A couple weeks back I went to see journalist, blogger and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow give a talk on how he uses technology to write and publish, as part of the Readers and Writers Festival. Cory makes the most of technology in his writing process, and has some really cool programs.

(In Boing Boing style) Cory sez,
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, “correcting” your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on.

What he uses is .txt files, which have minimal distractions and are easy to read, use and share. But minimal distractions doesn’t necessarily mean minimal tech. When it comes to research, he tags each note in the .txt file, Twitter-style. He then uses a Perl script to identify those tags, put his notes into a database and create a tag-cloud, which he can then use to find the notes efficiently.

Cory also asked a programmer friend create a program that automatically saves his drafts every 15-miniutes, and inserts a note with the time-zone he’s in, the current weather as reported by Google and the headlines from his last few blog posts. With this data he can see where he is, what’s it like outside and what he was thinking about, and hopes to eventually use the data to find out when his optimal time to sit down and write is.

When it comes to research for a story or an article Cory said he relies heavily on his blog. By blogging about an idea, not only is it recorded, it comes complete with comments from his readers on the subject.

Of all the things Cory talked about, he had two little writing tips which I have been trying out to great success. The first is stopping on a downward slope. When you finish writing for the day, end in the middle of a sentence that you know how you want to finish. The next day you can get a rolling start by finishing that sentence without struggling to remember where you were going and then continue on with your work easily.

The other is the use of tk. Tk stands for to come, and is an old journalist trick. Instead of interrupting your writing to insert a fact or find a particular stat, don’t interrupt the flow, just insert tk and come back to it later. Thanks to the infrequency of the letters t and k besides each other in the English language, a quick ctrl-f can find all the tks you need to replace.

Photo by Flickr user gruntzooki, licensed under CC BY 2.0.