When we lived in Andorra up in the Pyrenees, rather than relying on my usual jar of instant, I would occasionally drive down the valley and have a coffee in one of the local establishments. Although this cost money, obviously, my wife was keen to encourage me to do this because, rather than just ambling into the kitchen with a mug in my hand and a hopeful expression on my face, it physically got me moving away from the computer. Quite some distance away from the computer, in fact, as it was about a ten minute drive to the closest café.
The one we normally visited was called 5 Sentits (Catalan for ‘5 Senses,’ just in case you’re not familiar with this old language) and it was one of the most pleasant cafés I have ever visited, though now sadly it is no more. It was full of fascinating gadgets and pieces of kitchen equipment that my wife frequently decided she simply could not live without for another hour, so our visits there were often both lengthy and expensive.
I recall one visit very well. Behind one of the banquettes in the café there was always a collection of magazines of various types, mostly Spanish, but with a few French and English ones as well. I was idly leafing through these when I came across a writing magazine, in English. The cover was familiar enough to me – I even had a subscription to it and was an occasional contributor – but I hadn’t seen that particular issue. When I looked at it more closely, I realized why: it had been published back in 2002.
So while my wife pottered about, looking at the Porsche steak knives and numerous other pricey gadgets that I really hoped she wouldn’t find a home for, I leafed through the magazine, checking out the writing scene as it had been just after the turn of the century.
And what was interesting was how little things seemed to have changed. Obviously writers’ problems are perennial, which I suppose is what you’d expect. There were articles dealing with writer’s block, others suggesting new ways of finding inspiration when your novel has ground to a messy halt in a metaphorical muddy field, warnings against vanity publishers, and others extolling the virtues of the then brand-new technology of POD – print on demand.
There was, predictably enough, no mention at all of electronic books, because the first release of Amazon’s Kindle was still five years away, and there was no hint at all of the turmoil that would be enveloping the world of publishing within quite a short time.
But apart from this obvious omission, the magazine could almost have been printed the previous day, as long as I made a suitable mental adjustment whenever a price was quoted, which started me wondering whether there really was anything new under the sun when it comes to the craft of writing.
And in particular whether any of the latest crop of software programs were of the slightest use to an author. I freely admit that, just as my wife is a sucker for kitchen gadgets, because she’s an extremely good cook, I’m a sucker for software programs that promise to make my life easier. I’ve bought and tried several in the past, and they have been, almost without exception, either removed from my computer in very short order, or at best left there in some dark corner of the hard drive to be used infrequently, if at all.
The problem, I think, is that when I’m writing I try and hold the entire story in my head and just basically regurgitate it onto the page. OK, it’s a little more complicated than that, but I tend to think in a kind of linear fashion, starting at the beginning and working my way through to the end. I don’t normally do plot outlines, character descriptions, locations and so on as separate entities, which is what most of these programs seem to want me to do. I have a feeling that if I started using one seriously, I would end up in a kind of filing cabinet nightmare, surrounded by electronic notes about timing, characters’ dates of birth and physical descriptions and all the rest of it, and I wouldn’t actually have any kind of story.
Of course, that’s probably just me, being something of a Luddite and refusing to embrace the new technology, but I honestly think that I work better when I start by opening up Word, create a new file and then just write the blasted book.
At least, that’s what seems to work for me,
