How To… write a novel on your Mac

• Article 70 of 89
• MacFormat, April 2009

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They say everyone has a novel inside them. Which is great - who doesn't want to be a famous author and be the new Dickens or even the new Jackie Collins? Maybe it's not a novel, but a diary or a journal. Or even a blog.

But having that novel inside you and getting it on to paper are two different things. There's the sheer amount of time necessary to write tens of thousands of words, with the ever constant enemies of procrastination and distraction there to cut your average writing rate down to a crawl during whatever brief moments of quiet you manage to snatch in between work and chores.

Then there's mundane practicality: that novel might be in your head, but it's probably not fully written unless you're the new Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As you write it, you find that characters you thought were important aren't and others suddenly come alive, you realise you need to keep track of time lines and scenes, and should Tom the halfwit surgeon's son reveal his secret on page 115 or page 230 - or both? Suddenly, structure is all-important if you're going to make it to the end, and that's even before you think about re-writes, edits and proofreading. And inspiration, that vital ingredient for any novel, suddenly dries up midway through page 16. Then page 17. Then pages 35, 45, 50, 54... and then you're not sure what you're going to do next.

Fortunately, the Mac has been the preferred tool of creative writer types for years and there's a whole range of software that you might already own with features designed explicitly for writers - and that can help you make that novel a reality.

Obviously, a word processor is a good place to start. Surprisingly, TextEdit isn't as bad a choice as might be imagined. It writes in RTF format, allows text formatting including double line-spacing, can use the built in OS X spellchecker and grammar checker. If you want a word count - always something to lift the spirits when you wonder if you're getting anywhere - you can use OS X's built-in Services menu and Devontechnologies' free WordService (http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/services.html) to add that capability.

But if your needs are a little more advanced and you want things like footnotes, an index, stylesheets for structuring the document or some kind of organisational ability, you're going to have to look elsewhere. The obvious port of call for most writers is Word 2008 (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/default.mspx), the undisputed champion of word processing. If you need a particular feature in a word processor, you can pretty much guarantee that Word will have it.

But for many writers, that's a problem. Word is overkill. It has so many bells and whistles, they can be distracting, and distraction and procrastination are the enemies of productivity. Even once you've turned off your email, turned off your wireless Internet connection, promised yourself you won't play any games or "just look something up", you may find your eyes roaming for exciting things to look at. You may find yourself studying the beautiful colours of all the Dock icons as you re-enable the magnify feature and swish the cursor to and fro or wondering what the exact optimal arrangement of all the toolbar icons is as you customise them for the sixteenth time.

So there is an array of word processors that are specifically designed to have fewer features than Word and to be less distracting, typically with an uncluttered full screen mode.

Although not specifically designed with writers in mind, Apple's Pages 09 (http://www.apple.com/iwork) has a full-screen mode, designed to reduce that distraction. This hides the menubar and the Dock, and turns the screen black, leaving you with only a page number, word count and the document itself - you can also mouseover the left of the screen to get a pop-out view of all the pages in the document.
One of the pioneers of the full-screen writer's mode is Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom), which is an exceedingly basic word processor in most regards but gives you a highly customisable full screen mode. You can view your document in an exciting array of colours - although not too exciting, hopefully - and even go for the old style black on green VDU look if you're feeling nostalgic.

But you can also configure more useful options: whether to include a word, page, line or character count on-screen; how far down the screen the cursor can go before the document starts to scroll; how much padding to put round the document; and how often to auto-save - because nothing annoys a writer more than seeing all those precious words go up in smoke just because Word is having an off-day.

Indeed, backing up is an important thing to remember: the last thing you want is your 300-page magnum opus disappearing into the Well of Lost Plots simply because one little sector on your hard drive got corrupted when you dropped your laptop a couple of months ago.

Leopard users, of course, have access to Time Machine, which when switched on automatically backs up all their data to an external hard drive or server. Provided, of course, they have such a thing - if they don't, a quick trip to Currys, Amazon.co.uk or other retailer is highly recommended, since you can get 1TB of storage for less than £90 now, which should back up any novel as well as iPhoto and iTunes libraries and still have plenty to spare.

Alternatively or even in addition, if you like a belt and braces approach, a MobileMe subscription (http://www.apple.com/mobileme/) and Apple's Backup software are great ways to back up data online, so even if your house catches fire, your debut in the literary world will be safeguarded "in the cloud" as well.

By default, Time Machine is set to back up every hour, which might not suit anyone doing heavy editing. Because what often gets overlooked is the "oops, I didn't mean to delete that bit" problem: you've been writing and you decide that what you've written isn't quite right, delete it and then a few minutes, hours or days later you realise that maybe you could have kept some of it because it could be useful elsewhere. Except you can't because you only have the latest backup, not the backup you made three versions ago.

Fortunately, you can use TimeMachineEditor (http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/) to set the backup interval to a frequency of more than once an hour to ensure your peace of mind. But what Time Machine won't tell you is exactly which version of your document contained the text you wanted and you won't know until you've restored it. Get Backup does at least provide an easy way to restore all versions of a document that can then be searched with Spotlight.

However, a better strategy is simply to use an old version of Word, if you have one, in combination with a backup strategy. Although Word 2008 doesn't have a "versioning" feature, Word 2004 and earlier let you store many different versions of the same document in a single .doc file; you can do this manually whenever you want to have a distinct draft of the document or automatically every time you save the document. Then, if you want to recover a lost bit of text, all you need to do is get Word to open all the versions in separate windows and then search through all open documents for a relevant keyword or phrase to find the deleted text.

However, what you might find as you're writing your novel is that you'll write chapter 1 in one document, then chapter 2 in another then chapter 4 in another, revise your ideas in chapter 1 so make a backup of it then start editing it., maybe cut and paste a bit from chapter 2 into chapter 1 and so on. But rather than using a backup system, you may maintain your own manual backup system - a folder with all the versions of all the chapters you've written. Before you know it, you've got a huge collection of files, maybe containing just snippets of text that you want to keep. So some kind of project management software can come in useful once you've really got cracking.

Ulysses (http://www.blue-tec.com/ulysses) is a combination of word processor (with the near obligatory fullscreen mode) and filing system with backup functions. But instead of making you bend to its particular way of doing things, tries to be as free-form as possible, letting you devise the categories and structures you want for your writing. CopyWrite (http://www.bartastechnologies.com/products/copywrite/) attempts to do a similar job, but isn't quite as sophisticated as Ulysses but will appeal to some - particularly since it's free for small projects.

These both offer file project management, allowing you to tag and filter files, preview them, and search them: want to know all the chapters where Silas the Gardener appears or gets mentioned? They will do the job and usually far more quickly and precisely than Spotlight.

You can of course use this method and your chosen word processor to store information about characters in your novel and for things like timelines in other files. But database software such as Filemaker's Bento (http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/overview.html) can be a help with a little bit of effort, as can Omni Outliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/) and Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/), which are good organisational tools for notes, tasks and ideas.

But there are more sophisticated, tailor-made methods as well. If you really are dedicated to your art, then ultimately there are two programs that might well be the Holy Grail for Mac-based writers: Literature and Latte's Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html) and Mariner Software's StoryMill (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=127) - the daddies of writing tools.

They both offer the full-screen function of Pages and WriteRoom but Scrivener has a 'cork board' for tracking and rearranging notes, an outliner for organising and understanding documents, backup functions for keeping old versions of documents and the ability to embed a whole host of file types, including PDFs and web pages, for research.

StoryMill lets you set up then track, tag and filter characters, scenes, locations, and even research you might have done for the novel. It has a timeline, supports annotations, has a progress meter so you can see if you've been slacking off or working hard enough, and has a built in back-up function, too. As if that weren't enough, it has a word frequency tracker and cliché finder to improve your writing. And when - Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay! - your novel is finished, there's the icing on the cake: a tracker to monitor your submissions to editors and agents.

Ultimately, you will be the source of your novel, not your Mac. But your Mac can help you keep track of your files, save you from disaster, make sure you stay focused and even improve your writing. Let it help you so that the only limit is your imagination.

Writing a screenplay
Getting your work on television or the cinema
Maybe you don't want to be the next Shakespeare, but want to be the next William Goldman instead. In which case, there are many screenwriting tools available for your Mac. The undisputed king of screenplay writing is Final Draft (http://www.finaldraft.com/), which is pretty much the gold standard tool for television, screen and theatre writing that everyone in the trade uses. It has a vast range of features that make it stand out from a regular word processor: its support for the script formatting standards used in each industry; index cards for notes for each scene; a panel view for seeing how the script's scenes are structured; templates based on existing scripts; and versioned formatting, so you can not only keep multiple versions of a script, you can see the differences between the versions colour-coded onscreen.

But there are other tools available, most of them cheaper than Final Draft. NovaMind has a mind-mapping based program called ScriptMapping (http://www.novamind.com/screenwriting/) while Mariner Software has two products for aspiring screenwriters: Contour (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=138), for creating story structures and Montage (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=104), for writing and formatting scripts. Contour has the usual tools for creating story structures, such as a timeline and character notes, but it also has a system developed by Emmy-nominated writer Jeffrey Alan Schechter that is supposedly capable of guiding you through the plot points of all three acts and explains 'major storytelling secrets to crafting a highly marketable movie'. Once you're done, Montage, which has many of Final Draft's features, lets you write the script. It boasts a simpler user interface than Final Draft's as well as tools to create scenes, add characters to those scenes, and take notes, all without actually writing the script.

Journals and blog
Your daily activities for others to read
If you fancy being the next Samuel Pepys, writing a journal for yourself or a blog for others is the way forward. There are many pieces of software available for the Mac that support the sections, dates and other features needed of journals, including Mémoires (http://www.codingrobots.com/memoires/), viJournal (http://www.skoobysoft.com/vijournal/vijournal.html) and My Journal (http://customsolutionsofmaryland.50megs.com/myjournal.htm/) although MacJournal (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85) remains the most fully featured. This has rich text page layout features, as well as advanced security measures for encrypting your journal, in case you actually don't want anyone else to read it.

MacJournal has formidable blogging and podcasting functions and Apple's iWeb (http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/) is ubiquitous, but the king of desktop blogging software is ecto (http://illuminex.com/ecto). This supports just about every blogging system out there, including features such as tags and extended entries, stores all your blog entries and photos on your hard drive for offline work, let's you resize pictures and creates thumbnails before you upload your entry and includes plug-ins for working with Amazon stores and Flickr photos.

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