Writer's Toolbox

[Lucius]

What do we need to see our stories take shape? I myself am content with a laptop and LibreOffice, but perhaps some of us still use pen and paper, at least in part. Come to think about it, I sometimes do a little outlining that way.

I know there's a plethora of digital writing tools out there, but I've never used them with the exception of machine translation by Google and DeepL, but here we segue into the subject of AI that has a thread of its own.

Dictionaries and thesauruses! The more the merrier. I love them, but I'd like to single out the usage guides. The four Fowlers (by the namesake, Gowers, Burchfield and Butterfield respectively), Garner’s Modern English Usage, Swan's Practical English Usage, The Romance Writers’ Phrase Book haha disregard that I make mistakes.

[Shocker]

For years I have typed straight into Libre Office, but then began falling in love with Manuskript which I have used for larger projects. It’s especially great for world building and character notes. Recently installed Tintero, which promises to give me all I got from Manuskript but slightly more advanced. The jury is still out it.

If I want a nicely set novel style result, I run the stories through LaTeX. Lt Broccoli has gotten a glimpse on how 450 pages of pharma can look like.

Edit: as a Linux user, my choices have always been abit obscure.

[Vela Nanashi]

I abandoned heavy programs for just plaintext text editors with spelling a long while ago. On windows that is notepad++ for me, but linux so far I have not found a worthy replacement, so I have a bunch of text editors that are inferior to notepad++ that I am using for now, I will probably go for a customized emacs or neovim at some point though, but both of those have learning curves so currently I use kate on kde, geany (iirc name) over on cinnamon,

Also do enjoy dictionaries and thesauruses Some of the editors have a right click to see thesaurus entries and that is nice, but it is rare for pure text editors to do that

Also of course the keyboard I use is a great help for me to be able to write at all, my normal keyboard had gotten so painful to use that I was unable to write at all, but now I have a split ortholinear keyboard and it really helps avoid that pain nearly entirely. Specifically I have the zsa moonlander mk1, but there are others that may be even better than that one.

If I ever want to publish a book at some point I will probably be experimenting with LaTeX (or however the letters are capitalized) by Knuth, as that goes well with emacs and plain text but otherwise I might go for putting text into libreoffice writer to format for print there

[SoftGameHunter]

I just type in Word. Notes are in Word or Excel for larger projects. I've never understood what else is needed.

[LtBroccoli]

On my laptop, I use Pages for writing. I tried Skrivner on the phone and desktop for a short bit, but an errant failed undo wiped out 10k words, so I gave up on that. For screenplays I use Final Draft, then mark up in Pages. I want to find an alternative to notepad++ for Mac since that would make the editing process so much quicker for those. If I'm on the go, I'll jot something down in Notes. That's great for being able to easily synch between the phone and Mac.

I used to use Word, but after finding out that 200k words in a story makes it go all derpy and MS's constant enshitification, I uninstalled it and went to Pages. I lose maybe 1 percent of familiarity with none of the downsides.

Hardware, I'm still rocking my ZSA Moonlander keyboard, so much I got a second one for travel.

ChatGPT has filled in as a Google replacement for research, though I will never fully trust anything it says without a source. It's great for coming up with things like streetnames for housing plans or researching how realistic it is to refer to events that happened in my timeline. It's a good option for a quick name generator, too.

For the future... I refuse to upload any of my stories or characters to the cloud, but if I ever pull myself together enough I might take my "gaming pc" and turn it into an airgapped AI. MicroCenter is a very dangerous store, and it is very easy to buy too many parts because you get caught up in the fun. I may also one day get sick and tired of playing in the Mac walled garden and move to Linux full time. I test drove Ubuntu and Mint recently, and might give a couple others a try. Especially if I make the home AI thing. That could even help me with making graphic novels based on some of the stories. I am not an illustrator, and would have a lot of awkward questions to answer if I tried to hire one to turn Lake Hiawatha into something.

[AdmiralPiet]

I type in word. For some stuff I might use excel to organise.

If needesdI use the site dict.cc to help with tranlations.

For research: google and wikipedia mostly. Lately I ask MS copilot to speed up the search

[Shocker]

On my laptop, I use Pages for writing. I tried Skrivner on the phone and desktop for a short bit, but an errant failed undo wiped out 10k words, so I gave up on that. For screenplays I use Final Draft, then mark up in Pages. I want to find an alternative to notepad++ for Mac since that would make the editing process so much quicker for those. If I'm on the go, I'll jot something down in Notes. That's great for being able to easily synch between the phone and Mac.

I used to use Word, but after finding out that 200k words in a story makes it go all derpy and MS's constant enshitification, I uninstalled it and went to Pages. I lose maybe 1 percent of familiarity with none of the downsides.

Hardware, I'm still rocking my ZSA Moonlander keyboard, so much I got a second one for travel.

ChatGPT has filled in as a Google replacement for research, though I will never fully trust anything it says without a source. It's great for coming up with things like streetnames for housing plans or researching how realistic it is to refer to events that happened in my timeline. It's a good option for a quick name generator, too.

For the future... I refuse to upload any of my stories or characters to the cloud, but if I ever pull myself together enough I might take my "gaming pc" and turn it into an airgapped AI. MicroCenter is a very dangerous store, and it is very easy to buy too many parts because you get caught up in the fun. I may also one day get sick and tired of playing in the Mac walled garden and move to Linux full time. I test drove Ubuntu and Mint recently, and might give a couple others a try. Especially if I make the home AI thing. That could even help me with making graphic novels based on some of the stories. I am not an illustrator, and would have a lot of awkward questions to answer if I tried to hire one to turn Lake Hiawatha into something.

You will likely find that Linux is going to do whatever you need it to do. It sometimes takes some fiddling but it runs.

[KittyUmbrass]

Shorter stories, like what I post here, I just type into a plain old text editor.

Anything where I need a lot of worldbuilding, if it's going to be a series or a longer work that I'd prefer to publish for money, I'll eventually get out Campfire (for more complex things, especially fantasy worldbuilding) and Scrivener (great for editing novel-length stuff, and organising ideas). But I still start off in LibreOffice with a Draft Zero splurge for those long things. In that draft-0 phase, my notes tend to get dumped at the end of the file or in a separate text editor file to one side.

I've currently got a worldbuilding thing that may end up being a shared setting for my future RA stories that will probably end up being a Scrivener project and maybe a Campfire world as well, so I can come back to it and keep things coherent.

* * *

On question of using Linux - I switched to using Ubuntu on my laptop when XP support ended and have stuck with it ever since across a couple of generations of laptops. (One big reason I'm using LibreOffice, quite apart from not wanting to use MS stuff for anything I don't have to!) Since the laptop is basically for web browsing and writing, I haven't run into any problems (although using the command line for so many things is a faff, there's always some nerd on the web with a page to tell you what you need to copy-paste to make the thing do the thing).

[Claire]

I join the LibreOffice crowd here. For my academic writing I prefer LaTeX, but if I just want to quickly set up a document without any fancy formatting LibreOffice works just fine for me.

Other than that, I can't say I use anything special. If I'm unsure about the translation of specific German words dict.cc is my go to page. I sometimes look up what character names mean, then I end up on pages for parents choosing a name for their baby.

I also used AI to help me polish the translations of my German stories. I talked about that in detail here.

When it comes to doing research, I might just search for whatever I'm not familiar with, like how to throw a basketball correctly...

[LtBroccoli]

On my laptop, I use Pages for writing. I tried Skrivner on the phone and desktop for a short bit, but an errant failed undo wiped out 10k words, so I gave up on that. For screenplays I use Final Draft, then mark up in Pages. I want to find an alternative to notepad++ for Mac since that would make the editing process so much quicker for those. If I'm on the go, I'll jot something down in Notes. That's great for being able to easily synch between the phone and Mac.

I used to use Word, but after finding out that 200k words in a story makes it go all derpy and MS's constant enshitification, I uninstalled it and went to Pages. I lose maybe 1 percent of familiarity with none of the downsides.

Hardware, I'm still rocking my ZSA Moonlander keyboard, so much I got a second one for travel.

ChatGPT has filled in as a Google replacement for research, though I will never fully trust anything it says without a source. It's great for coming up with things like streetnames for housing plans or researching how realistic it is to refer to events that happened in my timeline. It's a good option for a quick name generator, too.

For the future... I refuse to upload any of my stories or characters to the cloud, but if I ever pull myself together enough I might take my "gaming pc" and turn it into an airgapped AI. MicroCenter is a very dangerous store, and it is very easy to buy too many parts because you get caught up in the fun. I may also one day get sick and tired of playing in the Mac walled garden and move to Linux full time. I test drove Ubuntu and Mint recently, and might give a couple others a try. Especially if I make the home AI thing. That could even help me with making graphic novels based on some of the stories. I am not an illustrator, and would have a lot of awkward questions to answer if I tried to hire one to turn Lake Hiawatha into something.

You will likely find that Linux is going to do whatever you need it to do. It sometimes takes some fiddling but it runs.

About 20 years ago I daily drove Linux for about 9 months. That wasn't the plan, but one day my XP PC was "having it's period." Every 28ish days it would blue screen, usually between 10-11PM on a Monday night. I remember because I was watching RAW at the time. I fully expected this piece of shit to crash again, but one night it completely gave up the ghost, BSODing three times in a row and I recognized the final errors. The kernel was deader than Dillinger. I could either wipe and reinstall and hope that worked while losing all of my work or limp along for several months until I had enough money to buy a Mac. So I went to Borders bookstore later in the week and hit up the computer section looking for any ideas. I grabbed a magazine that had a trial version of SUSE Linux on it and tried that. The PC rejected my new HDD so I spent the next several months running a trial version of Linux, needing to do a fresh setup and enabling all components every time I shut down or had a power outage.

If I wasn't a Mac guy already, I'd have moved to Linux 20 years ago and never looked back.