There are many useful technology tools for writers. These can be very helpful when you realise you need a stick or a carrot. When you can’t trust yourself and you need to outsource some discipline. You may use some of the tools frequently to set up your writing space to help you delineate your writing time from the rest of the day.
If you constantly try to write but are distracted easily, there comes a time when you think, ‘If I was going to sort this on my own I would have done it by now.’ Online tools can be a huge help here. They’re like having a partner, trainer or teacher keeping you in check.
Employing different strategies can be a game changer. People who are trying to get fitter often buy a gym membership in order to force themselves to hit the treadmill and pump some iron. I am a fan of committing to something and putting your money where your mouth is in order to get you to pull your finger out.
There’s an app called Pactapp. You make a pact with the app to eat healthier and/or exercise more. If you stick to your commitment you receive money rewards! Where do these rewards come from? They are paid by the people who did not stick to their commitments.
If I made a WritePactapp, I would be a billionaire.
If you really need to get words down, and fast, Write or Die is the best writing app out there. We are talking bulk words and fast – which is the focus of this book.
Write or Die asks you how many words you want to write and how long you want to write for. It then asks if you want ‘rewards’ or ‘consequences’ and you choose mild, moderate, strict or kamikaze.
So you start to write. If you have chosen rewards, when you are writing at the correct speed I imagine you get unicorns, cheer squads, babies giving you high fives and kittens.
I say ‘I imagine’ because I always choose consequences, or as I call them, punishments. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic! If you choose ‘consequences’ and you are not writing fast enough, the first thing that happens is that your screen flashes. Then there’s a siren. Then the computer starts eating your words.
Yep. You heard me. You want motivation? You want inspiration? You want to get over your procrastination? Look no further!
I use Write or Die on my laptop, but you can also get it as an app for iPhone or iPad.
You’ll hear lots of writers mention 750words.com. It’s a website where you commit to writing 750 words a day. That’s very doable. It’s about three pages. Easy! It’s all online, but entirely private. The website tracks how often you are writing, at what time of day, for how long, how fast you write and how often you get distracted. It offers an interesting framework and encouragement. It gives you statistics analysing the feelings, themes and mindset of your writing. It even gamifies writing and gives you points: the more you write, the more points you get. It rewards you for writing every day in a row. Fun, right?
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. In November all over the world people join NaNoWriMo and commit to writing a 50,000-word rough draft of a novel in thirty days, which works out at 1667 words a day. Some people love NaNoWriMo and successfully knock over their first draft with it, using the collective experience to spur them on. Others have told me the forums and groups are full of wannabe writers who just whinge and moan. Try it out and see if it works for you (but remember actions speak louder than coffee chats, so don’t get sucked into the chatter around it – actually do it). The founder of NaNoWriMo has written a book called No Plot? No Problem!, which people tell me is a great read. So read the book, commit to NaNoWriMo and have your first draft done by Christmas!
One of my Gunnas enthusiastically suggested I take a look at Scrivener, saying, ‘It’s amazing! It’s exactly how my brain works.’ Another couple of people in the class agreed, so I downloaded it as soon as I got home.
Scrivener helps you order your research, fragments of writing, chapters, characters and ideas. It catalogues all these things and is a whiz at helping you shuffle them around into whatever structure you set up.
Different tools and strategies will work with different kinds of brains. Every writer’s different and every project is different – some tools may work for one project but not for another. Sometimes you just want variety. When in doubt, shake it up. Personally, Scrivener wasn’t for me, but keep in mind that I’m dyslexic and not neurotypical. Many of the academic writers who come to Gunnas find it helpful; for some, using it is a real breakthrough.
Many writers use a dictaphone or voice memos. A.A. Gill famously dictates everything and has someone who types it out for him.
Voice memos are particularly useful for someone who is telling a personal story to get down their first draft. These writers are often overwhelmed by keeping track of all the people, threads, spans of time, different locations and background information necessary to understand the narrative. I always suggest sitting in front of a voice recorder for thirty minutes or an hour and telling the story like you are telling it to someone you have never met before. Start at the start. Your own internal logic will put it in a logical order. And it’s okay to interrupt yourself. Actually, that’s the point. There is a lot of natural jumping around with personal stories or family history.
I have never come across a writer who uses speech recognition software, but I do know the best one is Dragon and that a Melbourne University student wrote a PhD using only Dragon speech recognition. You could give it a go and see if it works for you.
The tech tool I use most frequently – and when I say frequently, I mean every day – is simple and available on every device or computer you have. It’s the ‘Text to speech’ function. ‘Text to speech’ means the computer speaks text on your screen to you. On Mac computers, like the laptop I use, you can find it in ‘System preferences’ under ‘Dictation & Speech’. I highlight what I want read to me, then push option + escape and the computer reads what I have highlighted. It doesn’t need to be something you have written: it reads whatever you highlight. It can read you a newspaper article if you like.
So why do I use ‘Text to speech’? After I have been writing for a while I get so into it, it all just reads like ‘blah blah blah’. I get a shocking case of cook’s mouth. Can’t taste anything. All tastes the same. Like nothing. When this happens, I stand up, have a stretch and get ‘Text to speech’ to read it to me. It’s like taking a look though a different side of the prism. I hear it with fresh eyes. I feel what it looks like. I get a whole new perspective on what I have written while I am unpacking the dishwasher, doing some yoga moves, making a cup of coffee (I just carry the laptop around so I can listen to it – I have even taken the laptop in the car while it’s been reading my work) or peeling the potatoes for dinner. It reads what I actually wrote, not what I think I wrote.
‘Text to speech’ is very useful once you’re in the editing phase of writing. As soon as you’ve highlighted the text and activated the ‘Text to speech’ function, you can edit away without it changing what the computer reads out – you can edit as you listen to it. This can be a lovely gust of fresh air after reading to edit all day – do a pass by listening to your work while you fiddle.
While we’re on the subject of editing, a great way to edit is to use your body. Listen to what you have written (either with ‘Text to speech’ or a voice recording) and close your eyes. Listen with your body. When your writing is working, you will be engaged and feeling relaxed but alert. When it’s boring you will drift off. When it’s annoying you will tense up.
In the book Incognito, David Eagleman explains the process of chicken sexing. Stay with me – it’s relevant, I promise. In egg production, it’s important to separate chickens by sex as soon as possible, as the males aren’t useful (most of them are destroyed). But it’s supremely hard to distinguish males from females and near impossible to explain how to do so. The Japanese came up with a method that was as simple as it was fascinating. A student of chicken sexing would pick up a chicken and guess whether it was male or female. The master supervising them would say ‘yes’ if they were correct, or ‘no’ if they weren’t, without offering any further explanation. In less than a month, students would somehow be able to sort the chickens accurately: their instincts kicked in, even if they couldn’t consciously explain it.
The more you write, the more your instinct – and your taste – kicks in, and the better you get at telling if what you have written is any good. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses how this kind of instinct works. We have an immediate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response to many things in life. These are not just random judgements – they are based on a lifetime of information, experience and knowledge. And the more work you do in a particular field, the better these instincts will become. While reading or listening to your work, relax, absorb, and observe when you smile and feel relaxed (that’s the good stuff) and when you tense up (that’s where you need to polish, cut, simplify, shorten, extrapolate or break it down).
When I do stand-up, I edit with my body. I listen to a recording of the previous night’s performance and identify which bits of the show are working and which aren’t. Working? I feel relaxed and alert – I even smile. Padding? I drift off. Annoying and needs work or cutting? I tense up or clamp my jaw.
Particularly if you are giving a presentation, reading a speech or performing in a debate, ‘Text to speech’ is a massive help. If you want to make sure you come across as warm, connect with the audience and almost seem as if you don’t need your notes, write your speech out, then use ‘Text to speech’ or a voice recording to listen to it. If you listen to it five to ten times, you will be very familiar with it and you will be less nervous, enjoy your presentation more and deliver it better. Chances are you will refine it too. Better still, move around while listening to it: this is an old actors’ tip from a friend of mine. If you move around while you are learning lines, they get into your body. You remember them faster and more effectively.
When I learn a stand-up routine, I learn it by heart and without notes. I edit my work down to a final draft, which of course keeps changing – art’s never finished. For me, a 55-minute show is 5000 words, leaving space for pauses and a bit of improvisation. After I have locked off the script, I print it out and walk around my neighbourhood reading it off the paper. When I know a page, I throw it in the bin. The bag gets lighter and lighter.
When I do a run of a one-woman show, I record each night’s performance. At the end of the run, I keep the best one and delete the rest. If, a few months or years later, I need to repeat a performance of that show and I have totally forgotten it, I listen to the recording of myself rather than read the script. I prepare by listening to it in the bath, on a walk, before going to sleep, while driving to a gig or as I do the supermarket shopping. I don’t rehearse: I just listen to my best performance over and over again, because somewhere in my brain is the memory of that show, and listening to it again activates it. Learning by listening – particularly when moving – produces a great result. A real ease with your material.
Reading your work aloud is also useful. Not as a substitute for ‘Text to speech’, but as an additional technique. If you feel your writing is a bit dry, flat or robotic, read it aloud. You can even record yourself reading it (most phones and computers have a recording feature, or you could use a dictaphone). Reading aloud will give you ideas about how to liven up your writing and add colour to it. How many times have you found yourself going off script when reading a prepared speech or presentation? It’s natural. When you read aloud – especially to someone else – you will find you add flourishes, jokes or extrapolations. Reading aloud is a different experience to reading in your head.
Reading to an audience is different again. But the chances are you won’t want to read your piece to someone else until it’s finished. I totally get that. And unless it’s a poem, a play or stand-up comedy, it’s unlikely you are ever going to read the whole thing to an audience. So the next best thing to reading it to someone else is reading it into a voice recorder or to a pet. This is different than reading it aloud to yourself. It lifts the work off the page. You can’t help but perform. I suggest you record yourself, even if you are just reading to the dog, so you don’t have to stop to write down your brilliant insights and edits. You don’t want to break the flow.
When I told Bear about this part of the book, he said reading your work aloud reminded him of rubber duck debugging. This is the informal name for a practice used in software engineering for debugging code. The story is that there was a programmer who would carry around a rubber duck; he would force himself to explain the code line by line to the duck. Developers found that by explaining their code to someone who doesn’t understand it – like a rubber duck – they quickly found problems and revealed glitches.
It’s amazing what happens when you take the time to read something slowly. Fiona, the knitting pattern Gunna, manned the helpline for people with knitting problems. When people would call up with an issue, she would say, ‘Read me what the pattern says.’ Almost every time they would stop halfway through and say, ‘Ah, I get it!’
When I committed to writing this book, I said to Bear, ‘I think I should buy another laptop to write this book on. An old crappy one without internet. My laptop is really messy and full of a million other things.’ He suggested a guest account on my laptop.
You can set up several accounts on a computer. Set one up just for your heart and soul writing. Your do or die writing. Your 120,000 words or bust writing. Make it simple: only include access to the document you are working on and the absolute bare necessities.
Alternatively, use one computer or laptop for your heart and soul writing and another for your day to day life. Make sure the one you write on is not connected to the internet.
If you find yourself drifting off into internet land while you’re writing, convincing yourself it’s research, you may need to use an internet-blocking app.
Freedom is a fabulous one. It blocks you from the internet for as many minutes or hours as you tell it to. People also speak very highly of Anti-Social, an app that blocks social media and other distracting sites for whatever time you determine.
Sure, these days we all have multiple devices for connecting to the internet and I am sure there is a way to override any app out there – there is no greater joy than doing something you are not supposed to, and all that. But nevertheless, these apps seem to work. They formalise a deliberate choice. Perhaps people don’t want to let themselves down by having a sneaky peek at the internet. Perhaps setting the app feels a bit like a self-imposed punishment in the spirit of tough love.
If you find that you set one of these apps but then override it or shift to another device to access the internet, just let yourself off the hook. What’s the point? Try going for a run, buying that tiara or paying a hard-arsed writing coach to keep you on track instead.
RescueTime is another popular app for managing internet usage that works a little differently. It gives you a read-out at the end of the day of your online activities. Say you were meant to write that day, but instead you see that you spent four hours on Facebook, two hours on Pinterest and an hour on eBay. This reality pill shames you into writing the next day. Don’t underestimate its amazing results.
I recommend writing with non-distracting music or sounds on in the background. Try waves, rain, nature noises, waterfalls or white noise. White noise is a gentle hiss, or a hum, kind of like the sound of a fridge running, or a fan. There are different frequencies of it you can check out if you are interested: brown noise, pink noise, grey noise.
There are many apps and plug-ins available online that provide suitable soundscapes. Some of the most popular are Rainy Cafe, Noisli and A Soft Murmur. Have a snoop around. You’ll find the sound of birds, fire, a singing bowl, the ocean. They’re a great help with afternoon napping too.
Alternatively, earplugs can create the illusion of white noise in your head. I am a big fan of earplugs – just the cheap foam ones from the chemist (Blu Tack works just as well). I use earplugs to block out distracting noises: music I want to sing along to or a conversation that sounds interesting. I also use white noise to flatten the sound base so I don’t get a jolt from sudden noises.