Tools.

I went through a period last year when I attempted to find the perfect writing solution. I desperately flailed from program to program, from Open Office to Microsoft Word, Ulysses (I liked the name), Write Room and even a alpha release of OmmWriter that crashed so bad my only recourse was to take a picture of the computer screen with my cell phone and retype it as best I could.

For the last NanoWriMo, I eventually settled on Scrivener. (My choice for templated writing remains CeltX, which is an incredible alternative to the likes of Final Draft.) The best part of Scrivener is that a huge release is right around the corner (November 1st, a preview for NanoWriMo is available here. A relatively unstable beta of the upcoming Windows version is available here as well — and okay, that’s not the best part: the best part is the outlining, and the index cards, and the ability to x-furcate your work into manageable pieces that will magically compile at the end of an arduous process).

My writing has since been more productive, albeit I have been looking for another excuse to distract myself from productivity. For awhile it was the chair. (I settled on a balans, designed by Norwegian Peter Opscik in 1976, now produced by Varier).

This is a great chair, but is not exactly conducive to sitting for long periods of time. Notice how the base of the chair is curved, so that it rocks with how close you sit to the desk, and whether your weight is forward or back. There are a lot of “knock-off” versions of this chair that sit flat to the ground and are actually bad for your posture because they do not allow you to shift your weight. I think even Varier produces a couple of these, which is unfortunate. But they also make this chair, which is scary and amazing looking.

Scrivener 2.0 is going to be great. It syncs to a directory of your choosing, which allows you to easily sync to your Dropbox. This will allow you to maintain an updated version across computers, and even update on the fly via your no-doubt several i-or-A-Devices and sync the changes right back into your original document. This is an extremely powerful feature that would be heightened by something like iA Writer for the iPad (I don’t have one yet). But even PlainText for the iDevice will sync back to your Dropbox and allow you annotate, update ideas or even update your base text on the fly.

Sometimes I find my obsessive nature regarding technology and writing to be a hindrance (no, really). But I am also looking for new ways to get my ideas down, so that I can hold onto that fleeting moment where I know I have something. This has been a progressive attenuation of options and pathways toward productivity, and I am sure when I enthusiastically declare to my friends that they can use Scrivener and Dropbox and Plaintext and it will all make them more productive, I look a little foolish when I haven’t been insanely productive myself, but hey – these things take time. We were told in our orientation at Sarah Lawrence that “Writers often peak when they’re older.” Ahem. I’m thirty. What, that’s not enough?