, personal development, and academic spheres, there’s bound to be blind spots in my view of the writing world. I rely on your feedback to help fill me in on the areas I’m less familiar with.

I hope you enjoy The Writer’s Technology Companion. If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed or the email updates to stay informed of the latest news about the tools of our trade.