Hello Supporters!
Welcome once more to my ‘Shed’ — the blog space which Unbound provides for creators of their wonderful books to talk directly to YOU: the people who have pledged to see us produce them.
Each week I intend to use this channel to bring you something special from Burns Towers here in Manchester. Previous instalments revealed details about the contributors whose writings will make up the largest part of ‘Trans; A British History’. Later on in the book’s development I will also share draft material from inside the book itself, as it takes shape. This week, as promised, I’m going to talk about the tools I use for writing.
First, the usual housekeeping announcements: Hello first to the new supporters who’ve arrived in the last 7 days. There are now just over 250 of you and the book is 60% of the way to its funding target. Thank you everyone for that support. Please keep encouraging people you know to join us. If everyone persuaded one extra person to pledge then we would complete the funding challenge.
You’re seeing this message because you’ve already pledged support for ‘Trans: A British History’. As promised, I’m using the facility to give that bit extra back to you all for doing so. Most of these Shed posts won’t be visible to casual visitors to the web page. They are ‘supporter-only’. So welcome to this exclusive club.
Writing Tools
‘Trans: A British History’ will be either my seventh or eleventh book, depending how you count. It’s the seventh conventionally book-shaped-book since I supposedly retired from my day job four years ago. The list includes a poetry anthology (‘Fishing for Birds’); a two part memoir about the ‘Press for Change’ trans rights campaign ('Pressing Matters'); a book about Equality and Diversity practice (‘Making Equality Work’); a short book about travelling around Australia (‘Letters from Australia’) and a very quirky book based on letters both ways between me and an American pen friend 25 years ago (‘Life by Satellite’).
But my work career actually began as a writer. I was employed by a large British computer manufacturer in the 1970s to design and write self study courses for their customers. The first job my boss gave me was to write a dictionary of computer terms.
The dictionary was a fun assignment. Have you ever thought how you’d compile one? Working out how to do that gave me a whole new respect for Samuel Johnson. One problem was immediately obvious: you just don’t tend to think about terms in alphabetical order, from Aardvark to Zebra. I was also travelling a lot at the time. How on earth could I safely organise a precious paper manuscript when tripping around the country on British Rail during the industrial unrest in 1977?
My solution was disarmingly simple: I went down to the stationery cupboard and requisitioned all the packs of index cards that I could find. Big ones. On the top of each card I wrote a word and in the body I wrote the definition of that computing term. When new words came along I just slotted them in alphabetically. When my boss wanted to copy edit my work I could give him a handful of cards and let him critique my precious ideas whilst I continued working on a different part of the alphabet. And when I travelled I just took as many cards as I planned to work on, leaving the bulk of the manuscript safely ensconced in a drawer back at the office.
Later, of course, there were computers for this sort of thing. Most of my work as an IT / business consultant involved writing reports. You seldom write these in a straight line. It was not uncommon for me to start with the conclusion and finish with the introduction. I went through several so-called ‘outlining’ tools in the course of my career. These kinds of programs are great for long pieces of work where you may first need to get your ideas down as notes and then juggle them around into a sensible order. Even Microsoft Word has an outlining mode, although I doubt whether many people use that.
Of course I’ve used several word processors to write. My first was WordStar and then I progressed, via an early Macintosh computer, to the very first version of Microsoft Word. Indeed, I’ve written dozens of book length reports and proposals with Microsoft’s venerable word processor. One of the last was a 70,000 word book about policy for the Department of Health — nicely laid out, printed and bound — so I’ll count that as a book-shaped book.
But the problem with a big all-things-to-all-people word processor like Word is the sheer clutter. When you’re actually writing that can really get in the way. A third of the computer screen is taken up by menus. There’s stuff going on all over the place. If you type quite fast, as I do, then you can keep getting interrupted. Often I used to end up pining for the simplicity of a blank piece of paper and a pen.
The next tool I turned to was just that — a blank white space and absolutely no clutter. Indeed, I’m using it right now to type this article. It’s called ‘iA Writer’ and is really simple.
The beauty of a tool like iA Writer is that it just lets you get on with writing. You get nice big characters on the screen and there are no menus because there are no fancy format options. It’s just A to Z, 0 to 9, punctuation and line breaks. The result is that you type much faster because you’re not constantly stopping to format text and wiggle the mouse.
One of my first eBooks, ‘Making Equality Work’ was drafted entirely this way. In fact I could write over 6,000 words in a matter of hours. I used a different document for each chapter and could pass those to my two co-writers to edit whilst I got on with the next.
That’s all very well. As I say, I use iA Writer a lot for drafting. But you still need something else to take all the raw material youve written and build a book made of chapters and special parts like title pages, indexes, and so forth. At that point I reach for another wonderful tool called Scrivener.
Scrivener is not a mere word processor. It contains one, but to describe it as ‘just a word processor’ would be like describing the Space Shuttle as ‘just a rocket’. In reality it is a complete system for managing the process of creating a book or script. It can hold your manuscript for sure, but it also manages your research, web links, background notes, the structure, previous drafts, and the status of every part. In fact it is so all-embracing that there can be a bit of a learning curve for using it effectively. Don’t start on Scrivener if you’re on a deadline!
The central aspect of Scrivener projects is something called “The Binder”. If you’ve used any other kind of outlining tool then the idea of this is quite straightforward. It’s conceptually like a ring binder. You can use it to break down your project into pieces — chapters in a book, or even the separate scenes in a chapter if you wish. In the early stages of a project you can just move these parts of the manuscript around by dragging and dropping them. There's a lovely 'Corkboard' feature for this. It mimics the way some writers start with bits of card and shuffle them around. Later, when you’re ready, you can press a button and Scrivener will export your entire manuscript in a variety of professional formats to send off to your publisher. It will even export the finished article to an eBook format ready to upload to the retailing platforms.
One part of Scrivener’s Binder is for your manuscript. A separate section is provided where you keep all your notes and research. For the last few months, as the ‘Trans: A British History’ project took shape, it is this second area of the binder which has gradually filled with information. It contains the structural plans for the book, the details of all the contributors and their briefs, images of press cuttings, early drafts of ideas… even the contractual material with the publisher. As the project progresses, the manuscript section will fill up with chapter submissions from the contributors. This is when I’ll be able to swap the chapters around, if necessary, to improve the flow of the book. It’s also where I can keep notes about each chapter and track the status of the parts — from first draft to final.
So that’s a brief canter through my creative world. A nice simple uncluttered drafting aid like iA Writer is the go anywhere tool for just writing a single piece of work like a blog or a magazine article. And the full glory of a writing management system like Scrivener keeps control of the bigger picture and the multitude of scraps that accumulate on a larger project like a full size book.
Next week something else to entertain and inform. I haven’t decided what it will be yet. I may share some thoughts about the process of managing a book when you’ve got 25 different writers contributing. That’s a really interesting aspect of this project.
For now, please remember to keep encouraging people to pledge. Without those pledges there can be no book. And we’ve come too far to let that happen
Christine Burns