Hacks/tools for writing on the go

[waitingforautumn]

Hi everyone! I really want 2023 to be the year I finish this novel - have a massive draft in a word doc on my laptop, backed up onto OneDrive. Only issue is my brain repels the work when I sit at a desk to write and reshuffle.

Even the work I've done so far (100,000 words) has been mostly assembled from the notes/Google keep app on my phone, hurriedly typed up when the idea strikes, and then pasted into word when I do find the attention span to sit down for any prolonged length of time.

I really want to harness those stolen moments when I'm walking/commuting/laying in front of the TV when actual ideas come in hot - only issue is I'm lacking an app where I can do this without feeling extremely messy about the process! My brain is like a bunch of sticky notes and so the writing process feels far from mindful or enjoyable. Have read about Scrivener but deterred by the reliance on Dropbox and syncing issues (?) - has anyone had experience with this, or any other apps/cheats I might not know about.

MS word really isn't phone friendly - on the PC I've set up headings to navigate easily through the doc but I need something a bit more iPhone compatible to work from day to day so I can fiddle around and write on a nice interface.

OneNote is the best solution I've come up with so far but even then it's not great on my iPhone given it's a Microsoft app.

Or should I just find the time and discipline to sit down at a desk 🤦‍♀️

Voice recording?

I was wondering about the Kindle Scribe for this purpose - I'd be interested to hear if anyone has tried it.

I know it’s not on the phone. But I have a remarkable that’s always close at hand. I can joy anything down on there when it comes to mind. I also pay the monthly subscription so can convert my handwritten documents to text.

Plottr is good.

I've also used PowerPoint - treating each slide as a scene card and shuffling them around in slide sorter view, also using the Notes sections for more text.

Dabble is great, it’s a web based app so you can use the talking keyboard thing to dictate into your phone as you go or you can just type. Small monthly subscription for the basic plan. I often write it all out on paper with a pen then read it out loud into Dabble and catch lots of mistakes, editing for flow as I go.

Google docs. You can live edit across multiple devices (including your phone) whenever you feel like it and it saves in the cloud to access on any device

Have tried a lot of the above but I have to say Scrivener is the best. Plotr and Dabble bill themselves as being simpler but it's basically because they have very few features (plus they are a bit clunky as they're online). I emailed Scrivener support for a hand hold when setting up sync but it hasn't let me down in the last 2 years.

I have issues trusting online services - I've had OneDrive and Google docs mess up on me before - and I'd much rather know where I was saving my manuscript.

I use the voice recording app on my Android phone. If I get an idea or want to keep a snippet of dialogue overheard on the Tube I click it and I pretend I'm a Hollywood producer talking to the script editor and just speak the idea out loud - it's so FAST and immediarete to do it that way and you can speak a thousand words far more quickly than you could ever write them even in a précised way and you can "blurb" to yourself about stuff that inspired or surrounds the idea.

Later when I get home I can replay it as many times as I want and I get all the atmosphere of where I was and how it occured to me. Then I turn it into whatever it deserves to be. I reject and delete about 95% of them but at least I never lose or miss any.

The central theme and broad strokes for my latest came that way. I was at a bus stop in Chelsea and I saw a woman, maybe late thirties, dressed in a very 1950s frock with hair to match and the whole story flooded into my head in one go - so I "called" Sly (the imagined script editor) by firing up the voice record app and told him the whole thing. I'm now three chapters in.