Three Writing Tools I Use Every Day

I am in awe of the people able to sit down with a typewriter and create a book. I could probably do it if I had to, but there is no way on earth I could do it as quickly or as well as using a computer. Some of that comes down to being able to type faster and fix errors without whiteout. But it is more than just the things I could get from a good electronic typewriter. There are a few writing tools that I use every day. None of them are secrets, but they are valuable enough to be spotlighted as many places as possible.

Scrivener

Last week I spent several hours trying to figure out how to get some short stories into the correct format for submission. The exact details aren’t that exciting. It had to do with getting headers to not show on the first page. I still don’t know how to do it in the word processors I was trying to use because it turns out the simple solution was to use the compile feature in scrivener which not only added the headers the correct way, but set the font, indents and margins to the standard format.

That’s just one of the many examples I have discovered to use scrivener to make my life easier. Another obvious one is the ability to have your notes and research all kept together in a scrivener file. I use this constantly, but one of the most common is simply to keep records of how I describe every character that shows up in one of my books so I don’t accidentally give the same character two different color eyes.

I have no doubt that I’m using scrivener at ten percent or less of its full functionality because almost every time that I run into something that it would be nice if it did it’s not only already been done but is easy to do with Scrivener like having it easily compile your writing into the correct format.

ProWritingAid

One of the few things that Scrivener doesn’t do well is fix my grammar, typos and word choice. That’s where ProWritingAid comes in. There are a few different programs or sites that do similar things, but I’ve had the best luck with ProWritingAid because while calling it a grammar checker may be technically correct, it barely touches on the value of this. Beyond pointing out spelling and the many places I missed a comma that I should have added one, it also highlights other potential issues in your writing such as the use of passive voice or using weak words when there are a far better ones.

It also has some other tools that I use fairly often such as showing you what the most common words in your text are, what things you might overuse (which aren’t always the same), helping you find filter words, showing a readability score and more.

This isn’t a replacement for a professional editor by any stretch of the imagination, but it does a good job of helping me to improve my writing and fixes a massive amount of errors that would have slipped through before.

Balabolka

Of the three I’m confident this is the more obscure. It’s just a free text to speech program, but it has all the features I need, like the ability to adjust the speed of the text and several voices. I have long known that reading my work out loud is a good way to make sure it sounds good and to find a lot of errors you’d otherwise miss, but I hate doing that. I hate recording myself and then listening to it even more. But every time I use Balabolka, I discover several errors that both Scrivener and ProWritingAid missed. Most of the time it the wrong word or having a word twice and it’s almost always something that would be embarrassing if someone else found.

More than that it often helps me to make things shorter, more clear and sound smoother because while most people will not be reading my stories out loud I like the idea that they can and knowing that it’s always better for things to be easy to read than for them to be difficult and because it uses punctuation, like giving a short pause at a comma it makes it easier to spot the minor changes.

Bonus: Dropbox

This isn’t a writing tool, but it, or something similar, is vital to anyone who is a writer. Dropbox is a folder on your computer except that anything you put into it is uploaded to the cloud so that if something happens to your computer, you can still get to it. Don’t let the novel you’ve been writing get lost in a fire or a computer crash. And if you’re just using it for your writing it’s going to be free since you can store up to a gigabyte of data for free and if you’ve written enough to fill that, even with some more data intensive formats, I am impressed.