As I’ve said above, different styles = different ‘perfect’ tools. Scrivener, a month in now, still fits my style like the proverbial glove.

Given my writing style, I don’t know if I will try using Scrivener to write an entire book. I was using it to assemble all my notes and reference webpages in one place so that I can find them easily. It works well for that.

Of course, he also had a printout, and it was only a short story and (he said) he could have retyped it in less time than it took to go through all that electronic trouble. “But,” he concluded, “it would have been less digital that way.”

Bob — Open Office is a decent alternative for MS Office on every platform, I’d agree.

Tycho and Mitch — I’d agree that 30 years on, plain text is still likely to be readable where proprietary formats may not. Heck, all my old stuff was originally on floppy disks, and I don’t even have a reader for those any more…

One major advantage to it over almost all similar programs I’ve tried - rather than creating a single proprietary database file with all the work in it, each chapter/outline/picture/etc. that you add to a given project is just stored as files in a folder. It uses RTF for text files, which is almost universal, and allows all the formatting most people will ever need.

Other things that look promising: it can be run from a USB key, and you can set it to use an external editor if you find it’s internal rtf editor to be too weak.

I’ve thought it probably makes sense for me to switch my fiction writing to TextMate (the same tool I use for Internet writing). OTOH, Scrivener is — as I said earlier — a very comfortable tool, and it doesn’t give me any reason to want to switch, other than the fact that plain text is more portable across platforms, and more likely to be readable in thirty years.

I do almost all of my writing in TextMate, I use Gruber’s “markdown” for formating which I translate either into HTML for posting to the web, or LaTeX for producing manuscripts. It’s a glorious program, and it really lets me deal with the words in a very simple, straightforward, no frills sort of way. I generally have a number of different files for any given project, which I can merge together or split up as need be. Text files are great because it’s easy to grep through them, both alone and in groups, and working with text files has let me sort of feel like I’m in total control of my text. Which is a good feeling. There’s an editor that uses a textmate-like system for windows called the “e editor” but I just know it exists.

For organization and management, (and backup and version management) I store all of my text files in a subversion repository. It’s nice for security, and it means that I don’t much have to think about back up and redundant copies. I keep notes and some other files in this database. For references I’ve had some luck with DevonThink, Eagle Filer and the others, but they cost, and I find a good naming scheme and some sort of bibliographic software often works just as well.

The only thing that I’d add is a plug for the *occasional* usefulness of personal wiki software. I’m using VoodooPad from flying meat software for a hypertext project, and it’s quite, quite nice. But there are other free options, instiki springs instantly to mind. If you think productively in this kind of branching mode, this sort of thing might be helpful to people. Frankly I prefer writing in textmate, so I’m doing imports and exports this way….

But whatever works…

Besides, I do just-in-time research — when I need to know something, I look it up and use the information right away.

My favourite writing machine is RoughDraft, available for free at http://www.richardsalsbury.com/. It was created by a writer (read some of his short stories while you’re there), and though it’s a very basic text editor, it’s got many things writers of books, short stories, screenwriters need. It does without many things that probably aren’t necessary. It’ll even publsh your work as a light weight html file (without all the unnecessary coding).

My only lament is that he hasn’t written a version for my prefered OS, LINUX. Therefore, I’m stuck with Open Office — not a bad tool either.