This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 12: My Eight Favorite Writing Tools.

[Intro music.]

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner. I’d like to start off today’s episode by congratulating my sister, Rebecca, who has just completed her novel. Now, Rebecca is one of those people whom I sort of simultaneously admire and envy. She works between eight and 11-hour shifts on her feet, all day, in one room, not able to leave the room, and it’s exhausting. Yet, every day before she goes to work, when her mind is fresh, she writes for one hour, two hours, as much as she can, and then uses the time at work to brainstorm and to think of sentences and phrases.

So, Rebecca, congratulations. I can’t wait to read your novel. We’re going to kick things off today… Oh, I just said kick things off. That’s a sports metaphor. Okay, I don’t hate sports, I’m just not a sports person. I’m one of those people that I really like going to like baseball games and football games and I love the energy of sports events. I sit there and I’m eating a soft pretzel and drinking a beer and going [inaudible 00:01:53] because you can scream and you can talk loud and I absolutely love that. But as far as the points or following a team, I’m not so good at that. I’m kind of like, “Yay! Sports team, score the points. Hooray.”

I know I should care more about sports because I grew up in Cleveland and my father is a diehard Cleveland Indians/Cavs/Browns fan. There is some kind of curse on Cleveland sports. Wow! This podcast is going away from writing. So let’s gather it back in without using any sports metaphors or as few as I can manage and start off today’s podcast episode with a throwback to last week’s episode. So last week, in an episode called finding your voice, I talked about finding your voice, which is obvious because of the title. But I received a really thoughtful email from a listener named Karen, who said, “Why get discouraged if your voice is not like that Pulitzer Prize-winning authors. Your voice is your voice.”

“If you try to match another person’s voice, it’s like trying to match their footprints in the snow. It isn’t natural. Writing in your own voice should be organic, not synthetic. My point is, reading would be boring if every author wrote with the same voice, even within the same genre. What makes reading so beautiful is all the different voices. I think your story will be better if you write it in your own voice, not trying to imitate someone else’s voice. My opinion is vive la différence. Embrace the difference.” Karen, thank you so much for your email. I really enjoyed reading it and I thought that you made some really, really great points.

So if any of you other listeners out there would like to share your thoughts on last week’s episode or this week’s episode, or really any episode I have ever recorded, I would love to hear from you. You all have a unique perspective and you all come from your area of expertise, and I really value that. So if you want to share your thoughts, you can do that one of two ways. First of all, by visiting sarahwerner.com, S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com and navigating to my contact page where you will fill out a very simple, small form. Alternately, you can feel free to email me anytime, anywhere at hello@sarahwerner.com. I will happily read your email, and usually I respond. You can also make a quick note on the Write Now podcast Facebook page, which is alive and kicking somewhere out on the internet.

So last week’s podcast was about your writer’s voice. This week, I’ll be talking about your writer’s tools. When I say tool, I am not referring to the bro who lives down the street and loves to pop his collar and drive his dad’s Mustang. Now, I’m also not talking about sort of the figurative tools that we talk about as writers; so alliteration, metaphor, allusion, assonance, internal rhyme, symbolism, theme, voice even. These are figurative tools. Often, you’ll hear me refer to the writer’s tool box. Those are the tools that live in that figurative toolbox. But that is not what we are talking about today. Today, we’re going to be talking about actual literal tools.

Every different type of craft has its tools. If you are a sculptor and you sit down at your block of marble, you might pick up a hammer and a chisel. That hammer and chisel are your tools. Similarly, if you like to knit, you might pick up a skein of yarn and some knitting needles. Those needles are your tools. So as a writer, what are our tools? What do you use to craft, to wrangle, to stump, to beat, to smash, to twist your words into a story or a poem or a book or an article, whatever it is you might be writing. I’m very interested in the different tools that people use, and so I conducted a short survey.

I looked at both what famous writers used in the past and use today. I also polled some of my friends who are writers and asked them about their tools. So for instance, my sister, Rebecca, I asked her for her top tools and she said, “You know what? I get a stack of three by five index cards and I carry them around. Whenever I have a free moment, I write down a sentence or an idea, or even continue on with my novel.” She has a really good point. Note cards are a really great tool. You can put different ideas around on them and shift them around, and it makes for a less linear writing process, which can be helpful at times, depending on what you’re writing. She also said that she listens to music.

I saw that this was a common theme among the writers that I talked to. She says she prefers listening to movie soundtracks, so kind of thematic music without lyrics by composers such as Philip Glass and Hans Zimmer. My husband is a writer and I asked him about his tools. He uses Google Docs to sort of set up a system of folders and saves different chapters in different folders and keeps things very fluid as well. He also uses Dropbox because we have had a string of very terrible computers in this house, and inevitably they will crash. He has gone through a time when he has lost his novel. I don’t want to necessarily say that, “Oh, that’s something we can all identify with. We’ve all been there.”

But if you’ve been there, that’s a terrible feeling. So he uses Dropbox. By the way, I hope I don’t sound like a corporate shell today. I’m not getting paid to endorse any of these projects. I’m just sharing with you what some people have found helpful and later I’ll share with you what I find helpful. So that’s my husband, Tim. My friend, Charlie, uses one thing, and that is Notepad. Not a notepad like a physical notepad, but that little accessory program that comes on most computer operating systems. He said that he likes the sort of no frills approach to writing. All you can do there is write, there is no formatting or anything.

My friend, Peder, from 168 Opportunities.com uses Evernote, which is a program that exists across multiple platforms, such as your phone, your home computer, and lets you save different snapshots and documents and photos and anything that you may need with you when you’re writing, and you can access that from a lot of different points. My very good friend, JP, is also a writer. He needs complete silence so he wrote down silence as his tool, as well as Microsoft Word. So you can see here really, no two of these random people that I surveyed use the same tools to write, or they didn’t call out the same tools they really love.

So I also took a look at the writing habits of some famous writers. I just thought these were utterly fascinating. Ernest Hemingway writes about his writing preferences in his memoir, A Moveable Feast, in which he says, The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener, a pocket knife is too wasteful, the marble topped tables, the smell of cafe creams, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed.” What Hemingway did is he would start off writing with a typewriter and he would just type out all of his thoughts and words.

But then when he did his subsequent rewrites, he would use pencil, because he was convinced that you’re wrangling it more physically. You’re looking at it with different eyes and you’re able to make changes that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to make in a linear writing tool such as a typewriter. John Steinbeck, who wrote East of Eden and the Grapes of Wrath, used pencil and only pencil. He would start every writing session with 24 pencils lined up on his desk. It has been said that, to use passive voice, he used 300 pencils to write East of Eden, which I can believe. He was also very particular about the type of pencil he used. His pencil of choice was the famous Blackwing.

I am a huge Jane Austen nerd/fan girl. I’m obsessed with her writing methods, which seems so unique. Jane Austen wrote by hand and she used a quarter of stationer’s notebook, bound with quarter tanned sheep over board sided with marble paper. The edges of the leaves were plain cut and sprinkled red. But what I thought was exceptionally interesting is that she made her own ink. Here’s the recipe for Jane Austen’s what she calls iron-gall ink. Take four ounces of blue gauls, which is gallic acid made from oak apples, two ounces of green copperas, which is iron sulphate, and one and a half ounces of gum arabic. Break the gauls. The gum and copperas must be beaten into a mortar and put into a pint of strong stale beer, with a pint of small beer.

Put in a little refined sugar. It must stand in the chimney corner 14 days and be shaken two or three times a day. So there you have it if you want to make your own iron-gall ink. She also used a quill along with this ink. So if you really want to go old school, that’s how you do it. However, if you are looking for something more modern than a quill and homemade ink, romance novelist, Jennifer Crusie, uses a tool called Scrivener. Now caveat, I’ve tried to use Scrivener before and it is immensely complex. It’s a program that you use on your computer or laptop or what have you. And really, what it is, is an information storage system.

That’s the best way I can explain it. So this is what Jennifer Crusie has to say about Scrivener. “I love Scrivener. It breaks the mass of information and draft text I need to do a 100,000 word novel into pieces that make sense in storytelling instead of following a rigid, non-intuitive outline. One scene per file means one index card per scene, with the crucial information on it so I can work deep in a scene in detail, and then with one click, see that scene in the context of the entire book. It marries the flexibility I need to stay creative with the organization I need to save time and see the book as a whole.”

So if you are interested in a sort of software system that’s less for writing focus and more for just sheer word count management and scene management and chapter management, then you might want to look into Scrivener. So those were four ideas from Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jane Austen, and Jennifer Crusie. I’ve just realized right now that me following up those four incredible and famous writers with my own favorite tools for writing is extremely narcissistic. But you know what? I’m going to do it anyway. All right, my eight favorite writing tools. Number one. I think my absolute favorite writing tool is a program called OmmWriter.

That’s spelled O-M-M W-R-I-T-E-R. Think of it as ommm, like you’re meditating. What it does is, I have extremely bad like, “Oh, look, shiny thing distraction syndrome.” And I’m a huge procrastinator. You put those two things together and you give me a program like Microsoft Word, and I’m like, “Oh, look, I can make this 95 different fonts. You know what? Would this look a little better with an indent here? Do my chapter titles need to be centered or should they be slightly larger or bolded.” Pretty soon, all of my writing time has not been spent writing, but rather formatting.

It also, with something like Word or Notepad, makes it very easy to access your little bar at the bottom of your screen with your programs all lined up, such as your internet browser. The internet is just so lovely and distracting. It can take me to Netflix, can take me to my email, can take me anywhere, except to the place where I need to be writing. So what OmmWriter does is two things. First of all, it provides a format-free, distraction-free writing zone. Secondly, it takes up your entire computer screen and blocks everything else out. So literally, the only thing you’re looking at is whatever background you choose for OmmWriter.

It’s all very peaceful, “creativity-enhancing backdrops,” and you just write on top of them. Well, you type on top of them. You get a little blinking cursor that looks like an underscore, and you just start typing. It does all sorts of little things to encourage you to keep writing. You can choose ambient music, you can choose whether you hear little clicky sounds as you type, whatever floats your boat. It is available online for an unspecified amount of money. It’s one of those things where, “Hey, do you want this? Give us some money because we worked hard to create this.” I think the minimum that you can donate is like $5, and it’s really worth it.

It’s available for both Mac and PC. I like it a lot and it really helps me to, as we’ve talked about before, get in the zone by taking away those distractions, those terrible, terrible distractions. I also just like really seeing my words that I type appear on a picture. I just think it’s really cool. I’ll have a link to this in the show notes so you can take a look at what it looks like. The only downside is saving the file that you write. You have to be very careful with this. What I found I have to do is save it as a dot-TXT file. I’m always scared that third party programs such as OmmWriter or Microsoft Word or what have you, I don’t know, will cease to exist.

Gosh, I’m so paranoid. I’m a weird, paranoid person. But I like to be safe. So what I do is I save my OmmWriter file as a dot-TXT file just in case, so that I can open it up in OmmWriter or I can open it up using pretty much any other program. So that is my absolute favorite writing tool. That’s where I produce the most writing and where I feel the most creative. A combination of the blank screen and ambient sounds just really works well for me. Now, I realize that won’t work for everybody, but that’s what works for me. Number two, you’re going to get a kick out of this one, because it’s pencil and paper. But specifically, yellow legal pads and big 0.7 millimeter number two mechanical pencils.

I can’t write in pen. For whatever reason, ballpoint pens, they’re too slick, and my handwriting gets a little too fast with a ballpoint pen and it gets sloppy and I just hate it. I hate it so much. I hate the feel. I really like good quality thick paper and a pencil because the lead really… well graphite, I guess, but we’ll call it a lead. The lead of the pencil really grabs and bites into the paper and I love that feeling. It makes me feel like I’m the sculptor with the chisel at the block of marble. That sounded like a clue answer. The sculptor with the chisel at the block of marble, such a nerd.

So a lot of the times, if OmmWriter isn’t available, because let’s face it, we don’t always have a computer with that very specific program available to us, but I always carry around a legal pad and a clipboard and my number 2, 0.7 millimeter mechanical, big pencil. The reason I like to use legal pads instead of the eight and a half by 11 or smaller for writing is that I don’t feel as hemmed in. I feel like I can write more. It’s just a completely mental thing. I like the color yellow because it brings out… I found that it enhances my creativity. So the office that I’m sitting in right now, where I’m podcasting to you from, is painted yellow for that very same reason.

I’ve actually only now just realized this, but it is exactly the same color as a legal pad. So make of that what you will. Number three, an idea book. I’ve talked about this before, and this is the little notebook where during the day, especially if you are at work, if you’re watching the kids play soccer or hockey, or if you’re out on a walk, this is a little tiny physical notebook that you can slip into your pocket and you can write down words, interesting names, ideas for poems, plot twists, anything you want, quotes from writers that you like. I use sort of the poor man’s version of the Moleskine cashiers’ journal.

So there are these little, I don’t know, they’re like three by five, and they have little tiny lines inside and a sort of just brown chipboard cover. I get like a three pack of them for like $4 at Target. So they’re really nice. I have them numbered and I can carry quite a few of them around. They slip into my pocket. Here’s when I sit down and my brain is all tapped out for the day and I’m like, “Oh, I have to write. What do I want to write?” I can just open up my little idea, but can say, “Oh yeah, I had this awesome idea earlier.” Of course, you know, because I think it’s happened to everybody before.

Sometimes, especially at like 3:00 AM, you’ll have this super great idea and then you’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t need to write it down. I’ll remember it later.” You’ll never remember it. Same thing with I’m sitting in a meeting at work and I have a great idea and I’m like, “Oh, it’d be really rude if I wrote down a story idea right now while this client’s talking. So I’ll remember it later.” Then I get really into the meeting and I join the discussion and then afterwards I’m like, “Shoot, what was that really great idea I had?” And I never get it back. If you’re not the kind of writer that likes to carry around a little whimsical, little journal book thing for your ideas, I totally get that.

Maybe you carry around a phone or some other tiny electronic computing device. Most phones have a list app or a reminder app. I sometimes use that when my little notebook’s not available, if I’m at a party and all I have is my phone, because yes, we’re in the age where I no longer carry a purse. I only carry my phone. I have a little list within my reminder app. So small notebook, jot your ideas down. It’s worth it. Number four, coffee. I have a problem. My problem is my caffeine addiction. Yay! I know that in some ways it could be worse. I could be addicted to like meth or opium, so hooray for me. But at the same time, I seriously cannot write if I do not have a cup of coffee.

It has to be hot coffee. I cannot have ice cold coffee or I freak out. And it has to be good coffee. Can’t do instant coffee. I’m a little, little picky. I won’t go into my coffee snobbery here, but suffice to say, I need it to write. For me, it’s not just the caffeine, but it’s also the ritual of making coffee and of sort of cradling the mug in my hand as I think, of taking a sip, of mechanically putting it down onto a coaster on my desk, writing, picking it up and sipping when I need space to think. So really, even outside of the caffeine, it’s sort of a mechanical comfort that I’m just used to having around me when I write.

Number five, a timer. This one might surprise you, and it’s not strictly necessary. You don’t need this to write. But this is one of those things that I like to have around if I can. A lot of phones and watches and computers, et cetera, all come with a built in timer in some kind of app form, or you can pick up a stopwatch or grab the egg timer from the kitchen or what have you. But what I use a timer for is when I’m just feeling lost, when I have trouble focusing, when I sit down and I’m like, “Aah, I’ve got to get this over with because I have to go grocery shopping. I need to send out these emails, and then I have to remember to put this bill in the mail and do this and this and this.”

What the timer does is… I set it for no less than an hour. That’s very important. Set it for at least an hour and tell yourself that this is an hour or two hours, or however long you set it, during which you are free to write. I think that somewhat like the coffee, this is one of those mechanical sort of comfort things, except in this case, the gift that I’m giving myself is freedom from my anxieties and worries. I’m granting myself with a very visible amount of time that I have to be creative and to write and to not go on the internet and to not wander around the house, pulsing around, doing chores. The timer says I have an hour, and so I’m going to use that hour. For me, it’s a focus tool and it might be for you as well.

Number six, Pinterest. All right. So either you know what Pinterest is, and you’re like, “Hooray! That’s where all my wedding plans are.” Or you’re like, “What is Pinterest? It sounds stupid.” You’re both right. But you can use Pinterest as a writing tool, you just have to use it very carefully. And Hey, you might want to use your timer along with Pinterest. So before I get ahead of myself, Pinterest is a social media platform that lets you create pin boards or collect photos from around the internet. A lot of people use them for inspirational quotes or pictures of cool things or recipes or what have you. You can create a number of different themed pin boards and pin stuff to them.

It is ridiculously easy to lose your entire day or at least more time than you intended on just the infinite scroll of images that are algorithmically intended to appeal to you. But what I’ve done is I’ve set up a special Pinterest board purely for writing inspiration. What I’ve put there is inspirational writing quotes that keep me interested and focused on writing. I have pictures that remind me why I love to write. I have pictures that hopefully will inspire me to write. Actually, I’ve made this available to you as well. There will be a link in the show notes. Again, the only caveat is, watch the time that you spend there very carefully. Go there, get inspired, and leave.

Number seven, sounds. As I mentioned earlier, my good friend, JP, needs perfect silence in which to write. Maybe you are this way too. In fact, I kind of am. But you may also know if you live in a house with a family, if you live on a busy street, if you work in a busy office with lots of ringing phones, and God forbid, music playing over the stereo, you might find it difficult to concentrate. In that case, I might suggest noise-canceling headphones or simply heading to a library with study carols or quiet rooms, or even investing in a pair of ear plugs. However, sometimes in silence, my mind begins to stray and I tend to get lost in thought.

Often, those thoughts tend to stray away from what I need to be writing. I start thinking about an upcoming trip or a movie I want to see or family issues or everything in the world except my novel. So in that case, I have a special playlist that I created in iTunes of songs whose mood match that of the novel that I’m writing. Generally, I prefer music without lyrics because then I’ll find myself listening to the words in the song and almost accidentally typing them out. So no words for me, just music or songs that I just know so well that I don’t even register the words anymore. Or if that’s even a little too much, there are some really cool websites and apps out there that are essentially background noise generators.

One of my favorites is rainymood.com, R-A-I-N-Y M-O-O-D.com. What it does is you type in the URL and you hear rain and thunder. If you like to mix and match your own sounds, there is an app called Noisli, N-O-I-S-L-I, where you can mix and match your own soundtrack, I guess, I don’t know. It’s all ambient sounds such as rain or wind or a crackling hearth. There’s even white noise and pink noise, and you can mix those at levels that suit your concentration. But really, a stream of sound, be it ambient or musical, can really help me focus and help me drill down into the story without letting my thoughts wander around unmeasured and unchecked. It can also help really establish the mood of what you’re writing.

Finally, number eight, Dropbox. I spoke about this a little bit earlier because my husband, Tim, uses Dropbox. It’s essentially a cloud hosting platform. You write on your computer or in some other electronic format, and you save it in your Dropbox folder. What this does is it shares it into a server that is hosted far away from your house and your own computer desktop, so that I can log in using my Dropbox credentials on any computer and retrieve my work, which is very handy since our computers tend to die tragically when you least expect it.

So I can go from working on my novel at home on my desktop computer in OmmWriter, I can save it to Dropbox, and then I can go to a friend’s house to hang out and be able to access my novel on my laptop, or I can go to the library with a laptop and I can access my novel there. So those are my eight tools for writing; OmmWriter, pencil and paper, an idea journal/reminder list app, coffee, a timer, Pinterest, music/ambient sound/earplugs, and Dropbox. Again, there will be a list of these within my show notes as well as links to those that are applicable.

So whatever it is that you use to write, be it a vintage typewriter where you really have to hammer out the words letter by letter, or a $600 Montblanc pen, or a quill and parchment, and Jane Austen’s oddly specific ink recipe, these are all tools. These are the means by which we tease those words and phrases and images from our brains and transfer them into story form that can be shared with others. These are tools that teach us as we work, that inspire us as we grow, and often give us a safe space in which to simply be writers. When I set my timer for an hour, that is a gift of freedom that I’m giving myself.

It allows me to spend time on my craft, and it keeps me from feeling guilty or fearful, those poisonous feelings that can stop you from doing what you need and should and love to do. If you have your own tools, again, please feel free to share them with me, whether you use Microsoft Word, or Write or Die, or Scrivener, or what have you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email, drop me a line using my contact form. What else? This week’s book of the week is the Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. It is a science fiction book written in 1954. Depending on your preferred genres, this could either sound extremely interesting or excessively dull.

It is the story of a policeman, it’s a mystery story, and the policemen must solve a murder. He has been assigned a robot as a partner, a robot that looks very much like a human. The twist is that if he doesn’t solve the murder, the robot, his new partner, essentially gets his job. So he’s under a little bit of pressure. I had never read Isaac Asimov before. I’m going to admit that to you and just accept my failure as a science fiction fan. But I had developed this prejudice against not older books really, but I was like, “Science fiction from the 1950s, it’s going to be all boring and blah, blah.” But oh my gosh! It’s not, it’s amazing. It’s thought provoking.

Seriously, it’s the best kind of science fiction because some of it has come true, and it reads wonderfully. I mean, it’s not dated at all. Every once in a while, a character will say like, “Oh, geez,” or something that’s kind of 1950s sounding. But for the most part, until those happen, I am completely lost in the novel and I don’t remember at all the era it was written. It remains imminently readable. That sort of timelessness can only come from a very skilled author. The premise of the Caves of Steel still works today. We are still facing, believe it or not, the same issues that they were facing in the 1950s, as bizarre as that sounds.

The novel takes place in a city with a capital C, a dome, a cave of steel, where humankind has multiplied into the trillions, people who have never felt the real sun on their face or smelled a fresh breeze or felt rain on their skin, people who are essentially living in a bureaucracy, where food is rationed, where they’ve run out of fossil fuels and are quickly running out of nuclear fuel sources. But it really speaks to the way in which we entrench our lives into these inescapable patterns. It points out that these inescapable patterns are not inescapable. That horrible 8:00 to 5:00 job that you are stuck in, you may not be as stuck as you thought. Freedom is there and you just have to know where to look for it.

Also, it’s a murder mystery, and I’m just a sucker for a murder mysteries. So this book really surprised me, which as you know, is one of my absolute favorite things about books. So it’s a quick read, it’s fun, it has robots. I hope you like it. Definitely too, thumbs up. Every once in a while, when fancy strikes me, I send out emails. If you would like to be on my mailing list, you can sign up on my website. Go to sarahwerner.com and scroll all the way down. A little popup will come up that says, “I like you. Sign up for newsletters,” and you can just type your email there. If you have questions, I would love to answer them. If you have insights, I would love if you would share those with me.

If you have tools that are very valuable to you as a writer, I would love to hear all about them. Special thanks for this episode go to my Patreon supporters, Sean Locke, Gordon Tillman, Charles Liam, Rebecca Werner, and Stephanie Worrell. Thank you all so much for your generosity. Thank you also to my podcast mastermind group which consists of Peter Adel and Ron Gibson. Finally, Tim, my husband, thank you so much for giving me the house to myself so that I can podcast. I really appreciate that. Tim is actually out at a coffee shop right now working on his novel. So, Tim, I’m thinking of you. You’re a cool dude.

With that, this has been episode 12 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am Sarah Werner; thanks for listening.

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