I try to write on a daily basis. It’s handy to keep my skills honed! As with visual art, it helps to keep in practice, even if you just write a few paragraphs. I’ve been writing professionally since my late teens, but I also write for pleasure.
The struggles with writing
The hardest part of writing, I’ve always said, is just getting the words down -- it’s telling the story, transferring the concept to something a reader can experience. Revisions come later; they’re the easy part, even if they can be tedious.
When I’m writing, it’s often a challenge to focus on what I’m doing . While I can get in a creative flow with visual art, it’s often much harder with writing. Multitasking sometimes makes it far more difficult to get out those tricky initial words. And it’s understandable to want to put it as well as possible initially, so you don’t have to do extensive revisions and editing later.
Becoming productive
A few years ago, I stumbled across a truly remarkable writing program called OmmWriter . OmmWriter itself is a full-screen application and generally keeps out extraneous interference for the process. Not only does it come with a number of natural or naturally-inspired backgrounds, it also features several musical and ambient tracks and sound effects for each keystroke. Of course, sounds are optional and can be turned off, for you to put on your own music or ambient inspirations.
I wrote a novella in a week with OmmWriter! It was an impulsive little satire, and I was more than slightly surprised at how easily the creativity flowed. Normally, I would have sat staring at LibreOffice for far too long and produced less than half of what I did.
What set it apart from the other things I’ve used to write was, most of all, the creators’ commitment to creativity and creators . To illustrate this, let me tell you a little story.
A few years ago, when my comic Incubus Tales was still running, I also wrote serial fiction to accompany it for the wonderful publisher Circlet Press. The serial, entitled Incubus Tales: A Thousand Words, did very well critically and was exceptionally well-received in general.
But after I finished it, life started going a little more than slightly crazy. Not just the world in general, but my personal life and the lives of those dear to me seemed to turn into one strange, stressful event after another. I tried to start numerous stories, and eventually I ended up stopping with each and every one because something else would come up and derail my process.
Last month, I decided that I’d spent long enough not doing something I love. I was determined to write, however I could manage it. Whether for publication or for just telling the story, I knew I needed to write again. I made the choice to do it the best way I knew how, and I began to assemble the music I would need, inspirational images for setting and flavor, and I remembered the delightful program I used years ago when it was new, the one that had helped me so much: OmmWriter.
Support for creatives
I contacted them because I couldn’t find a download and had lost mine from a computer crash a couple of years ago. They wrote me back that generally the downloads are time-limited and transaction-specific, but they offered me a coupon for a free copy of OmmWriter since I supported them in past and they wanted very much to encourage my creativity. In the time since I used it last, OmmWriter advanced in a number of ways, and I love it more than ever. It’s also remarkably rare, in my experience, for a company that claims to support creators and creativity to actually do that.
But OmmWriter and its creators came through for me, and for that I will always be grateful. It’s important to me that creativity be encouraged, because so often creativity is just exploited. For the creators of this already spectacular program to be so generous, because they really believe in creation and writing...that makes a huge difference to me.
How to get started
OmmWriter is available at https://ommwriter.com for digital purchase. You can go with their suggested price of under $10 US, or add more if you want to be generous too. They have a new program called OmmBits as well, which is intended as a briefer experience for smaller pieces of writing.
If you want to try OmmWriter, you can Try the experience test on their site. They offer two experiences for you to take OmmWriter for a spin. Although they’re more limited by necessity than the full program, it’ll give you an idea of whether or not you might be helped by the way it does things.
Conclusions
OmmWriter is just so wonderfully different, to me, and that’s what makes it special. It helps with that hardest initial step. It’s effortless to just copy and paste what you’ve written into LibreOffice or Word or whatever you use, for later revisions and editing. Naturally, OmmWriter also sports the fundamental functionality of any text editor, both in auto-hiding top menus and in intuitive icons.
If you’re looking for something that can help your creative process get its start, think about OmmWriter. It’s uncommon to find such a creative thing developed in a dedicated way over years and committed to creativity.