Everyone has their own style of approach towards a craft. Ruskin Bond uses pencils & typewriters, Hemingway used moleskins. One writes in the morning, another at midnight. One writes everyday, another writes only when the muse comes calling. To each his own. Every writer has a flow & their respective tools and setups. In this post I try to explain my writing workflow – How I write? When I write? What are the tools I use?
When I come across a blog idea or something pops up in my mind, I open up Taskpaper which I use as a outliner and note it down. I write as many points as I can – without judgement – on that topic. Then, I research on the net for an article which might further flesh out my story. & send it to Instapaper. If I just need some specific points or quotes from an article, I clip them to Evernote. Once my research material is collected, I start culling through all the saved items, deleting all which don’t contribute to what I’m writing and once I have all my points listed, material collected, I fire up my text editor and start writing.
I don’t sit at one computer to do all my blogging at once. All my writing & research happens in bits & pieces at work, at home and sometimes in transit. I start on my mac, continue on my iPhone and PC or vice versa. The glue which holds this complete workflow together is Dropbox – a cloud storage service where I have all my posts stored as text files. (Why text files? Because they can be read on any computer running any operating system and don’t require any proprietary word processor to interpret them). And, I prefer cross platform apps – which can work on Mac, iOS, Web & Windows. All my blog posts are written in Markdown in a markdown enabled text editor on all my systems. Byword – a simple text editor meant for those who don’t like fiddling with a myriad of settings and options is my choice of app for the Mac & iOS. As the name aptly implies, the app is focused on words. I like to write in its full-screen mode for optimal, true distraction-free experience. Also, love the way the app subdues markdown syntax making it easy to read the content. Markdown pad is my choice on the PC. It has a slew of options from live HTML preview, easy keyboard shortcuts, HTML export to distraction-free writing. Once I’m done with drafting my post, I re-draft it atleast 4 times before posting. And when I have my best, I copy the HTML code and paste into WordPress and publish it.
Ultimately it is writing which counts and not the tools. But, writing is not an easy task. And, settling down on the right tool & setup eases the process of putting thoughts and feelings into words.
Reply