I know we like our writing apps. They are so good now, aren’t they? Most people use Microsoft Word (which I kind of hate, mainly because it’s so “business-y” and doesn’t make me feel very creative at all). Then there’s Pages, which comes for free on your MacBook, and your iPad. It’s actually pretty good, and lets you do fancy designs quite easily, so it’s good for flyers and that kind of thing.
My favourite one is Scrivener, which costs money, but really works for me, because of the way it helps you work with scenes, rather than just a long chunk of text. If you get a chance, try it out by going to Literature and Latte.
But my current favourite app on my Mac is Winston. This is what it looks like:
It looks like a typewriter, it sounds like a typewriter, and it works a lot like a typewriter. What I mean by that last one is that if you need to change something you’ve typed, the words around the bit you’ve changed don’t shuffle around and make room.
So why is this good? Isn’t this a bad feature?
It can be, but here’s why I like it: it makes you write more freely, because even if you want to go back and change some of what you’ve already written, you can’t, which means you just keep going, and worry about the mistakes later.
“But wait,” I hear you saying. “How do you fix it? Because teachers are always telling us that we need to do more than one draft, and if you can’t go back––”
I’m going to stop you right there. You can do a second draft, but it’s going to be a proper draft. You know, the kind of draft that you type out a second time, once you’ve printed out the document and done a real edit, with pen on paper. Trust me, it’s the best way to do it. Just changing words on a screen isn’t the best way to improve your piece of writing. Of course, you don’t need a free typewriting app to do this – you could just print out your Word document, do an edit and retype. But are you really going to do that unless you have to?
There’s one more thing about Winston. You can change the background. I mean, I’d love to have a beach cottage to write in. But I’d also like an apartment in New York, so check this out…
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