Happy Wednesday! The Insecure Writers’ Group is a group of writers offering motivation and encouragement to all those taking on the challenges of writing. Every month the ISWG sponsors a blog hop where writers can blog about a topic related to overcoming obstacles and exploring various aspects of the writing journey. If you’d like to participate in a future hop you can join here. It’s always a great experience, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in writing and sharing with other writers.
The co-hosts for the July 3 blog hop post of the IWSG are JS Pailly, Rebecca Douglass, Pat Garcia, Louise-Fundy Blue, and Natalie Aguirre!
Every month there is an optional discussion question to ponder, and this month it’s the following:
July 3 question – What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?
I wish I had a very interesting and complex answer for this question, with a lot of great suggestions and tools that I could recommend. However the truth is, I really don’t. 😅
I am a Microsoft word user, with ProWriting Aid to help me with my editing. I got Pro Writing Aid in November, and I do like it so far. I also (thanks to my son), have recently discovered the convenience of dictating my text via the microphone on my iPad. My son is only 6 yet knows way more than I do already about all technology haha. Being able to talk through some of the text helps me work through my thoughts, and also saves my hand, which due to my graphic design work is already starting to show signs of carpal tunnel 😫
How about you? What recommendations do you have for tools and programs that help you write? How do you write when it’s inconvenient, or when you don’t have a computer? Let me know in the comments, and let’s discuss!
-Winter
Winter Betancourt 
Thanks for asking, Winter. The heavy lifting is done in Scrivener, with hat tips to MS Word and Apple Pages. I use notes for my ‘writer’s database’ and TextEdit for tweaking code. ProWritingAid (desktop version mostly) keeps things tidy, and Atticus formats the manuscripts (although Scrivener gets it ready). Affinity Photo and Designer give me all I need for covers and infographics, but it sure is easy to prototype in Canva (and you can beat the portfolio of images and videos). Sometimes a spreadsheet is just what you need to organize things (e.g., multi-POV stories with subplots), and I prefer Apple Numbers over MS Excel unless I have something that requires more detail.
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Wow that’s awesome! Thank you for sharing that info Grant, that is really helpful! I’ve never tried Apple numbers, I struggle with excel so maybe that would be something I might like better. It’s amazing how each program and tool brings a little something different to the table in terms of what it can offer to the process.
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Using the different apps has opened my eyes as to an endless list of possibilities. It gets easier because the apps often share somewhat common interfaces. What can be done in one might be achieved easier in another. For example, Numbers is much easier to use than Excel, and it shares similar nomenclature with Pages and Keynote. When I’m prototyping a worksheet for writers, I often turn to Pages or Numbers, and both make it super easy to produce colorful and functional PDFs.
Toward the end of this linked post you’ll find an example of a Numbers spreadsheet for calculating the number scenes based on the estimated word count. https://tameyourbook.com/the-trellis-method-discover-what-story-beats-can-do-for-your-writing/
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Thanks so much for this! 😁
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You’re welcome, Winter!
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I’ve tried dictating my books but I get frustrated since I do a lot of editing as I write. LOL I know. Bad habit.
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Susanne I do the same thing!! I totally get it! Usually when I dictate my words I do end up with a bit of a mess I have to sort through after 😂
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Great minds think alike.
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Yes!! 😁👏
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I was a hardcore Word user for years, with forays into the equivalent in early iterations of OpenOffice (now LibreOffice). The open-source versions didn’t work as well for me back then, so I stayed with Word. When the Google Docs offerings matured I switched over and haven’t been back. LibreOffice is quite good now, and if I had to drop Google Docs I would probably switch to it, with Word as a back-up.
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Wow, thank you John that’s great to know! I’ve never tried Google Docs, I’m going to check that out. 😃
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ProWritingAid looks as if it could be useful for me, and not too scarily hi-tech,Very techy indeed, in software – I call it ‘ teaching computers. my husband encourages and urges me to try new systems, so I do, then head straight back to Word.
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Haha I totally understand! Pro Writing Aid is good because it works with word and just gives suggestions (most of the time pretty helpful). I find it makes my program run a little slower, but so far it seems worth it 😅 I’m used to word so I always gravitate back to that too!
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