There’s a famous two-decade-old Paris Review interview with Haruki Murakami in which he, one of the world’s most celebrated novelists, details his daily routine. He wakes up at 4AM, works for five hours, goes for a run, reads, goes to bed, and then repeats it all over again. The rigor and repetition are the point.
I am not Haruki Murakami.
In addition to my work at The Verge, I write novels — my second one is out today — and while I admire Murakami’s commitment to an immovable schedule, I’ve found that I produce my best work when I’m constantly rethinking routines, processes, and, mostly, how I’m writing. In the modern age, that means what software I’m using.
What I am about to describe will be a nightmare to anyone who likes all of their tools to work harmoniously. All of these apps are disconnected and do not interoperate with each other in any way. Many of the things they do are redundant and overlap. I suppose this process is quite the opposite of frictionless — but that’s precisely the point. I’m not sure I believe that ambitious creative work is borne from a perfectly efficient workflow.
This is, instead, a journey of moving the work through different pieces of software, depending on what it needed or how I needed to interface with it. Just as being in different locations can inspire or challenge new ideas, moving work through different writing environments can be that shift for your text. What I’m about to detail is less about the specific pieces of software, and more how one might change their approach depending on what the work needs.
At least, that’s how it is for me. Maybe it might be for you, too.
When I start writing a book, I need to quite literally collect my thoughts. It’s the fun part — when the project is all potential, before the realities of how painful it will be to actually make it have set in. I’ll find inspiration in things I’m reading, watching, and listening to; ideas will come to me while I’m riding the subway, when I can’t sleep at night, and even sometimes in the middle of meetings.
Everyone has specific uses for their notes apps, and there are so many available. The slightly counterintuitive / deranged thing is that I use two different ones. Each serves a different purpose.
I use Bear for structured ideas like character sketches or thematic concepts, and I make use of the app’s lightweight tagging system to stay organized. For entirely loose thoughts, I usually paste things into Notes and don’t worry about formatting, context, whatever — I just know it is saved somewhere. (Actually, I have a very adverse reaction to how Notes looks, but it’s the one where my partner prefers to share grocery lists and streaming passwords, so I’m stuck with it.)
The important thing here isn’t that these apps are especially good or tailored to any purpose. I just have a different environment to open on my phone, depending on the type of idea I need to save. One I use when I’m being thoughtful, and another when I need to get something down quickly. And in the moments when I need to save something super fast, I won’t even use a notes app at all — I’ll just text myself.
Nothing about Bear or Notes interact with each other, and, eventually, I will have to move any useful text out of them. Both of them sync quite nicely to desktop apps, so copying and pasting stuff to a new place is a fairly painless, if not tedious, process. This is, for me, the value of notes apps: combining scraps of ideas, so that you can turn them into something useful later.
I don’t stop taking notes when I’m writing — in fact, that only increases as the book starts to take shape and really live in my brain. But the place I spent the most time focused on deliberate, actual writing was in iA Writer, my minimal, zero-frills word processor of choice. This was the software I opened when I sat down to do the exhausting work of novel writing.
I’ve tried a handful of other apps, but this is the one I keep returning to, even though it costs $50 for mobile and another $50 if you want the desktop version. Looking back, this is a pretty ludicrous amount of money to spend just because I like the app’s default typeface. (Though, when you’re going to spend over 100 hours looking at something, $100 seems less egregious.) There’s a sea of free apps that accomplish the very basic task of letting you type, so find the one that makes you feel the most comfortable. The first draft is the hardest part, so anything you can do to ease that process is worth it.
I drafted almost entirely on an iPad — not any of the high-end models, but Apple’s entry-level one with the crummy keyboard attachment. I just wanted a device dedicated to being a writing tool. (I wrote my first book on a Chromebook that was too slow to meaningfully browse the internet; eventually, I had to send it to the e-waste pickup when it was too sluggish to open Google Docs.) On the iPad, I removed most of the default apps, and the only other things I installed were the Kindle app and some PDF readers. No games, no streaming services.
I know some writers that work from start to finish. I’m a little more chaotic in that I write in absolutely no order. This becomes a problem later, since the most important part of a narrative is structure. So at a certain point, when I had enough words written (usually around 60,000 words), I moved things into several different Google Docs so I could start to separate out scenes and chapters. If iA Writer is for getting words on the page, Docs is where I finish and begin to revise a book. This is where it becomes a legible story.
I don’t have too much to say about Google Docs that you don’t already know. It’s the word processor that I’ve used the most throughout my life, so it’s also the most familiar and most convenient. We use Google Docs all day long at The Verge, so writing a book in it also makes it feel like work, which is an admission in a way: that now, we have to do work.
The use of AI, especially when it comes to writing, is controversial for a myriad of good reasons. I know a lot of authors that wholesale reject the use of them. I don’t personally feel that they are immoral; I mostly find them quite unhelpful. For my work at The Verge, I find myself testing them somewhat regularly just to know what’s out there. (I do think AI is quite useful for rough language translation.)
Just as Microsoft Word was designed for business memos, the incentive of AI-generated writing is to produce copious amounts of banal web copy or cheery emails. I’m not interested in using AI to generate any of my work because, frankly, I like doing the work. Making art, as Ted Chiang has argued, is a series of decisions. The convenience of AI is that it makes decisions for you. But then, really, what is the point of writing if you let something else do it for you?
This was when things got a little weird. Google Docs has a hard time with writing that goes over a certain length — that threshold, I’ve found, is around 15,000 words. So my book was separated into large sections, and I created an index linked to all the chapters, also as a Google Doc. By this point, I’m off the iPad and back on a laptop; my browser has tabs open to each of the seven separate Docs that comprise my draft.
For me, revising isn’t as hard as finishing a first draft, but it is an organizational challenge. On one hand, you have to keep balancing things on a sentence, paragraph, and chapter level; on the other, you can’t lose sight of the book’s entire structure. Having the manuscript spread across so many different documents was proving cumbersome.
So I installed Scrivener, one of the few apps I know that is actually built with book writing in mind. (What does it say that the majority of the creative writing we do is done in software designed for the workplace?) If the ideal of software in the past decade has been ease, Scrivener leans the other direction by designing something for power users. It’s software that you get more out of the more effort you put into setting it up, making it your own, and wrangling its eccentricities until the quirks feel like second nature. Even the way Scrivener looks — the use of multiple panes, rigid organization structures, and high information density — feels like Windows software from the late ‘90s / early aughts.
I confess, I only did light customization (the first thing I did was switch all the UI elements to a better typeface). Even then, it was quite worthwhile to use the app to organize and reorganize chapters. With the customizable metadata fields, I was able to create labels to easily sort chapters by characters’ points of view and track which sections needed revisions. Scrivener also lets you visualize your projects, and seeing everything laid out visually like index cards on a corkboard is extremely helpful when you’re trying to weave together five plot lines. It really helped me nail down the book’s sequence and structure.
The thing is: I actually hate writing in Scrivener, so then I moved everything back to Google Docs to finish (again, scattered across several different Docs). I did another round of revisions with my agent, and then sent it off to my editor, exported as a Word document.
As much as I find Microsoft Word quite clumsy, especially on a Mac, it became necessary to eventually move a full manuscript there. Word is the industry standard for the publishing industry, and I wasn’t about to ask my editor to accommodate my desire for a less ugly word processor. (It also seems like no matter how long Google tries to solve its interoperability with Word’s track changes, crucial things always end up getting lost in translation.)
After a couple rounds with my editor, we finally felt like the manuscript was good to go to production. First, it went to the copy editor. This started in Word, but then the book’s interior was laid out and I had to look at proofs in Adobe Acrobat, which has its own gangly commenting system that I endured because all authors are brave.
A lot of time passes while a book is in production, and then you start to have meetings about actually selling the book. This is my least favorite part of the publishing process, since I’m forced to think about publicity and marketing, and I’m not sure anyone chooses writing fiction because their desire is to “please a market.”
Anyway, one last app that I’ve been using — at David Pierce’s recommendation — is Craft 3. The previous versions of Craft, which I’d never used, were full-featured productivity apps. This third iteration pivots it to a writing environment first, with lots of productivity bells and whistles second. This has been the ideal to manage all of my pre-publication commitments, which involve writing marketing copy, planning events, and scheduling interviews. With Craft, I’ve had a pretty easy time staying on top of deadlines, and I’ve found it less fidgety than similar tools like Notion.
So, if you’ve been keeping track, the journey looks like this:
Bear / Apple Notes ➡️ iA Writer ➡️ Google Docs ➡️ Scrivener ➡️ Google Docs ➡️ Microsoft Word ➡️ Adobe Acrobat
There are a few things all these apps have in common. First, they all have reliable phone and desktop versions. I don’t use each one equally, but it’s nice to have access to the text no matter where I’m working. Second, each piece of software is built around a core strength, rather than trying to be good at everything. Scrivener is the only outlier here, since it suffers from feature bloat, but you can also really make it work for you if you put in the elbow grease. (There’s a whole subculture of Scrivener users and tinkerers — multiple friends have recommended Jaime Greene’s online courses.)
I have a third book under contract, which means I’m committed to doing this whole process all over again. Well, not this process, exactly — if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’ll have to reinvent the whole thing for myself as I write, and that means trying a lot of new software. Even if it was possible to create the perfect app, one that could capture the journey of writing a book from conception to publication, I’m still not sure I would use it. The limitations of each tool forced me to be thoughtful. The friction made me ask, at every turn: what does the book need now?
A workflow is for getting things done efficiently. Embracing mess is how you write a book.
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