Organise

Welcome to the January 2024 edition of I love words. This month’s edition has a New Year, sorting my writing out, practical vibe to it…

Find your flow

Each of us thinks differently, works in different circumstances, and have different projects we want to complete, so it stands to reason (to my mind, at least), that we’ll all have slightly different ways of working effectively. Because of this, I’m not going to tell you that my way to write is the best way to write. But I am going to share two tools that have helped me to get the best out of my writing. You may disagree with my suggestions. That’s OK, but please share your working practices in the comments as others may find them useful.

Scrivener

I am in danger of becoming a Scrivener evangelist. It’s brilliant. If you’re unfamiliar, Scrivener is a piece of word processing software, but differs from other programmes in how it lets you organise your work.

You can split a project up into different parts (sentence, paragraph, chapter - whatever size you want). You can work on each part separately, move them around, edit them, and compile them into one big finished document however you wish.

I used Scrivener when writing The Momentum Mindset and it helped me reach 50,000+ words without becoming overwhelmed by the size of the task. I could take Vicki’s (my co-author) notes, pop each idea or topic into Scrivener as a separate section, and work on them in whatever order I wanted. By freeing me from the idea of a linear work flow, such as you might find with a conventional ‘start-to-finish’ page-scrolling word processor, I could write according to inspiration and get the project finished.

It’s tricky to explain such a complex piece of software in few words, so head over to their website and give the trial a go to understand it more. Be warned, it can look a little heavy at first, but there’s loads of blogs and videos around to guide you through it.

I set up a little affiliate link thingy, if you want to check out Scrivener for yourself: LINK

Todoist

This is a new addition to my life. I freelance and work for different organisations. For some of them I have multiple projects on the go. This can make it difficult to keep track of everything. I love notebooks, and had kept a paper to-do list, but it was huge and intimidating and tricky to maintain.

I read about Todoist, in Robert Wringham’s column in issue 15 of the excellent New Escapologist. It’s an app that you can have on your phone and computer and it synchronises and does all the things that apps do nowadays. But unlike other to-do list apps I’ve come across, the interface for this one just feels right. It’s flexible, I can organise it how I want, I can nest lists within lists within lists and all of a sudden I no longer have to keep all these tasks fizzing around my head and can outsource them to Todoist. It’s freeing and my productivity has shot up significantly, which gives me more time to write.

I use the free version and that’s sufficient for my needs. You can find it here (no affiliate link this time): LINK

What works for you? What doesn’t?

I’m aware two recommendations for software may not constitute the most exciting writing advice ever, but I think it’s helpful for the tech to get out of the way. I love writing in a notebook, partly because I can jump all over the page, but it’s a pain to then type it out when I want to use it. Any tech that helps me write in the way I think is a good thing, and that’s why I wanted to share the above.

I’m always on the look out for new ideas though, so feel free to chip in with your suggestions.

Things I liked (and think you might, too)

‘‘It’s a golden age’: poetry flourishes in Ukraine – but at a terrible price’, by Luke Harding

The Guardian highlighting how the war in Ukraine has led to a creative outpouring of poetry - but with many of the poets being killed by Russian soldiers and artillery: LINK

‘Making of a Poem: Farid Matuk on “Crease”’

I have a mixed relationship with poetry. On the one hand, I love the idea of free, lyrical expression with the words and meter structured however I wish. On the other, I feel safer within the expected, rationalised conventions of prose or strict poetry forms such as haiku. As such, I find myself drawn to The Paris Review’s series in which poets explain how a piece came to be written and edited, complete with annotations. It’s also reassuring to read that others take a long time (years) to get their personal creative work to a state they can feel happy with.

Jesse’s Darling’s site visit - a road trip movie

The Turner Prize winner took a film-crew from Tate out for an adventure. I enjoyed this… LINK

A thousand words

Portsmouth, 2023, Kodak film