How to shift your writer’s block using free writing software
Trawling through my RSS reader late last night, I came across a note about NaNoWriMo, the annual National Novel Writing Month, which starts today and runs until the end of the month and aims to push reluctant writers into the deepest of ends, into writing an entire novel.
It’s a simple, but effective idea. Your NaNoWriMo mission is to knock out 50,000 words in 30 days. So set your daily and weekly word counts. Work out when to write. And you write. Anything. The trick to reaching such a high target in such a short time is not to worry about your precious words, plot, characterisations, whatever you’ve been taught in writing school. What’s important is to keep tapping on the keyboard. A month later, you’ve accumulated a huge mound of, ah, material. Maybe it’s not all bad. Yes, here and there: the basis for something better next time.
First, sharpen your pencil
First things first. While you shouldn’t get too bogged down in the technicalities, the muse does tend to flutter into being somewhere between choosing the right font and point size and deciding whether chapter headings should be in italics or not. In other words, your writing environment matters. By sorting out the admin before you get going with NaNoWriMo, you’ll be able to focus on the words. The beads of blood will flow more freely from your forehead.
So, which super, shiny writing gizmo to choose?
Before kicking off the agony, I’ve picked out three free Windows programs to handle my key writing tasks.
To process the words, I’ve downloaded the latest version of OpenOffice:
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- What’s good about it: free as in beer, free as in speech; jump around from heading to heading using the nifty navigator; add comments to the margins; add numbered footnotes and endnotes; apply styles; never lift your fingers from the keyboard thanks to custom hotkeys.
- What’s not great about it: a huge download; you have to download the whole OpenOffice suite of programs; it takes 20 or so seconds to open up on my year-old laptop – at least on first opening after booting up Windows.
To back up the work in progress, I’ve downloaded and set up FileHamster. Whenever I make a manual save of my OpenOffice file, a new backup gets sent to an external drive. Just in case my laptop dies during NaNoWriMo…
- What’s good about it: cut and cut again safe in the knowledge that you can go back to an earlier version if you change your mind; leave comments as you reach major writing milestones.
- What’s not great about it: minimal help guide; ads running at the top of the app – though the $14.95 upgrade zaps the ads.
To track the writing experience, I’ve downloaded Windows Live Writer Beta. It shoots my thoughts over to a writing blog – important in the marketing of the novel once it finds a publisher.
- What’s good about it: everything – a blogger’s dream; WYSIWYG is very nice; editing using the blog’s theme is useful when I’m working on several blogs at the same time – alt-tabbing from one to the other, it’s easy to tell them apart.
- What’s not great about it: while it’s pretty much perfect, it does take a bite out of my laptop’s memory usage; it’s yet another window open on my crowded desktop.
I’m keeping my project notes in three OpenOffice files – a plot outline, character notes and an ideas journal.
That’s it. Oh yeah, 12-point Georgia for the body text. Chapter headings, no italics. Now there’s nothing left except to write…
