Gearing up to write a book

You don't need much, but there are some tools I've found helpful for research and writing

Happy new year! I hope 2024 is starting off well for all of you.

It’s been a bit of a rocky start here with the usual post-holiday inertia plus a bracing combination of winter weather and disrupted childcare. Thus, instead of the meaty reported post I’d hope to run today, here are some rough and ready thoughts on the “gear” I’ve found useful in my book journey so far.

(If I was an organized, strategic person, I would have run this as a pre-holiday gift guide. But I am not such a person. Clearly.)

Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

A book stand

I tend to be a late adopter, partly out of technological skepticism and partly because it takes energy away from my work to change the way I work. That said, there are a few humble tools whose value even I could easily grasp, most obviously, a book stand.

The great Rebecca Boyle—whose book, Our Moon, comes out today (!) to rave reviews (!!) and who I hope you’ll hear from soon on BookSmarts—was the first person to explain the utility of this item to me. As she patiently explained, a book stand enables one to place a reference book next to the computer and, in a calm and collected manner, copy notable passages. This struck me as a big upgrade from awkwardly hugging an open volume to my body while frantically transcribing a relevant quote in half-remembered, five-word chunks.

So after we got off the phone, I dug out an old cookbook stand and, let me tell you, it has been a game changer. Plus, I always know how many milliliters are in tablespoon, which is nice.

A scanning app that recognizes text

Speaking of books, I sometimes need to copy entire chapters of a book for later reference, such as when I’ve poorly timed an interlibrary loan and find the due date approaching before I’ve even cracked the cover. My book stand makes scanning pages with my phone easy. Unfortunately, my iPhone’s Notes app and the free version of apps like CamScanner do not recognize text. Which means they are not searchable. Which means they are close to useless for future research.

Frustrated by this, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a paid version of CamScanner, which does provide text recognition. It’s not perfect, but it can produce a searchable Word document of a scanned pdf file. That, together with the original scan, has been anough to allow me to go back and find what I need without too much trouble.

I’m not really recommending CamScanner specifically over other programs like OneNote and Adobe Acrobat, which also offer text recognition for a price. I’m just recommending finding some way to accomplish this task. (If anyone knows of a decent free service, I’m all ears. Google Drive has the capacity but only for files less than 2 MB.)

Dictation software

I’m sure we all dictate stray book thoughts into a notes app while out walking the dog or doing housework. But I have found Word’s built-in dictation tool to be especially useful for more involved tasks. Specifically, for these:

1) Transcribing bookmarked excerpts from audiobooks

I listen to a lot of audiobooks for book research because my reading time is so limited, and I use bookmarks to flag important passages. Then, I go back through and play the bookmarked sections into the dictation software to create a text document of quotes and excerpts. Voila. Kind of like a book stand for an audiobook…

2) Transcribing lengthy voice memos

When I do field reporting, I try to write up detailed reflections at the end of each day, but sometimes, I’m just too tired and settle for a voice memo. I know that when it comes time to write about the trip, I will want to reread my reflections and probably search them for specific details. Which means they need to be transcribed.

After a recent trip, I had one very lengthy memo to deal with and simply played it into Word. Then I left the room to do some laundry. When I came back an hour later, all 4,000 words were there in a document, albeit in one gargantuan Kerouacian paragraph.

Word’s auto-punctuation feature works reasonably well, and I was amazed that it correctly identified proper nouns like Masai Mara and strange phrases like “grass-based economies.” It was more than good enough for ctl+F. And it probably saved me hours of manual transcription.

As above, I’m not so much arguing for Word above other alternatives (although I have been impressed at its performance), but rather for finding some tool that excels at dictation. You could also use services like Otter or OneNote.

A spiral notebook

I’ve been writing my first drafts longhand lately and it has been revolutionary. It’s low pressure and both faster and more enjoyable than pecking out a chapter at the computer while being clobbered by digital distractions. But I have to confess that, in the beginning, I was a bit fussy about it and felt that I needed a fancy Moleskin notebook to pull this off properly.

Soon, however, I grew frustrated that the notebooks didn’t lay perfectly flat. And I quickly realized this project was going to get expensive. I have big handwriting, especially when I’m writing fast, and the first chapter I wrote took up almost two full notebooks.

Then I remembered Lauren Groff saying that she writes the early drafts of her novels in ordinary spiral notebooks, like the kind you used for high school chemistry class. I ordered a multipack in bright, primary colors and have been filling them with writing, lists, notes, and mind maps. They work great. I love the little pockets for stray paper and, most importantly, they cost a dollar apiece.

🎶 All together now! 🎶

To my surprise, I’ve found these notebooks deeply satisfying. It’s comforting to have all my book thoughts housed in one physical object—to be able to flip back and forth between a draft and a diagram of the book’s structure without clicking a mouse. (I know this is how people wrote books for centuries, but it’s new to me, OK??)

Of course, having my hard-earned words exist only in one single, un-backed-up paper copy also makes them feel exceedingly vulnerable—to spilled coffee, forgetfulness, and other everyday mishaps. Which is why, as soon as I finish a draft, I plop my notebook into my trusty book stand, open up Word’s dictation software, and read the whole thing aloud into a searchable, digital document. See what I did there? 😉