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 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.
I’m writing another college textbook,. I use OverLeaf to write LaTeX.
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’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.
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 !
