A rundown on my writing tools
Scrivener, Zotero, Substack, Zencastr, Descript, Day One, Overcast, Listen Notes, Temi, Goodreads, Open Library, the OED, Quote Investigator...Logseq...and, a lot of keyboard shortcuts.
This post is for the writers and tech nerds out there who are curious about what tools I and others use, in particular more obscure ‘pro’ writer tools like Scrivener and Zotero. If you’re not into this sort of thing, hey, presto, sorry, it’s just what I felt like writing today—and, seriously, for some reason, I find it helpful to write this sort of stuff down for my own…reference, I guess.
UPDATE: please see my more recent tools posts about moving to Logseq, and then to Obsidian.
I love good tools, and as someone who started writing code before anything else, I really appreciate great software tools for writing. Creating software is of course also a form of writing and expression in language, and before I ever wrote a story or studied Latin, Spanish or Italian, I was writing in BASIC, Forth, Pascal, dBase, and SQL. Computer languages gave me an appreciation for how its possible to be creative with language—how we can create anything with words, and also how a tiny difference like a bit of punctuation here or two words reversed there can change everything. Since we’re on the subject, I’d also say that playing D&D also taught me the magic of creating worlds with words, and also of how language can be used to create spells—that is, a series of words that creates something simply by way of being written or spoken.
These days I spend a lot of my time using writing tools. In this post I’ll do a rundown of the tools that I use most often and talk briefly about some of their benefits and quirks. Probably because I started using computers and writing code at the age of eight or nine, and have been using computers all my life, I appreciate and enjoy the intricacies of (good) software, and I don’t mind getting into the guts of these things to make them work as I want them too. I recognize that many writers may not want to fiddle around with tools to this depth, but I’m one of those people that doesn’t mind investing time up front finding and setting up my tools, in the hope of avoiding manual labor farther down the road.
There are several overall characteristics that I look for when choosing software tools:
First of all, software should be fun to use. I mean, you should enjoy using your tools, and there are so many tools to choose from out there these days, if you don’t like using something, just ditch it and find something that you do like. One of the great things about software (that I learned from writing in Perl) is that “there's more than one way to do it,” and you can do all of what I do and more using a totally different set of tools. As you wish! For me, fun means fast, reliable, and has some features that really wow me whenever I use them—for example: the Search in Project feature in Scrivener, Overdub in Descript, and the way that Substack automatically generates media assets for new posts.
Second, I want to use software that’s alive—that is, part of an current project with active development ongoing. Just as with languages—and cities—if something isn’t used, it begins to die—and on the other hand, something that’s being used by a lot of people will usually have a vibrant community of developers and users constantly working to improve and further evolve the product. Every software project has a life cycle. Some last for many years, even decades, and some great projects die early, and inexplicably. I hope that Zotero makes it out of permanent beta!
Next—I love tools with lots of features. I know, simple can great, of course, but I’m sort of a nerd this way, and I love discovering things that a tool can do that I didn’t even know of. Some examples are using markers to make audio chapters in Descript, the Linguistic Focus tools in Scrivener, and the ability to add items by identifier (like an ISBN code or DOI) to Zotero.
It’s also important to me that software tools have an open architecture. This doesn’t necessarily mean open source, but I do want it to be to be easy to get my data in and out of the tool, and, ideally, to connect one tool to another. This is, for example, what lets me connect Scrivener to Zotero to produce properly-formatted reference citations and bibliographies, and to paste formatted content from Scrivener into Substack—more on those below.
Cloud storage is mandatory at this point. I write on different devices and there’s really no excuse for an app not to have automatic, immediate synchronization these days. This also pretty much eliminates the need to “back up” my data manually (although I do), because it’s all always in the cloud somewhere. When I get a new device, I just log in to the various accounts, and it’s all there.
Finally, you gotta have good keyboard shortcuts! I developed an early attachment to working the keyboard fast and furious, and I use all the shortcuts I can remember. Scrivener’s ⌥⌘0 keyboard shortcut for Format ▸ Style ▸ No Style, ⇧⌥⌘V for Paste and Match Style, and ⇧⌘A in Zotero for Copy Selected Item Citations to Clipboard are both ones that I use all the time.
Scrivener—for writing
The tool that I use most of all is Scrivener, which has so many features for writers that the user manual is an incredible 909 pages of PDF goodness, and I love that it begins with “Philosophy,” which states that Scrivener is “the opposite of a word processor,” “the digital equivalent of a writer’s studio, incorporating not only the typewriter, but also the notebook, the index cards and corkboard, the jotted plan, the scrapbook and the folder of research.” Part of this philosophy is that you don’t need fancy formatting to get your writing done, and so all of the formatting is left until you publish, or “Compile“ a finished version of your piece into PDF, ebook, or some sort of printed format. Especially, or perhaps only if you grew up writing in computer languages, this will make a lot of sense!
I do all of my long-form writing in Scrivener and I keep all of my work in one single project file. If you were working on more than one book at once you could use multiple project files, but I so appreciate the ability to search the entire project that I wouldn’t want to split things across projects unless I was really ready to put something to bed. Scrivener stores its data in human-readable text files that can be synced with iCloud or Dropbox, and it’s used by many many other writers, so I trust that my writing is stored safely. As for other writing tools, I know that of course some people use antiques like, ahem, Microsoft Word, but I haven’t used Word in more than a decade for anything at all, and I can’t see storing all my stuff in separate files all over the place anyhow.
I’ve been using Scrivener for a few years now, and honestly I don’t really having anything negative to say about it. I haven’t found any real bugs or shortcomings, and often I find that it just sort of magically does what I want—for example, if you copy and paste an entire piece from Scrivener into a web-based editor like Substack, it carries over all the formatting, links, and even the footnotes automatically, and perfectly formatted! Amazing! Scrivener does have an iOS app, and it all syncs up, but I do all of my serious writing at the desk with the Mac version. If I need to write in the field, I use Day One or Notes, or even just record a voice memo, and then move it over to Scrivener later.
Zotero—for references
If you’ve ever seen an academic paper or a book with footnotes or endnotes, you know what references and citations are. I’d say that any writer—at least any non-fiction writer, but really, any writer—needs a tool to keep track of all the books, articles, podcasts, and other material that they’ve digested as part of their research. Each book or other piece of material is a reference, and you refer to them in your written work with citations of those references. A reference manager is a database tool that stores each reference as an individual record with structured fields of data for the title, author, date, publisher, URL, etc—plus a formatting engine that understands and outputs citations in the various styles that people tend to use, like APA, Chicago, etc.
Of the various reference managers like EndNote, Bookends, Mendeley, and Zotero, I chose Zotero because it’s free, open source, and because it interoperates with Scrivener. I remember using Endnote back in grad school, and for some reason I couldn’t really stomach going back to it at this point.
I get my references into Zotero in a few different ways—first, if it’s a book or research paper, I can use Add Items By Identifier and paste in the ISBN code for book or DOI for a paper, and Zotero will look up the details and add it to the database without me having type anything manually. If I’m reading something on the web or Youtube, I use the built-in Zotero Connector plugin to ask Zotero to parse the reference data from the web site. If I’m listening to a podcast or need to create a reference to something else, then I have to create an entry in Zotero manually. You can also use AnyStyle to copy a bibliographic reference from somewhere (like a bibliography in a PDF or online book or research paper) and parse it into a format that Zotero understands, and then use Import From Clipboard. Once in a while I use the Zotero iOS app to enter a reference or notes in the field, but mostly I use the desktop app on my Mac. Speaking of iOS though, it turns out that you can now scan books into Zotero from iOS, neat.
One little nit that I have with Zotero is that somehow they omitted the date field from the podcast reference type, and so you have to add the missing meta-data as, for example, “Issued: 2019-08-20" in the Extra field. Someone is working on fixing this, but it’s open source, so who knows when it’ll get done.
Another little bummer with Zotero is that there’s no autocorrect in the notes field. I’m so used to having autocorrect correct my sloppy typing that this really bugs me… and so when I’m writing up my notes for a book that I’ve read, I first type the notes in Notes, or Scrivener, or Pages, or whatever, and then paste them into Zotero with the reference. Either way, with all my research notes in Zotero, I can easily search up that amazing quote that I made note of and use of it in the piece that I’m writing.
A pencil—for reading
Speaking of notes, and reading—I like real paper books. I find them easier to read, and the tactile sensation of touching paper and turning pages helps me to absorb what I’m reading. I take notes while I’m reading—and for that, I use…a pencil. I like the fancy, medium-soft Blackwing 602’s, and I have sharpeners scattered all around so I always have a nice point. When I come across something in a book that I want to make a note of, I underline the passage and then write a little tickler in the upper corner of the page, sometimes just a symbol or a single word. That way, when I’m done with the book I can go back through the entire thing quickly, like a flipbook, and find all of my written notes and transcribe them into Zotero. Yes, I really do this.
Scrivener + Zotero for citations
Now that you have all of your references in your reference manager—in my case, Zotero, the first step in creating a citation in your writing is to highlight a section of text in Scrivener and do Insert → Footnote. The actual citation of the reference goes in contents of the footnote itself. If you hadn’t yet discovered the value of using a reference manager, you’d just type your citation in there by hand, carefully formatting it to match the citation style that you want, and hoping that you never need to go back and update anything.
On the other hand, since you’re using a reference manager, it keeps track of all the details of the references, and you copy over citations into Scrivener as you write. There are two ways to do this. If you only use one citation style and you’re happy to stick with that forever, you can set up Zotero with your preferred citation format—for example, Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition—and then when you drag and drop or copy a reference from Zotero and paste it into Scrivener, it will insert the citation in that style. Let’s call these static citations, because once they’re created, they’re plain text, and if you want to update the citation in any way, you’d have to copy-and-paste it over from Zotero again.
This is a step up from creating citations by hand, but what if you want dynamic citations? This is really what you’re going for—citations that can be updated if something about the reference changes, or that you can change on the fly if you don’t know which citation format you’re going to want to publish with, or if you might want to publish different versions of your work with different citation formats.
It’s fairly easy to do dynamic citations if you’re writing directly in Word, but I’m not—I’m writing in Scrivener. You can get dynamic citations in Scrivener, but it requires some fairly technical setup, which I learned about from this lengthy video about Integrating Zotero and Scrivener. Once you’ve completed the installation of the various pieces required, you set Zotero up to use the Scannable Cite citation format, so that when you insert a citation from Zotero into your Scrivener footnote, you get a short, encoded placeholder which serves as a pointer back to the full reference in Zotero.
Zotero “scannable cite” citations appearing in Scrivener footnotes along the right side ⬆️
When you’re ready to publish your piece, you compile it from Scrivener in ODF (open document format) and then run ODF Scan in Zotero, which scans the finished work for those encoded placeholders and expands them into full citations. You can then open the finished ODF document in LibreOffice (an open-source substitute for Word), make any final tweaks, and then save as PDF or even (heavens!) print out your document.
All of this sounds complicated, and it is, but unless you simply don’t have references (maybe you’re writing fiction, lucky you!) or you’re doing all of your citations by hand (which means you’re insane), you’re going to have to learn to use a reference manager one way or another, and once you get used to it, it’s pretty cool to see your full citations and bibliography appear magically from all those references that you made as you were writing. If you’re a writer who uses Scrivener and Zotero and want the full rundown on how to do exactly what I’m doing, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help, because if I go on any further about it here, I’ll undoubtedly lose the single remaining reader that’s made it this far!
Substack—for publishing
Although I’ve had blogs at various times in the past, and also experimented with Medium, these days I’m loving what Substack is doing, and it feels like the right platform for me as a writer. I think the thing that brought me to Substack first of all is how deeply integrated subscriptions are into the whole experience. Basically I want anyone and everyone who’s reading to become at least a free subscriber, and Substack does this better than any other tool that I’ve come across. I used to use Wordpress a lot for web sites and publishing, and it’s incomprehensible to me how subscriptions are still not more deeply integrated after 20+ years.
Zencastr—for podcast recording
I’ve started using Zencastr for recording remote podcasts because, unlike Zoom, it records separate tracks for each speaker, something that’s really critical down the line if you need to remove one person’s laughing or coughing while another person is speaking.
Descript—for audio editing
I used to use good old GarageBand for audio editing but I’ve recently switched to Descript, and very new-school tool that uses AI to transcribe your spoken-word audio automatically and present it in a word-processor-like interface with the text linked to the audio. This means that you can edit audio just by editing the text! You can cut extraneous words, trim gaps, copy and paste bits of speech, and, most amazing of all, once Descript learns your voice, you can simply type new text in and it’ll use what they call Overdub to generate natural-sounding speech for the text you just typed in. What?!? Yes, we really are in the twenty-first century. Descript is using what’s often called deep-fake tech to synthesize your voice, and it really works! It this a good idea? Well, you can decide that for yourself, but it’s out there, and it’s useful to me. You can see and hear this technology in action in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, where the producers used it to have Tony posthumously read out some letters and notes he’d written before he died.
An Important Update — moving to Logseq
Since I wrote this piece, I discovered Logseq and that has been a big upgrade. I no longer use Day One, iThoughts, Notes or Todo, and I am in the process of moving my research notes from Zotero to Logseq as well. Here’s a more recent post detailing my move to logseq.
Feel free to continue reading here, of course, if you want the back story.
Day One—for journaling
I use Day One for daily journaling. I think I started using it because of how seamless and instantaneous it syncs up between iOS and desktop versions, and also just because the interface is well-oriented towards diary or journal writing because everything is organized by date. I could of course use Notes, or Scrivener, or whatever else, but I’ve been using Day One for so long now, and I love being able to go back and find my journal entry for a particular day, and start from there.
Overcast’s calendar view with thumbnails of all the pretty photos in my diary entries.
Overcast and Listen Notes—for podcasts
I use Overcast on iPhone to listen to podcasts because I like the interface and I like supporting independent software authors like Marco Arment. One thing that Overcast doesn’t do and that I still wish I could find in some podcast tool is an exportable or publishable list of episodes that I’ve listened to, but, whatever. For researching podcasts, Listen Notes is an amazing search engine and database that you can’t really live without if you love podcasts. The only problem is that I’m not on the road enough to have time to listen to all of them!
Other writing tools
I use the built-in Apple Notes and Voice Memo apps for notes, audio notes and ambient recordings. I love how these all sync up between devices, and how I can record something in a voice memo and transcribe it later either by hand or with something like Temi.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m like the data, data! I use Goodreads to keep track of all the books I read and lists of books on certain subjects like love and masculinity, including my all-time favorite books.
I only just recently came across Open Library (a project of the Internet Archive, which also runs the Wayback Machine) and wow, what a great resource! You can borrow books online, for free!
Did you know that you can often access the full Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online through your local library? I get mine though the San Francisco Public Library and it’s awesome! Wiktionary and the Online Etymology Dictionary are pretty great too.
A lot of quotations are misattributed, and I like to dig around using tools like Quote Investigator, WikiQuote, and LibQuotes to be sure I’m not making the “coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” mistake.
My usage of mind-mapping tools varies, but depending on what I’m working on I can find this paradigm really useful sometimes, and when I do, I use iThoughtsX.
If you’re ever wondering how many “pages” your piece is, well, it varies by size of the font and the size of the paper, doesn’t it, but in general, on average, “500 words is 1 page single spaced or 2 pages double spaced,” and you can see your exact word, character, sentence, paragraph, and page count using something like WordCounter.
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And now — some questions for YOU!
How much time do you spend geeking out on your “tools” vs actually using them?
Do you use any of the writing tools mentioned in this piece? What other or different tools do you use for writing? How do you use them together?
My favorite tool of all time would be… kitchen tongs. What’s yours?
Do you have a story about when you first heard the band TOOL? (I do)
What else rhymes with tool, fool, drool, cool, school, and pool?