Ye olde word processor of ancient lore. The venerable Word. The wily Docs. The inscrutable Pages. All these brave warriors of the written word now long vanquished by sleeker, smarter and better contenders.
I, too, am guilty of forsaking my beloved Pages for the brute strength of Scrivener and the sleek curves of Ulysses and that slinky temptress known as iAWriter.
But can you blame me? I am but a man who writes words. Simple words. And simple words need no margin settings or fancy title pages. There are no reasons for sharing my words with the clouds, as if a hundred other zealous writers will add their thoughts to my doc, live and in real time.
My words need only a space to exist, and the occasional markdown so I need not lift my hands from the keyboard to navigate to a bulky options menu. Automatic saving and backup to iCloud is also helpful.
Right now, I am obsessed with Ulysses. It has the markdown features I sought but could not find. When I need to italicize something, I need only add _before and after_ the word I wish to turn sexy. To bold a text, I add *stars*. To create a title, I use the rugged and dependable #hashtag or ##two, like a real man.
No longer need I break my writing rythm and search along the top ribbon of a cluttered menu to find the bold or italicize or “Subheading” buttons. No longer do my words leap inexplicably around the page because the title case was too large and my entire document feels it must shuffle to another dimension in order to accommodate the usurper. From now on, my words live as they were meant to be when I first tapped them out on my trusty keyboard.
But what, then, good sir, is to become of saving, you may ask? Are you to tell me that you simply close your laptop and trust these mighty new programs to save your work? Fah!
But yes, this is indeed what I propose, gentle reader. No longer do I need to click “save as” and then dig through folders and subfolders to where I want to save my work (only to forget and never see it again), and then forget to hit save every few minutes so that last few words I type are not saved.
Nay, good sir, with Ulysses I need not concern myself with the intricacies of saving. The lovely maiden does it herself. I care not how. She just does it. When I close my MacBook, she goes away, and when I open the program, there she is with her beautiful smile and the last words I typed, waiting for her knight to type more.
The same is true of the mighty Scrivener, for whom much lore has been written by greater wordsmiths than I. Scrivener, the lord of planners, the slayer of pantsers, the trebuchet of novelists.
Scrivener is by far the mightiest of all writing tools, and is fit for a true king of words. It comes armored with dozens of ways to organize ones novel, from the trusty corkboard to the gallant character and world building templates. With the cork board, you can write each scene and chapter in its own page, and then shuffle them around as you wish. You can plan each stage of your novel, Dan Brown-style.
I, too, dabbled in Scrivener, but alas, it lacks markdown syntax and thus I was wooed by Ulysses. Nevertheless, I have found nothing as powerful as the mighty Scrivener.
But then that sultry harlot iAWriter appeared from nowhere. I admit that even I, a loyal and devoted knight of Ulysses, was tempted by iAWriter’s gentle minimalism and the kiss of her plush suite of writing features such as markdown, automatic cloud save and the like. She is even cross platform, because she is web-based, and I could enjoy her pleasures on both PC and Mac.
But alas, she comes with a stiff price that I, a poor wordsmith, was unable to afford (especially when one considers my student pricing with Ulysses). iAWriter is also a stranger in this world, and I know not from whence she came or for how long she will stay around. What if she were to leave tomorrow, carrying away my heart and my vampire-pirate novella with her?
Nay, I will stay with Ulysses, who is the perfect line between the brute force of Scrivener and the scarlet seduction of iAWriter.
All of them are heirs to the throne of the kingdom once ruled by word processors. In truth, word processors were the true usurpers. The typewriter provided all a writer needed and was the king of the written word for centuries. Like Ulysses, one didn’t need ribbons full of options to arrange one’s words. Like Scrivener, one could arrange papers in piles and assign notes to each one. Like iAWriter, one could write anywhere.
But the Word Processors marched in and overthrew the lineage of typewriters and dominated the land for a mere two or three decades. Now, a new breed of ruler is here: the writing program. These new rulers hark back to the legends of the typewriters.
I for one, am glad, for the Word Processors had become so ridiculous and so out of touch with the common writer that it was time for heads to roll.
Unless, of course, one needs to make a resume. In that case, All Hail Word!