Andrew's View of the Week

I’ve not been writing many posts lately.  I’ve been spending most of my writing time into the ekphrastic poetry class I took this spring.

But here I am without a poetry assignment this week and no major irrigation issues in the yard. Well, there is a minor irrigation issue as one of the zone valves was leaking, but a few dollars in parts, a little swearing, a scraped knuckle and that problem is fixed.

One of the things I noticed while doing my poetry class is how much time I spent actually messing around with the computer’s writing tools and getting completely lost. I’d write a draft poem and forget where I saved it or I’d do some free-writing for a poem idea and save it in the wrong folder.  The other thing I’d do is heavily revise a poem then decide I liked the original better, but I hadn’t saved a copy of the original so …

Well you get the idea.

I do love my computer for writing, even with its and my faults.  In fact, I likely couldn’t write if it wasn’t for computers and word-processing software.  My handwriting is so bad that even I can’t read it and spelling is a mystery to me.  If it wasn’t for spell check, I’d never get a sentence out on to the screen.  I’ve talked about this before here on the blog so won’t rehash all that.  Let’s just say that the computer gives me the tools to get words from my brain to my readers.

A few weeks ago I read Matthew Zapruder’s book, Story of a Poem, where he discussed the process of writing a large poem along with a bunch of other things.  It’s a good book and I recommend it.  One of things he mentioned was using a typewriter, yup an old fashion typewriter for writing his poetry drafts.  There’s a few advantages here.  Most poetry drafts are basically free writing and the lack of distractions is great for this kind of writing.  It is prone to type-os, but sometimes that misspelling or bad punctuation mark is just that thing to send your mind and the poem to a different place.  Also, you can’t just correct on the fly and if you want to revise the poem, you have to put in a new sheet of paper and start typing all over again.

Yes, kind of a pain, but you now have a copy of each version of the poem so if you wanted to go back to a better version or get back a line you really liked – well it’s there.  With most word processors this isn’t the default behavior and you’d have to make an extra effort to save each version of the poem.  Most of the time, I don’t make that effort and from time to time I lose really great lines and even whole drafts that I wish I still had.

I’m not ready to go out and buy a typewriter just yet.

I did discuss this book with a local writer who does all his drafts on a typewriter.  He suggested I look at the writing program Scrivener.  Now, I follow bloggers who use this software to write novels and other big projects, but I’ve never used it because I thought it wouldn’t be useful for small things like a poem.  My friend told me that Scrivener had a snapshot feature that would do what I wanted – easily make a copy of a version of something that I could recover or refer to.

So, I downloaded the trial version and took it for a test spin.

I like it.

I did my last poem of the class using Scrivener and found the writing process was easier than the four or five MS word docs or Apple pages windows I’d normally have open.  The snapshot feature worked well and helped me with revisions.  Other features I liked was being able to import research files and having split windows where I could quickly and easily view reference material while revising the poem.  Scrivener does a lot to help simplify writing workflow and keeping things organized.  It’s also simple to use.  One of the reasons I don’t like using new tools is the effort and time needed to learn how to use it.  Scrivener was fast to get to a basic level.  You can get lost in the weeds of its more advanced features, but the basics are a snap.

What sold me on using this more is a longer poetry collection I’m working on and the problems I have keeping track where I am and what still needs to be done.  Just as a test I imported my current work in progress and within an hour or so was able to setup labels, tags, subdivisions and other things that now give me a quick snapshot of what work is complete and what remains.

So cool.

Now I feel like I’ve got the project back under control and can spend more time writing and less time trying to remember where I was.

Sometimes you just need a new tool to get a job done.  It’s why I have four different kinds of hammers in my wood shop – sometimes you just need a bigger hammer to get the job done.