How to write and manage text if you are an author
When you are an author, your medium is text, will always be text, and is always going to be text.
So of course you’re going to want to use the most powerful tools to manipulate text there is. Fortuitously, there’s a field of engineering which is also about text: programming. And programmers have been building text-manipulation tools since the dawn of their field of work.
FILE FORMAT
There is basically only one option: Unicode plain text in UTF-8 encoding. That is, a “.txt” file. (No, that does not mean Notepad ought to be your tool of choice, but more on that later.)
Basically UTF-8 is the most common text encoding in the world, ubiquitous across the internet. It is guaranteed to be the lowest common denominator, and can cover theoretically any writing system, from Icelandic over Vietnamese to Korean, and has every punctuation mark known to man, up to and including interrobangs.
FORMATTING
“But wait!” I hear you crying, “What about text formatting?”
Fear not, my friend, programmers have solved that too. Firstly, the font is irrelevant; you’re working on the text, remember? The font is the formatter’s job, for when you finally publish.
However, you might want some emphasis signifiers, like boldface, or italics, or underlined text. You might want to insert hyperlinks or images, or other content into your multimedia text (because let’s be honest, the internet is here, and we might as well use it.)
You might be tempted to write in HTML then, since it can do all these things. WRONG. HTML is horrible. It was never intended to be read, much less written by humans (but alas…) What you need is a formatting language that is easy on the eyes.
I suggest you read a little about the following ones and pick a favorite:
Markdown (my favorite)
Textile
AsciiDoc
MediaWiki
PmWiki
TeX (better for traditional publishing)
All of these languages are fairly lightweight, and provide a full gamut of semantic formatting.
(TeX is a little more heavyweight as it was developed to write scientific articles. It creates PDF files where the others are more tailored to HTML. TeX is also much older.)
Formatting in either of these languages involves the use of special characters, usually the more uncommon punctuation marks on the ordinary US keyboard, and interprets those to have special meanings like “boldface this text” or “this next bit is a hyperlink” and such things.
Many of them also have the option to make common symbol replacements like turning the straight apostrophes and quote marks into their left-right paired counterparts, substituting double dashes for M-dashes, and some of them even create ligature letters!
TEXT EDITING
Here comes the toughie. You’re going to have to learn to type again. Not in the sense of operating a keyboard, but you’re going to have to re-learn an entirely different paradigm of text editing.
Why?
Almost all current text editing software is based around the Common User Access paradigm of user experience. You are not a Common User. You are an Author. You are a Special User.
Special tools for special purposes.
Your text editor of choice will from now on be EMACS (free, old) or Vim (free, old) or SublimeText (non-free, new). All of these three editors are rife with shortcut keys, advanced search features and all of them throws the CUA manual out the window.
(I use Vim, and I am never going back.)
These three editors, compared to Notepad++ or Gedit or other “advanced text editors” are the difference between a manual screwdriver and an electrical screwdriver.
Need to find every occurence of a word? One shortcut away. Need to properly capitalize a couple of hundred words? There’s a command for that. Spell checking? Pick a language. Search multiple files? No problem.
(For that matter, I suggest you move to a Linux operating system, and teach yourself Shell Scripting; purely for the fact that the Linux Shell Scripts provide a lot of useful text-editing and text-searching capability.)
OTHER THINGS
For gods sake, learn touch typing. And get a decent keyboard, and take breaks, and be on the lookout for Repetitive Strain Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
Also, do backups all the time. Plain text is a lot less susceptible to data loss than finicky Word or Open Office documents, but still. Zip up your chapters every time you finish one (one chapter per file in a directory is wise) and upload them to a cloud hosting service or put them on a USB.
If you want to get advanced with the backup, teach yourself to use a Versioning Repository system like Git/Github or Hg/Mecurial. These tools lets you save changes to your text incrementally, and undo to much earlier versions easily, and have an upload function too for remote backups (and your beta-readers can access your repository to read your story and write their feedback directly into the chapter files of alternate versions (”branches”) of the story for you to see.)
FINAL REMARKS
A poor craftsman blames his tools, because good craftsmen know what tools to use. All of this I’ve thrown at you will take time to learn, but trust me, it’s an investment of time that is worth it – in reliability, in ease of use, and in user experience.
Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t write every day. It’s OK.
Write a lot. The more you write the better you get.
Think about the things you’re not so good at, and think about what you’re doing wrong, then try to change it. You can’t get good without a healthy amount of reflection as you go.
Show your work to a few people at first to build confidence.
Publish on the internet. Patreon-driven web serials are the future of authorship.
