Literature and Latte

By Jason Clark

8 Dec 2008

So I have 3 weeks to turn in my first draft of two chapters of a book project I am doing for Baker, with Pete Rollins, Scott McKnight and Kevin Corcoran.

Aside from the scary company my two chapters will be sandwiched between (something to make these others guys look even better), I have the research done, and an outline for both chapters.

Now I need to nuckle down and write everything up.  But I don’t want to do it in word, and be cutting and pasting sections, pages and ideas back and forth.  I’m aware of Scrivener, and Ulysses and StoryMill.

So any of you have experience of these, know of any other mac applications, that would enabling environment to write in, and get the job done easily?

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  1. Comment by Pat Loughery

    4.52 pm on 8 Dec 2008

    Jason, as I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve been really happy with Scrivener. I’ve not used the others but have seen their webpages before.

    Scrivener lets me write wherever I have the most creativity, at whichhever part of the story I have the juice for at the moment. It lets me write even if I don’t know where that section will fit into the main story. It lets me organize my work very quickly. It lets me brainstorm ideas, jot down notes to look at later, etc.

    Note though that you still have to dump the results into Word or similar for formatting,and this can be disheartening since Word is so much LESS easy to use.

    One nice little thing about Scrivener – the trial period for it is very generous. It’s 30 days, but not in the sense of “30 days afer you start using this, you have to buy it.” It’s 30 days in the sense of “30 different days on which you choose to start the program.” If you launch once and run for a week, that counts as a day. If you launch once this month and once next month, that counts as 2 days. This gives you plenty of opportunity to see if it’s what you want. Even so, the price is excellent and in my experience certainly worth the money.

  2. Comment by Wesley

    5.20 pm on 8 Dec 2008

    I use Mellel.. http://www.redlers.com/ very nice and well put together, excellent stylistic options and source managing (seamless integration with BookEnds). I don’t use Microsoft Word anymore.. it’s either Pages (for everyday kind of stuff) and Mellel for papers/articles/research, etc.. Enjoy!

  3. Comment by john chandler

    7.58 pm on 8 Dec 2008

    Jason,
    I really like Scrivener and have used it for both long and short writing projects. I even have been using it lately for putting together teaching outlines. I have a few different posts about it on my creativity blog: http://www.creativityist.com/tag/scrivener/

  4. Comment by Michael

    8.08 pm on 8 Dec 2008

    For a completely different take on what makes productivity, you could check out WriteRoom — http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

    This software has no features at all except it creates a blank space for you to fill with words.

  5. Comment by Jason

    7.39 am on 9 Dec 2008

    Thanks for the suggestions guys, Jase

  6. Comment by Brunettekoala

    10.28 am on 9 Dec 2008

    A good coffee shop as your writing office.

    That always helps. :)

    (hey, it worked for JK Rowling, she wrote a good chunk of Harry’s adventures in one of my favourite Edinburgh cafes – ‘The Elephant House’…)

  7. Comment by Existential Punk

    10.50 pm on 11 Dec 2008

    Curious as to what the book project with Pete Rollins is about? Can you share?

    1. Comment by Jason

      7.51 am on 12 Dec 2008

      I’ll put something up early January, before I present my chapters with the other authors at Calvin Seminary.

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