Apps for Writing a Novel

I typically write my novels in Scrivener (on a MacBook Pro), but often, when I'm "on the go," I want to have my novels at my fingertips to edit. I've found a few apps which help in that task, and I thought I'd share. I'm not a techie or even presume to be one. I also hate to spend money on an app that I haven't experienced before, so most of these are free apps that I have found useful in daily editing and writing.

1.) Evernote

Although this is not an app that syncs with Scrivener (maybe one day), it is awesome for impulsive note-taking and jotting down ideas. The app syncs over multiple devices, iPad, iPhone, iTouch, even Mac and PC. You can sync voice memo notes, or save an entire webpage (on your computer), separate your notes into notebooks. These notebooks, you can make into "shared notebooks" or "offline notebooks." (Note: offline notebooks are a "premium" feature, which costs $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year to utilize.) 

You can also tag your notes, and later search by tag if you've forgotten what you've called the note or even if you made a note about it--as long as you tagged it. Also, you can "favorite" a note, which I like to use for those notes that continually come back to, or something that needs attention.

As a non-paying Evernote user, I get 50 MB of syncing/storage per month. For my uses, this is plenty. The only times I've even come close to using this is when I upload a lot of pictures or Internet pages.

In the two years I've used this app, I have yet to pay for this service, and have found it invaluable in making notes for later novels, works-in-progress or keeping track of research.

2.) Dropbox

This is not actually a word-processing app, but a storage app that you can also download to your computer. Then you save your document into the Dropbox folder and can pull up the document on your iPad, iPhone or iTouch later. There's some overlap in iCloud's abilities for a Mac user, but overall, I've found Dropbox to be simpler and, at times, more dependable. If I save a document into Dropbox, the document shows up in the app and I can download it, then "open in..." Pages or Index Card (more on that later).

Now I do physically have to put my files there and keep them updated--Dropbox doesn't do that automatically. At least, I haven't found it to do so, unless you're keeping the original file there, which I don't. I prefer to keep backups or copies on Dropbox and work from them when I'm on the go. I'm still a laptop writer at heart, and that's my preference, as I can type a heckuva lot faster on my MacBook Pro than on my iPad (even though I love it).

3.) Simplenote

This is one of those I-love-but-hate apps. I've found a ton of difficulty in dependability in syncing Scrivener to Simplenote (although it's simple to do.) 

To sync Scrivener and Simplenote, go to "File," then "Sync" and select "Simplenote." From there, you'll need a Simplenote account and password, which you set up online. Then enter your information and give the project a "keyword." This can be anything, but it acts like a folder and tag, so you can compile the entire document in Simplenote on the web or on your iPad. Click on "Continue" and it will talk with the Simplenote server to download your notes on there already, and then it will give you an option to select which files to sync. 

This is the point where I constantly get "Download Failed: There was a problem downloading the notes from the server." Sometimes, if I try again, I can get it to communicate, other times, it's not worth the effort.

If you get past that point, you can select which notes to sync with Simplenote, from all of them, to one, and you have the option to permanently delete files on the server which you choose not to sync at that time. Of course, make sure that you don't need those files, because once deleted, they're gone forever.

Even though I have problems syncing, I can access Simplenote on my computer, my iPad, my iPhone, my iTouch. I always have a backup at my fingertips, and should something happen to my computer, there's a backup in Simplenote. Call me paranoid, but I like having as many backups as I can--especially when they're free.

4.) Index Card

This is one of the few apps I've paid for that I enjoy (current price $4.99). Scrivener allows you to sync with Index Card via Dropbox, and allows you to utilize the summary you write on the card portion of Scrivener, unlike Simplenote. It also allows you to rearrange your scenes or chapters with a quick drag of the finger. Of course, you have to go back into Scriverner and "file," "sync with Index Card for iOS," to make sure you're writing on the same document, but it's nifty once you get the hang of it.

One downside to this is that syncing is not quite as simple as with Simplenote. Instead of syncing and being allowed to choose the documents you want to sync at that time, you have to create a "Binder" section in Scrivener with all the scenes or folders you want included in your sync prior to selecting "sync..." under "file." If you don't, you'll be syncing nothing or omitting some scenes that you might have wanted to work on. 

Case in point: if you create a new scene in Scrivener and don't immediately add it to your Index Card binder by right clicking on the title and selecting "add to collection" and then choosing the correct collection to sync, you're out of luck  when you sync later--the new scene has not been added, and you won't be reminded to do so, either. That's a huge downside for me--I often forget to add a new scene to my Index Card binder in Scrivener, and when I go to sync, I'm not given a list to compare old saves/syncs versus my new save/sync to, and I often forget about a scene. 

As a result, I've learned that you can keep several binders in Scrivener for Index Card purposes (or other purposes, but I don't have a need to at this point). I often create a new one when I'm trying to update my files for syncing because I don't want to scroll through and figure out which files are there and which aren't. 

Index Card on iPad is great though, and I've found it to be relatively bug-free with few crashes (i.e., loss of work). You can color-code your cards, edit the main text or the card summary or title. You can also jump through your text by "word," either forward or backwards, which is awesome to have when writing a novel or short story on the iPad, instead of having to use your finger to painstakingly put the cursor in just the right spot to add that "s" to "sync." It also gives you the quick buttons: undo, -, ', ", ., ◀ & ▶ (allowing you to cursor forward or backwards one character), a "+" button which adds a new scene in your file, and a forward delete button. All of these are great for writing a novel on your iPad, buttons that you'll soon wish you had in Pages or your Messages.

Index Card is a convenient app to have for writing on the go, and I enjoy it for what it is. Just remember to sync back to Scrivener when you've made changes on your iPad, otherwise you'll be working with an old document. 

When you return to Scrivener, you cannot have forgotten to export your Index Card edits to Dropbox, or else all your work will only be accessible via your iPad. You can do that with the nifty little arrow button on the top right of the screen--but it does kind of suck that you have to do this and it doesn't save there automatically. 

And when you go to update your files in Scrivener, you must select "update collection from Index Card file," and all your files are replaced in Scrivener with the newer documents from your iPad.

Although Index Card and Scrivener are tedious to use together, the backup is nice, especially considering how complete a backup it is from Scrivener.


In conclusion:

I don't like to use too many apps. I prefer to keep life simple with ones that work and work well. I familiarize myself with a few and stick to them until I find something better.

These four apps are the free or inexpensive apps which I've found myself returning to time and again for writing on the go. 

There are a ton of other writing apps out there, and I've certainly not tried them all. I've focused on ones that I can use in conjunction with Scrivener, since that's where I do the majority of my writing.

If there are more that I should be using, please feel free to let me know! I'm always up for trying a new app, as long as it's affordable. I'm a starving writer, after all. 

Playing the Writing Game Well

The Associated Press

The 2012 Olympic-Winning U.S. Women's Soccer team just won their fourteenth game in a row on Wednesday. 

Whether you like soccer or not, you must admit, that's a pretty impressive record. 

This was also their head coach's last game, and I'm sure, they wanted to send her off with yet another win. 

But, though they went into their fourteenth game looking pretty good for the win, they didn't lead start to finish.

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." --Ernest Hemingway

Even though you may go into writing thinking you could win, you may not always lead--or end up the victor. Sometimes when you go in thinking you have the advantage, you find yourself humbled. 

No writer knows it all; every writer has more to learn.

Remember that writing is a changing art. There are a lot of changes going on in the writing industry now, just like there were a lot of changes going on ten or twenty years ago. Every decade, every year, offers something new. We, as authors, as writers, always have something to learn about the writing craft and industry.

"I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all." --Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

If you go into writing thinking you have a chance of losing, you might just find yourself more prepared to win than you thought. A writer's humility can be one of their greatest assets. 

Through humility, we are willing to learn. 

If I go into a forum or ask a fellow writer for a writing critique, while thinking I have nothing left to learn, you can rest assured that I won't learn a thing--even if I get some awesome feedback.

On Dreams

Writing is one of those fanciful careers, the stuff dreams are made of. It's so easy to get discouraged. In this game, the U.S. came back from a one-point deficit, to score four more times.

They ended up beating Australia by four points. They not only started strong, they finished strong. 

While ending the first half tied, the U.S. women came out after halftime refocused. The game ended with a score of 6-2.

Start strong, end strong. 

You will have peaks and valleys in the writing game. 

You will make goals, but you will get scored on. 

Just make sure that you don't let the times you get scored on prevent you from finishing strong. Refocus your writing life, and start scoring goals.

F2K Writing Course

Twice a year Writers' Village University offers a free (that's right, free) creative writing course. It's called F2K (Fiction 2000), and it's awesome. It's beyond awesome, it's mind-blowing.

F2K is a community of writers--both beginners and experienced writers--and lasts for six weeks. It's an online forum, complete with social network similar to Facebook, where you can share status updates with just your fellow writers. (What writer doesn't like that idea?)

It starts at the beginning, forging relationships between writers. For everyone in the forum is a writer. As we put ourselves out there, we find support and encouragement from other writers (who are also readers).

Although we write for readers, a fellow writer's point of view is essential to catch the nitty gritty things that readers may not recognize as interfering with their enjoyment of the book, but ultimately do. 

This course consists of six lessons, each of which serves to encourage and stir up the creative mental juices. It starts with basics, and builds on that. Not that one can be taught the writing skill completely in six weeks, but this course will take you from not knowing what point of view is, to writing in different points of views correctly. From not knowing how to use conflict in a scene, to using it well. 

Other members of your class edit your work and allow you a chance to look at it more objectively. Thus you can see your piece as another would see it, and make changes accordingly. 

Oh, and did I mention there's a weekly, class-wide competition? As well as an end-of-session competition, where we all get to vote on the best short story? That's a great incentive to work hard for the competitive writer... which, I'm sure, none of us are...

Registration ends tomorrow, so be sure and sign up now! 

Having the Guts to Write

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” 
― Sylvia Plath


I think it's every author's fear that they aspire to be great and merely turn out mediocre--or even a complete flop. It's my strong belief that one of the ways a writer does not live up to their potential is because they are afraid to push the envelope. 

They're afraid to really write.

The beautiful (and terrifying) thing about writing is that it reveals an author's deepest thoughts. 

As an introvert, when I started writing I thought it was something embarrassing, something to keep to myself, something that I could not be proud of. It's taken me several years to wrestle with this idea that writing is an art which I can fine-tune, which I can practice and which improves most when shared with others. I've been forced to come out of my shell, accept my thoughts, and share them with others.

Sharing your work is a major part of writing. 

Even if you have no publication aspirations, sharing your writing will give you an opportunity to grow and to learn from the reader.

I'm part of an online forum where I share my writing. When I decided to get serious about my craft, stumbling upon this forum was one of the biggest blessings in my life. It not only gave me an outsider's view, another opinion, but it created confidence in me. Other non-biased writers are some of the best places to give and receive feedback from. Even when they did not love what I'd written, there was value in the feedback I received.

Writers take away different things from a book than what a typical reader absorbs. 

Once I took my writing seriously, I know my criticism of other writers intensified. I had always been critical of books, and it's a running joke in my book clubs that I cannot find a book I love. (Although this isn't true--I swear!) But in my forum of writers, I am allowed to be critical. I can tear their writing apart (kindly), knowing that my intention is to help them improve as a writer and to buff and shine their work-in-progress until it glows and I am jealous of what they've written (if I'm not already). And I can be confident that they are doing the exact same to my work.

Other writers have an ability to be honest about the quality of writing that most readers lack. Not to say that getting a non-writer's opinion is not valuable--by all means, it is extremely valuable, since they will be the majority of people reading your book. But a reader tends to take away a general impression, one which removes overall themes and feelings from the book without being able to discern why they love or hate the book. 

A writer, on the other hand, is usually able to pinpoint exactly what makes them feel a specific way in a piece of writing, as well as offering solutions to fix the sentence or piece as a whole. This is invaluable insight into your writing. Insight which you, as the author, are too close to your work to see. 

There comes a time when one must get over their fear of sharing and fear of rejection and share their writing with others. 

Share it in a safe place first. Let your confidence be buoyed--but be realistic about praise if you share only with friends and family who will probably tell you your work is the best they've ever read. Recognize that sharing with a stranger, like in an online forum or a writer's group, can be much more valuable in terms of honesty. And honesty promotes growth.

What it really comes down to is stuffing down your fear and putting yourself out there. 

Take baby steps if you have to, sharing a paragraph or sentence or simply a story idea. Then share more, and share it with a wider range of people. Don't allow yourself to get comfortable in your writing. 

Comfort is the death of growth.

Writers should never stop growing. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be a writer whose first work was just as good as her last. I want to constantly improve, constantly make my writing more valuable, more interesting and more thought-provoking than the last. 

I don't want to remain a static writer. I want to be willing to change, when change is necessary and vital. 

I want to be a writer with the guts to push the envelope.

The Fourth Fisherman by Joe Kissack, A Review

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. But I knew that it was about a man and his marriage, and, somehow, how a group of fishermen had saved his marriage. Two seemingly unrelated incidents, and two incidents that I am still not quite sure complement each other.

When I began reading this book, I think I expected something between a Nicholas Sparks book and Moby Dick... But it fell short on both ends and pleasantly surprised me in the middle.

Joe Kissack had it all, a fancy house, expensive car, enviable job. He had it all, but something grave was lacking. A part of him always understood this, and he sought to fill the hole inside him with more stuff and more accomplishments. Eventually, alcohol, and then drugs filled that hole. It’s not an uncommon scenario: raised under a tough father, the man wants to please his father and so becomes an overachiever, until he finally realizes that nothing fills this hole and he needs help.

But for Joe Kissack, help arrived in the story of five fisherman who disappeared from the Mexican coast. It was a news story that went largely unnoticed in America, overshadowed by the confession of John Mark Karr to having killed JonBenet Ramsey. Kissack, however, followed a different story, a story about survival in the midst of overwhelming odds, a story of five men drifting in the ocean who had only each other, a boat and a Bible.

The story of the three surviving fishermen, Jesús, Salvador, and Lucio, does not parallel Joe Kissack’s much. The telling of their stories, narrated in alternating bits and pieces, is at times frustrating and other times slow. Although both stories are interesting, I found the fishermen’s story more so, and was disappointed that the fishermen’s story was not featured more prevalently past the first twelve chapters. 

For some Christian readers that suffer from depression and drug and alcohol abuse, Kissack’s dramatic salvation and easy abandonment of such demons could be challenging to read about. Although it is stated once that most Christians do not have a transformation like Kissack experienced, the story is more focused on the amazing aspects of his salvation. I do not mean to make light of God’s ability to change lives, and though this story is about that ability as much as about the fishermen, for some readers, this may not be an inspiring read, but one that leaves them unhappy with their ongoing battle with depression or drugs and alcohol.

The Fourth Fisherman was a book that I am glad I read. It was interesting and kept my attention throughout, but I would have liked to see more substance with the fishermen and how their ordeal changed their lives. That part of the story is glossed over and the brief epilogue is too brief, in my opinion. Despite my reservations, I enjoyed the read. Kissack has written an inspiring book, one that could encourage men and women to accept some harsh realities about themselves and get help, whether from God or from counseling.

*I received this review copy from Blogging for Books.

My Rating: 

3.5/5 stars

It would provoke interesting discussion in a book club, but simply for the way the parallel stories are approached, I don't feel that I can rate this book higher.

So You Want to Write a Novel?

This is a great video spoof on a newbie's perceptions of how easy it is to publish a novel versus one with experience. Laugh out loud funny.


Anyone who is thinking about writing a novel should listen to this video and then ask themselves if they have what it takes to write a novel.

Book Review: Caleb's Crossing

A young Puritan minister's daughter, Bethia, is slightly rebellious and wants to have a formal education--something refused to women in the 1600s, when this book is set. Her desire for knowledge and knack for languages instigates friction between herself and her family as her father teaches her brother Latin, Greek and Hebrew to prepare him for the life of a minister. Father angers when he realizes that Bethia is a better student than her brother, Makepeace, and forbids her from more learning. In order to quench her lust for knowledge, Bethia begins to eavesdrop on her brother’s lessons and "borrow" school books or her father’s books and study them in private.

Bethia’s father is a minister who preaches to the Wampanoag Indians on a New England island, and Bethia is a girl who struggles to accept her place in the world as a woman and future wife. There is no other option for Bethia in the 1600s, and she is determined to follow the example of her mother. Throughout the course of this novel, she struggles to resist rebelling against this destiny, by seeking her own fulfillment. 

And then she meets Caleb. Caleb, who is a Wampanoag Indian and the nephew to the wampaw (witch doctor) that is Bethia’s father’s nemesis. Caleb, who teaches Bethia his language as he learns English from her. Caleb, in more ways than one, changes Bethia’s life. He becomes not just a friend, but more a brother than her own brother has ever--or will ever--be.

What transpires throughout this novel is the telling of Caleb’s education throughout the years, as he is taught English and started in Latin, Hebrew and Greek first from Bethia's father, then becomes the first Indian graduate from Harvard. His knack for language parallels Bethia’s, and she, through a twist of fate (I won’t spoil it), follows him to Harvard. At Harvard, Bethia finds love and continues her education through eavesdropping. 

Although the ending is certainly bittersweet, it is reminiscent of life. Caleb’s Crossing is based on a real person, but the story itself is fictional. The story of Caleb crossing from one world into the next, however, is certainly factual. He crossed from the Wampanoags to the English and found that combining the two was harder than imagined.

My rating: 

4.5/5 stars

I would definitely read this again. It was quiet and thoughtful, sad and yet enjoyable. The writing was fluent and elegant. A worthwhile read.