Recently I decided to start writing a science fiction novel. I reserved a desk in my room for this purpose, I also picked up an old Thinkpad X200 on which I installed Lubuntu 24.04 and plugged in a gaming keyboard for night writing. I chose to install a minimum of applications in order to stay focused.
My main writing App for the moment is Joplin
And you?
Are you writing a book or have you already written one?
What type of tool do you use to write?
Do you have some advice to share?
I’m still in the world and character building phase. Sketching landscapes, rooms and such, writing little short stories to form the characters (my idea is that they have a “memory”, don’t know if it works in the end).
As for now I’m completely analog, I bought a nice notebook and do everything in it. But when time comes I think I will go with Obsidian as I already use it for my other notes/projects. I think it will be very powerful with the graph-view regarding relationships etc.
Obsidian is not FOSS though, and there are alternatives. I just hadn’t the time to look at them.
Edit: Obsidian can be used for free when you do not use their sync features. I use it that way and just have it in a Git-Repo for accessing it on different devices. Obsidian notes are in Markdown so you also do not have some kind of vendor lock, it’s just about the links between the notes.
I’ll take a look!
How does Joplin hold up with larger files? I’ve just been using Google docs, which I don’t like for several reasons. One of which, is that it gets really choppy when you hit 100+ pages.
How does Joplin hold up with larger files?
To be honest, I don’t know. I hope someone else will be able to answer this.
I have written the first draft of 2.5 books!
The first one was the 1/2 which just got a little messy and I didn’t enjoy it. It was my first major writing project and I just didn’t organize it well enough. I also grew out of the idea quickly and decided to stop and not waste more time.
My second book I managed to finish at 70k I believe (it’s been a while). Similarly I grew out of the idea by the end and it would have needed major revisions to push through editing.
My third and most recent one I really love, the first draft is complete and I am slowly editing it. Though editing seems to be my weakness it seems because it’s taking far longer than it should. This one I would love to actually clean up and eventually publish but yeah, going to take a while to get there!
I use Scrivener to write in and I highly recommend it! (you can usually find some discount codes for it as well). I like to use it to quickly draft the storyline and then expand each scene as I go. It also has some handy features for organizing research notes and pictures. It’s packed with so many features so it’s a pretty popular writing app among writers in general.
You have a real commitment ! I hope to keep this motivation that is in me. I’ve heard good things about Scrivener. Unfortunately at the time there was no version for GNU/Linux… But I’ll look at it again !
Currently on the worldbuilding/outlining phase.
I’m using a customized self-hosted Semantic MediaWiki installation, and can’t imagine doing it any other way—it’s like Wikipedia with the added ability to aggregate and live-update information from related pages. For instance, I can create a story event page with the place, date, and list of characters involved—and just from that, each character’s page has a map of all the places they’ve been, a timeline of all the events they’ve been present at, and a list of all the characters they’ve met; and it all gets updated whenever I add or edit an event.
Plus it’s on a web server, so I can access it from any device with an internet connection.
self-hosted Semantic MediaWiki installation
Sounds like interesting, I need to look into it !
I’m writing another college textbook,. I use OverLeaf to write LaTeX.
LibreOffice on an old HP laptop I got for free, still running win10 because I can’t be assed to change OS on the half-dead creature. It’s currently the home of two on-going projects and one that I will go back to whenever these two are done, or at least done telling me their stories for the time.
My only real advice is the one everyone should have heard by now: Just write something. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have even have to have a greater context. Exercise your creativity. Get comfortable with it.
It sounds like the half-dead creature is older than mine :D
Thank you for this valuable advice, the idea of writing came to me when an old aunt told me that she had started writing after the death of her mother. It had helped her overcome depression. And I must admit that I feel surprisingly good since I started writing !
I write quite a bit, I have a laptop running Arch Linux (btw), and I use Scrivener for writing. It’s a Windows app but it runs perfectly fine under Wine.
As for advice: sometimes I get caught up on the opening line, so to combat this I deliberately try to just write the worst opening line I can possibly think of. It gets it out of the way, and then whatever you write after that will feel like an improvement. Then you can just go back and fix it later once you know what the thing’s actually about.
