necessarian tagged me to do this on Tumblr, but I'm doing this here, naturally.

This is a post to share my writing space, i.e. my physical/digital toolbox and the more spacial and physical aspects of my writing. My biggest sin is that I'm inconsistent, so I'll run through a number of my slightly more common methods of writing.

Longhand

I actually rarely write actual stories longhand these days - sometimes I do it if I feel my brain isn't working fast enough, and/or that I need to take some time to think and slowly pan out how a story begins before jumping onto my computer and writing the rest of it much faster. Generally I prefer writing in lined notebooks, especially if they're college ruled (but I also really like wide-ruled, too; it's not a dilemma for me.)

I do, however, outline longhand extremely frequently. I find it easier because it's concrete and gives me more space to think, whereas planning digitally is too abstract and makes me feel like the story isn't in my grasp. I have examples of my longhand outlines in this post, and also here; but sometimes I just write my notes for fics, even if they aren't necessarily outlines, as follows:

This was for a fic where a character kissed multiple people, so what I did for the "outline" of it was just list the characters he was going to kiss, and then go from there. This isn't a real outline but it was still a guideline for me for the story, and to figure out the sequence and pacing of where to go from whom. Some of them I didn't put in - the ones whose names I circled were the ones actually in the story, while the others were just my brainstorming.

I also really like crossing things out in ~lists and ~outlines and whatever. As you can tell in this! I also do this on my outlines - I'm sharing another one here that has many more notes that I'll definitely make a separate post for at a later date, but here's just a little bit of the outline where I crossed things out.

More on this outline: so it was for a very long fic, in which I write out nearly every scene that happens in it, in my outlines. But the thing with this, as is the natural progression of time, is that I need to figure out the real life time distance in each scene, i.e. dates and seasons. I've always found that using specific dates not only provides timing verisimilitude, but can also be useful for inserting plot events such as holidays and birthdays.

For my especially longer fics, like this one - what I do almost always is straight up draw out the calendar. That way I know how much time passes between each scene, how or where I can do timeskips/gloss over, and make appropriate adjustments as they pertain to calendar events and statements about how much time has passed, since people tend to be pretty conscious of that.

(Writing on whiteboards is not that common for me, though.)

So - notebooks (and whiteboards when provided) are my usual tool when it comes to outlining. I prefer pen because it's more reliable to read over a long period of time, but pencil is neater when I make mistakes. Mechanical pencils, that is - you'll rarely catch me with a lead pencil if I can help it.

Digital - Mediums

I write in a lot of different mediums; using one for too long makes it feel old and stale for me, so I need to change where I write frequently. As of late, I've been writing in:

Notepad (both on computer and phone)
Textedit
Dreamwidth
Microsoft Word
Google Docs

But I also sometimes write in (and/or have written in):

Tumblr
750words
Facebook Messenger (to another person)
Skype (to another person)
Dreamwidth/LJ comments (when provided)
WordPress

There's probably more, so this is a non-exhaustive list, but it's what's at the top of my head.

I'm only going to give examples/screenshots from my first list. For Notepad, it's pretty much the same on both my phone and computer, so here's the computer screenshot:

(I haven't been writing much on my phone lately, anyway.)

You can see snippets of actual fic in the left hand column! I've been using Notepad for a lot of things lately, including actually writing. I also have some outlines/notes here - short things, or things that aren't detailed scenes of stories, just notes such as:

With Google Docs, I'm even more inconsistent than I am generally. I use it pretty regularly, but not all the time, so it has some copies of my fics, but nowhere close to all, which is important to me since I tend to like having everything in one place. (But more on that later.) I've been using it since it became popular, so - 2009?

But some of my fics are on Google Docs because I wrote them on a school computer and needed to upload them so I could access them from my personal computer (and delete them from the school computer); or I compiled parts of fics from elsewhere, or for formatting purposes, or for betaing purposes. Google Docs is useful like that, even though I don't use it as avidly as

necessarian does.

I also use TextEdit on my computer a lot! It's a refresher from the more ~formal feeling mediums (like Gdocs, MS Word, etc.) - just plain text for me to write without any of the garnish on the side.

Yeah, I rarely title or save them. Such is the magic of TextEdit - it saves pretty much automatically, especially if I close the program. I don't need to title the files if I need to take a break or something, which is good because I usually title at the end and it's usually a pretty stressful process for me.

Another medium I use occasionally (but not frequently) is 750words.com. I used it a lot more in 2011 for actual daily writing, but nowadays I use it if I need a change of pace. It's also pretty useful to track metadata, like such:

And here's what the actual frontend of the document looks like:

And yes, I also write in the accursed Microsoft Word. But we'll get to that later...

Digital - Formatting

One of the most important things to me when it comes to writing is formatting and consistency, as well as saving multiple copies of my stories. It's not writing per se, but it's a process I go through almost at the end of every story I write, in a sort of therapeutic archiving type thing.

The first thing I need to say is that I love WordPress's text editor. It reads rich text so well (Tumblr's does too, but considering the functionality and the slowness of the website it's definitely not ideal) and converts it to raw text either the way I want it, or easy enough where I can Find + Replace pieces of code that I don't want.

I have a page saved on (one of) my (many) WordPress platforms dedicated just to fic - either for formatting or just writing.

(Visual is rich text; text is raw text.)

So what do I use the WordPress text editor for, aside from just writing? Well, generally when I write, I like to save two copies - one on my computer, in .docx format (i.e. Microsoft Word); and the other on my

aroceu journal, where all my fic is.

However, they're obviously in two different formats - rich text and raw text (since I use the beta version of Dreamwidth.) So if I originally wrote in Textedit, Notepad, or 750words - so, any format where I'm writing in HTML format more or less - I need to convert it to rich text for my MS Word format. So that's where WordPress comes in.

On the flipside, if I write in a rich text editor, such as MS Word or Google Docs, I need to convert it to raw text for Dreamwidth purposes. Again, where WordPress comes in.

On saving my stories to my computer:

This is slightly more new, but I save all my creative writing in the Documents folder on my computer (the one that Macs come with), divided by year. The only exception to this is the current year, which I save straight up in the Documents folder. And by creative writing, I include creative nonfiction, and poetry. This is something I only started organizing last year (I used to divide it by fanfiction/original/etc.) but I think it's much more preferable for me.

Oh yeah, and here's my preferred MS Word format, though I'm much less picky about consistency than I used to be. Maybe because I have loads more stories?

11pt, Cambria, 1 inch margins, 1.15 line spacing, space after paragraph

And then on saving my fics to Dreamwidth -

The reason I started doing this in the first place was that I wanted to archive everything finished I'd written somewhere, even if it was bad. I guess saving things to my computer wasn't enough (and back when I was in high school, it was easy to keep it consistent if/since I'd write on school computers), and it has really shitty things from 2007, but it's inspiring to watch how I've grown.

Saving my fics also creates an easy copy + paste in either rich text or raw text format, if I wanted to save another copy. I've also been tagging consistently since I started using the journal, so it's nice for data, which I like to collect and just know, such as how many fics I've written for certain fandoms, or in certain years, or pairings, or genres.

(I used to have tags for whom certain fics might be dedicated/gifted to, and also AUs, but that made things more difficult and inconsistent for me, so I deleted them.)

Dreamwidth also serves as my rough draft place; where I get my fic beta'd a lot, if I can help it. In addition to this, it's where I first consciously establish a fic's summary, rating, and author's notes. Dreamwidth is almost always the first place I post a story when I finish something, even if I don't post it to AO3 or elsewhere.