I’m finding myself with a lot of extra spare time these days. So I figured I’d make use of my extra time with a little creative writing.
For the record I’m not interested in “self publishing” or even sharing my stories with my friends or family.* I’m just doing this for my own enjoyment.
Which leads me to the question of what format should I use to do my creative writing on?
Thanks.
Is it common people do creative writing while never intending to share their writings? This makes me feel like an oddball for some reason.
I use Microsoft Word. I don’t love it, but it works fine for what I do.
As for writing and not intending to share: IMO it’s up to you. I never shared anything I wrote when I was younger, until I felt I was ready to put myself out there for possible criticism. If you just want to write things you enjoy for your own benefit, go for it. Nothing wrong with that at all. If you decide later on that you do want to share them (or they inspire you to write something later that you do) then great. If not, that’s fine too.
I use Word Perfect…but, really, any medium is fine. Whatever you are comfy with, and, for a lot of people, that still means a nice pen and lined paper.
(The best investment of time I ever made in my whole life was learning to type!)
As for sharing with others, while this is a big part of the emotional draw of writing for a lot of people, it isn’t necessary. I’d keep writing even if I knew that my stuff would never be published, but I do share it with friends. If you can find a small, friendly writing group, where people share chapters around and encourage each other, it can be a very, very wonderful thing. Just finding one other bloke who is writing at about the same speed you are, and exchanging chapters, can be really inspiring. Obviously, the emphasis here is on friendly!
My old boss once told me that the key to management was to figure out what form of reward people wanted. Some want compliments. Some want challenges. Some want time off. Some simply want money! If you can key in on what they want, and give them the proper amount to encourage productivity, you’ll be a good boss.
The same is true for writing. Some write for others, and depend on the feedback. Some write only for themselves, and have no need to show it to anyone. Some (we have no few here on the SDMB!) write to arouse specific emotions in others. (Trolling is only a subset.) And, to be sure, some write only for the money.
I usually write in either Open Office or Word, but I’ve written using far more primitive tools. Hell, I’m old enough to have written using a typewriter. Double space and use decent margins so it will be easy for you to read. Do you plan on editing your stuff, or just writing it?
Sharing your writing or not, if you want your writing to get better find a critique group. At the least it will let some other eyes see your foibles, and some of those eyes might even be skilled.
Use any format that will accept text and let you retrieve it.
I think the more important part is learning how to build a story. Character creation, story arcs, all that stuff. I discovered how important this was when I was writing a story, and I wrote myself into a corner: I simply could not figure out how to continue the story. So I set it aside and started to look at books about writing.
Whatever word processor you use (Microsoft Word and Open Office are close enough to a dead heat that I couldn’t recommend one over the other), double space with first line indents. If you DO show your work to others, this makes it much easier to read and allows room for comments. Single spacing is bad.
If you are not interested in publishing nor sharing anything you’ve written, then format doesn’t matter. Choose whatever you are comfortable with.
When you say “format,” what I (an editor) think you mean is how the text looks on a page. I think you’re talking about margins, indented paragraphs vs. one line space in between, single spaced or double spaced lines, punctuation, etc. What most everyone else in this thread thinks you mean is “which application or software should I use”?
Which brings us to clarity in writing. What do you mean by “format”? Are you using the word incorrectly or have all the respondents in this thread misunderstood your question?
We don’t know and because you don’t plan to publish or share in any way, then clarity and readability are moot points. Do what you like.
No, I articulated it poorly. Thankfully, most of the people in this thread knew what I meant anyway.
I’m not familiar with softwares for this type of thing. I mean heck, I just pulled up MS word on my computer for the first time since I’ve owned it. I just wasn’t sure if one was preferred over the other.
Also, my grammar sucks, so I was hoping maybe there was something out there that could help me out with that. (Beyond spell check of course.)
Cool. Your grammar was fine, it was a usage issue that was confusing me. Word has a halfway decent grammar checker in addition to the spelling checker.
Because “spacing and paragraphs” is what “format” means to me. I suppose “platform” might be a better choice of words for the OP (at least I wouldn’t confuse platform with “how to format my document”); however, “platform” generally denotes which operating system to use (PC, Mac, Unix, other).
For your own use, any format is fine. If you want to do it in crayon on brown wrapping paper, go ahead. If you want to submit it, then read up on how to format a manuscript.
All word processing programs are good. I’d give a slight edge to Google Apps, since you can work on things from anywhere, but anything else is just fine.
I don’t really agree with this. One of the main disadvantages of using a word processor over pen and paper (outweighed by many advantages) is that you can’t see so much of what you have written on the page at one time, and you get lost scrolling around and trying to keep track of what you have already said, and whereabouts it is. Double spacing makes this problem much worse.
I say compose in single spacing, then if you want to print it out and get others to critique it, or revise it on paper yourself (which is often a good idea), you can easily convert to double spacing before you print. I would even suggest that, when composing, if your eyesight and your monitor is up to it, it is good to be zoomed out so you can see the whole page, or as much text as possible, single spaced, on your screen. (My eyesight isn’t up to this though. I could read it with effort, but it would be a distracting strain.) It really helps not to have to be scrolling.
In my experience, grammar checkers are wrong far more often than they are right. Especially, they flag a lot of perfectly cromulent constructions as errors, and often, even when they find real errors, their suggestions for changes are not good.
Spelling checkers need to be used with care too. They are good at finding errors, but often the first spelling they suggest will not actually be the word you intended (which may or may not be further down the list). Using a real but inappropriate word usually makes you look far more stupid than a mere misspelling of the correct word would.
I know, we aren’t disagreeing with what the word means but you were questioning what the OP meant when using the word. I was just trying to point out that to understand what the OP was asking, to do that you don’t just look at the one word, get hung up on whether it’s used correctly. Rather, you read the whole thing, look at the overall content of their words - that is if you’re truly trying to understand what they’re saying.
