These 6 Tools Can Help You Write

We all know there’s no cheat code when it comes to writing — but the right tools can definitely make the writing life a little easier. After all, sometimes staring at the blank computer screen just doesn’t cut it. Here, a novelist, an artist, a tech expert, and more creators share their favorite writing tools:

Pens:

Sophie Lucido Johnson suggests writing by hand to better connect to your practice. Johnson is not just a writer; she’s also an illustrator and cartoonist, so she knows her pens.

There are many proven psychological benefits to writing by hand. Lynda Barry said she couldn’t write her second book until she sat down and started writing it by hand. Julia Cameron insists that your three daily morning pages need to be done by hand in a drab notebook. And I say that writing by hand just kind of feels good sometimes. It can remind you that writing is active and kinetic. It can bring you back to the things you loved about writing in the first place.

Your old tech:

Tech journalist, Lance Ulanoff, writes about how fun it can be to indulge in a bit of old tech nostalgia: “I love digging an old phone out of a drawer and making it work again or successfully booting up a Windows 95 laptop. Sure, these are increasingly isolated systems that can no longer read media or connect to the modern web, but it is fun to relive my technology past.”

Journalist:

Clive Thompson pushes this idea a little further, noting that actually writing on your old machine can help you to see your writing afresh because of something called the “novelty effect”: “This, I think, explains a big part of why switching to my old computer suddenly jolted me into a mindset for re-writing. The old version of Word — and the different laptop screen, and even the crappy old keyboard — made the file feel suddenly different.”

A typewriter (or at least a printed draft):

Novelist, Jonathan Lethem, recalls the tactile joy of revising “fresh piles of typed pages” in his meditation on the typewriter as evocative object. He notes that he now gets a similar effect by printing out pages and then retyping the next drafts from scratch. After all, the whole point of revision is to re-vision.

I still substitute for what was lost by printing out documents, then hiding the files on my hard drive, and opening a new blank screen so that I’m forced to retype every word. I often recommend this method to my students, in the belief that they’ll learn crucial things by revisiting their own language choices as they pass anew through their fingertips.

Writing software and apps:

Freelance writer, Larisa Andras, points out that online grammar and spelling checkers can be immensely helpful when it comes to making your work more polished and professional. In this piece, she recommends Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and other programs that approximate the helpful extra eyeballs of a copyeditor:

Tumblr (used as Tarot):

Cory Doctorow might just be the most prolific writer on the internet, which is really saying something. Here, he shares his unique way of compiling what essentially works as his ideas file. Essentially, he scrolls Tumblr, reposts what he likes best, and then ports these images over to his Twitter account, while thinking about potential connections between all the images:

Originally, I used it as a place to post my photos of public signs, which I have always found fascinating (a sign in public tells you about the signposter’s theories about other people, as well as the history of the place where the sign appears).

But as I followed more and more Tumblrs that were devoted to posting striking images, often with little or no context, I found myself reblogging their images into my own stream…I’ve never lacked for story ideas, but now that file is bulging. The exercise of scrolling Tumblr, reblogging the images that strike my fancy, and copy-pasting them into Twitter threads over ten or twenty distinct keyboard and mouse operations has become a daily exercise in fantasy divination, a storytelling improv session for myself.