So I’ve been a little stuck in my writing lately. And that’s a problem. After all, I’ve got like 4 books worth of material stewing around in my brain, and I’d really like to get all those random thoughts down in words and sections and chapters and bound into actual books. It’s about time. Seriously. I can’t go to a conference without someone asking me “How’s that book coming? The one you were working on like 7 years ago?”

(For those who are keeping track: the book Bug Hunting will never see the light of day – it had a couple good chapters and the rest was cr*p; the book I was writing with Jerry Weinberg on testing is now Jerry’s book; any other books I may have mentioned in passing are pure speculation. While I have failed utterly at authoring or co-authoring any books, I have succeeded at contributing to other people’s books. You’ll find my words in Roundtable on Project Management edited by James Bullock and Jerry Weinberg, Visual Basic for Testers by Mary Sweeney, Windows Development Power Tools by James Avery and Jim Holmes, and most recently The Art of Agile Development by Jim Shore and Shane Warden. So it’s about time for me to figure out how to produce a book of my own. But I digress.)

Now I don’t think my problem is laziness or busy-ness or even classic writers block. Rather, every time I sat down to write anything of substance – anything longer than an email or a blog post – I felt the insistent tug of excessive friction. My writing tools were not working for me. They were working against me. And I found myself fighting them too much. So I decided that what I really needed was a new and better writing tool. Something that would work the way I work and think. Something that wouldn’t get in my way. Something that was not Microsoft Word.

Now I’ve tried a lot of editors over the years. I’ve tried plain old text editors and fancy WYSIWYG editors and mind mapping tools and even Google’s online editors. Of all of them, Google’s stuff fit my style best. I like it’s simplicity, the ease with which I can share drafts with reviewers and collaborators, and the tagging mechanism for documents. I used that last feature for organizing snippets of prose. But the biggest downside is that it doesn’t work so well for me on an airplane (given that it’s a web-based editor and all). And even if it did, it has some annoying glitchy-ness in simple editing functions (like weirdness with Undo) that just gets in the way.

For writing prose, my needs are simple. I don’t need a whole lot of formatting options just for getting words out. I need to be able to organize snippets of prose (as in Jerry Weinberg’s fieldstone writing method), I need to be able to look at all my related text in one place, and the solution has to scale to book size. The need for both organizing bite-sized bits and seeing the whole thing is why Google Docs came closest to my needs. Other solutions excelled at one side of the equation and failed utterly at the other. Mind Manager is great for dealing with little nuggets, but doesn’t let me see everything all together easily. So the result is highly fragmented writing. By contrast, Word lets me see all my prose in one place, but its outliner is just awful and let’s not even talk about scaling up to book size with the whole Master Document feature. Ugh!

So my latest find, the thing I’m trying now, is Scrivener. I’m not sure yet if it will really fit my style. And I haven’t tested it to see if it scales. So it’s too early to tell if I’ve found my writing tool of choice. But even though I had 29 days left on the evaluation, and even though I don’t yet know if it will really work for me, I bought it anyway. Why? Because the company that makes it took extra pains to make it work with subversion.

Yup, taking extra care to make sure a writing tool works with a source control system is enough reason for me to proclaim my love for them on the Internet and give the company money.

Those of you who caught my recent posting about my ability to make Keynote melt down know how annoyed I was that Keynote did not work with subversion. And another consultant I told about the experience commented “Well, that’s a non-starter isn’t it? Not working with subversion. Hmph. <snort>.”

Well Scrivener got it right. Even though Scrivener uses a similar Mac-trick to Keynote by making their “file” actually be a directory, Scrivener does not blow away the crucial .svn files needed for subversion to work. I know because I tested it. In short, Literature and Latte, Scrivener’s publisher, understood that version control is a crucial part of a professional’s workflow. They paid attention. And I love them for that.

Now – will the rest of the features help me write more? The storyboard feature looks really cool. The whole screen editing feature is great at removing distractions. But only time will tell if Scrivener and I can achieve a productive mind meld. I’ll let you know when I have a book draft done. And no, I won’t tell you what book I’m working on. I have an amazing track record of not delivering on pre-announced book titles, so the only thing I’ll admit to is that I have a book in the works. And I’ll talk about it after I’ve managed to write a whole first draft.