All this research into writing software has been very good for me to analyze how I write books. All of the ten books of written, including the scripts for the Buffy comics, I have written in Microsoft Word. Because a good many of these books were written with the mighty Tom Fassbender, the majority of "development work" was done verbally and in e-mail.

Tip #1: Do not underestimate the value of e-mail as a tool for story development.

What do I mean? When I write with Tom, it's remarkably easy to type up a "status e-mail," i.e., here's what I worked on last night, here's what I'm thinking, here are my problems that I can't quite figure out, and maybe end with a series of questions that I would leave HIM to figure out.

Believe it or not, you can e-mail yourself. And if you can get over the hang-up of writing to yourself (it's better than talking to yourself, but hey, I do that too), then this can be incredibly effective. I find that writing an e-mail is less intimidating that staring at a blank page with no idea how to begin.

When I'm writing solo, I almost always start simple, with a single Word file. This first starter file becomes my "notes" file. It's a total mess. It's actually more like a zygote file, in that it spawns all of my other files.

This file is essential my first e-mail to myself. I just start talking about the story (I ask myself lots of questions and occasionally call myself names). This could include a set-up, attempted themes, main character descriptions, even thoughts on what I DON'T want the story to be. An example of this overblown self-direction, from the novel I'm working on now:

Explore the role of coincidence and the impulse of the writer's mind to CREATE CONNECTIONS where none exist.

Is there regret in a character like this? How can someone like this look back on his life and be happy. Here's someone who is so lonely that he wants to constantly surround himself with crowds only to do things to push them away.

The interesting back-story here is his family. What is it about how this guy grew up that would make him so lonely? First of two children?

*

I separate thoughts into separate sections with an asterisk, like I'm doing now.

At some point, this file becomes unwieldy. My very first file, from the current novel, grew to six pages before I thought it was time to split it up. It becomes four documents: characters, outline, text, and notes. The notes file is essentially whatever's left that doesn't fit into the other three.

I spent some time last night trying to cram my existing work on this new novel into both CopyWrite and Jer's Novel Writer. I like Jer's character database, which may be more useful if you have 75 characters (as Jer suggests he does) than if you're just trying to keep track of the 10 or 15 main characters, let alone a core group of, say, five. But Jer's software is totally geared toward writing the body text of a novel, with some ancillary support features (like margin notes, which I can imagine would completely rule). It's no wonder that Jer wrote one of those blog-inspired novels-in-a-month-things for national write a novel month. I, myself, am not the kind of writer to sit down and just start cranking out (blogging out?) the main text of a novel, but if that's for you, Jer's with get you going with minimal distraction.

I liked CopyWrite's attempt to manage multiple document -- after all, this is how I write using Word. I was a bit excited at first, but I'm not totally in love with the interface. It's not easy to change the font size or the magnification on the page (I like my type tiny so I can see in a glance a wide range of what I've just written).

All this leads me to the following conclusions: 1. I'm going to stick to Word for my creative writing, thank you. And 2. My new most-requested upgrade feature to Word, one that I believe will happen sooner rather than later, is tabbed document windows. Even on my glorious 17" screen I can barely fit three word files side-by-side (I'll usually do something like make my outline very thin, say an inch wide). If I could have a bunch of files open, but all neatly arranged in clean tabs, now we're talking.

I would LOVE to hear from other writers on their techniques. I may be an old dog, but I'm always up for new tricks.