Devices
This is a post about writing. Feel free to ignore it and move on.
* I bought Scrivener after working with the trial version post-NaNoWriMo and having heard raves about it in this article from Antony Johnston (who writes one of my favorite comic books). I have yet to play with all the features on the corkboard, and I realize that the feature that fascinated me in breaking things down into scenes for my latest short story is similar to the notebook view in Word, but I'm really looking forward to working more with this software. It allowed me to think about my work in a different way and I needed that. If you use a Mac to write with (sorry PC-folk, it's really Mac-only) I'd recommend trying it out. The cool part of it is that you get thirty days of log-in, not thirty calendar days (a very significant difference), to test it.
* Ten years ago, as I was transitioning from being a musician to a writer/artist of comics, I was buying and reading an enormous number of books about storytelling and the craft of writing and drawing. Lots of things that helped me in little and various ways. Over the last five or six years I've slowed considerably the number of purchases and readings, having found that I am learning more and more about storytelling and craft by simply writing and writing every day. When I go more than one or two days without SOME kind of creative writing, I get twitchy. I mention this to tell you that I recently purchased two books that I think would be beneficial to anyone who wants to write fiction of any kind (radio, TV, comics, prose): Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight and Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress. Obviously Mr. Knight is gone, but Ms. Kress teaches creative writing at workshops around the country and she knows what she's talking about. As a creative person, you'll get different things than I did out of each book, but I really think that if you take the time to flip through and then go back and read them you'll get something very useful that you didn't know you should have been doing.
* I've got the Google G1 phone from T-Mobile (since July or so) and I haven't taken the time to find a word processing program for it. I find it remarkably easy to use once I bothered to play around with it (who actually reads the directions?) but it's sometimes maddening that I haven't discovered a way to take notes on the thing. Not enough that I'll spend the time in the Android store to find a free program, but enough that when I want to take notes on something and the phone is all I have, I'm reduced to taking pictures or video that I'll have to try and interpret later on. It's better than writing on my hand, but I'm sure there's something on the phone that I'm just missing and I'll figure it out sooner or later and be happy with whatever I can come up with.
* Taking China Mieville's THE CITY & THE CITY, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez' LOCKE & KEY along with Patrick McGoohan's THE PRISONER as examples of excellent fiction (we don't need to mention the reimagining that AMC did on McGoohan's work) I noted that each of these successful tales dropped me right into the story with very little explanation. This is something that I really admire and wish occurred more often in popular fiction. Better reviewers/scholars/analysts than I will tell you what the deeper meanings of all three would be and even how they're connected and overlap, but I like that I'm allowed to discover (or not) the world that the creators have built or are building for me to enjoy. I like that they trust me to come along with them and be absorbed by the story. Constructing stories of some complexity and with deliberation takes skill and guts and I've learned a lot from all three works so far. The least of them is to be brave and do what I do and know that there is an audience out there to be found.
* Finally, I mentioned above that just writing every day is something that has to be done. It may be taking notes, editing another work, or piddling with a scene. Mornings are my time to write and that's when the ideas flow and flow and flow. I keep a spiral notebook with various ideas for stories in it, but I've also picked up some moleskins to jot other ideas in like the ones I mentioned above. So one's for ideas, the other's for processes and processing. The old tools are sometimes the best, aren't they? Pen and paper for writers, go figure. If you're reading this and you're a writer, do you want to share some of the tools you use?
* I bought Scrivener after working with the trial version post-NaNoWriMo and having heard raves about it in this article from Antony Johnston (who writes one of my favorite comic books). I have yet to play with all the features on the corkboard, and I realize that the feature that fascinated me in breaking things down into scenes for my latest short story is similar to the notebook view in Word, but I'm really looking forward to working more with this software. It allowed me to think about my work in a different way and I needed that. If you use a Mac to write with (sorry PC-folk, it's really Mac-only) I'd recommend trying it out. The cool part of it is that you get thirty days of log-in, not thirty calendar days (a very significant difference), to test it.
* Ten years ago, as I was transitioning from being a musician to a writer/artist of comics, I was buying and reading an enormous number of books about storytelling and the craft of writing and drawing. Lots of things that helped me in little and various ways. Over the last five or six years I've slowed considerably the number of purchases and readings, having found that I am learning more and more about storytelling and craft by simply writing and writing every day. When I go more than one or two days without SOME kind of creative writing, I get twitchy. I mention this to tell you that I recently purchased two books that I think would be beneficial to anyone who wants to write fiction of any kind (radio, TV, comics, prose): Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight and Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress. Obviously Mr. Knight is gone, but Ms. Kress teaches creative writing at workshops around the country and she knows what she's talking about. As a creative person, you'll get different things than I did out of each book, but I really think that if you take the time to flip through and then go back and read them you'll get something very useful that you didn't know you should have been doing.
* I've got the Google G1 phone from T-Mobile (since July or so) and I haven't taken the time to find a word processing program for it. I find it remarkably easy to use once I bothered to play around with it (who actually reads the directions?) but it's sometimes maddening that I haven't discovered a way to take notes on the thing. Not enough that I'll spend the time in the Android store to find a free program, but enough that when I want to take notes on something and the phone is all I have, I'm reduced to taking pictures or video that I'll have to try and interpret later on. It's better than writing on my hand, but I'm sure there's something on the phone that I'm just missing and I'll figure it out sooner or later and be happy with whatever I can come up with.
* Taking China Mieville's THE CITY & THE CITY, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez' LOCKE & KEY along with Patrick McGoohan's THE PRISONER as examples of excellent fiction (we don't need to mention the reimagining that AMC did on McGoohan's work) I noted that each of these successful tales dropped me right into the story with very little explanation. This is something that I really admire and wish occurred more often in popular fiction. Better reviewers/scholars/analysts than I will tell you what the deeper meanings of all three would be and even how they're connected and overlap, but I like that I'm allowed to discover (or not) the world that the creators have built or are building for me to enjoy. I like that they trust me to come along with them and be absorbed by the story. Constructing stories of some complexity and with deliberation takes skill and guts and I've learned a lot from all three works so far. The least of them is to be brave and do what I do and know that there is an audience out there to be found.
* Finally, I mentioned above that just writing every day is something that has to be done. It may be taking notes, editing another work, or piddling with a scene. Mornings are my time to write and that's when the ideas flow and flow and flow. I keep a spiral notebook with various ideas for stories in it, but I've also picked up some moleskins to jot other ideas in like the ones I mentioned above. So one's for ideas, the other's for processes and processing. The old tools are sometimes the best, aren't they? Pen and paper for writers, go figure. If you're reading this and you're a writer, do you want to share some of the tools you use?