Kinetic Writer

I recently traveled to San Diego for Comic Con International, where I immersed myself in the geek culture (which you can read about on my personal/geeky blog) and was on full alert for journalistic opportunities. I made a few professional contacts that will hopefully, with proper follow-up, result in a gig or two… or at least a foot in the door with certain magazines and publishers. It was nerve-wracking to put myself out there and do in-person pitches, but I would be kicking myself now if I hadn’t taken the opportunities as they presented themselves.

That said, for five straight days I was pretty much sweating buckets from the heat, humidity, and fear of professional rejection.

But while preparing for this intense trip, I assembled a small arsenal of tools that turned out to be extraordinarily helpful to me as a wannabe writer/journalist. One of my biggest “areas of opportunity” (management speak for “major faults”) is organizing all of my creative ideas and following through with them in a timely manner before my interest/motivation wanes. But I’m entering an efficient groove and I like how it feels. This is my (unintentionally color-coordinated) arsenal of tools:

• My favorite Pilot G2-Pro pen (with a decent supply of ink refills).
• 3×5 in. Cambridge writing pad by Mead (individually they cost about a dollar, but I found a 12-pack of them at Sam’s Club yesterday for $4.47 + tax).
• LG EnV2 phone with a small text message plan, an easy-access digital notepad feature, a QWERTY keypad for quick typing when its flipped open, and a removable microSD card.
• Olympus DS-40 digital voice recorder (not pictured).

I’ve been keeping my pen, a notepad, and of course my phone with me wherever I go. When I invariably have a spark of creativity hit me while I’m at the doctor’s office or at a friend’s house, I can easily jot down a couple notes (or a couple pages) and come back to them later. The notepad format keeps everything together, but I don’t feel bad tearing out sheet to use as scratch paper if necessary. I’ve nearly filled my first one in about 6 weeks, and am using it more and more every week. Even better: I refer back to it as originally planned!

The newest item added to my arsenal of tools is a digital voice recorder that is smaller and lighter than a candy bar. I am still trying to figure out how to best utilize it… it’s easy to record oral notes, but that requires more time and effort later to transcribe (or just plain make sense of) the audio files. It did come in handy at the Comic Con to record the panels I attended because I was able to set an “index point” that I could skip to in playback, which made it easy to access the quotes I wanted to use in my blog posts. I’m at the bottom of the learning curve when it comes to manipulating digital audio files, but hopefully that will change with time and practice.

The other tool that is less portable, but still travels out of town with me, is my old and increasingly unreliable Dell laptop. There is a good chance that I will purchase a Macbook in the next year, and I have a feeling that it will become a part of my life as a writer in a way that no PC ever could. That perception is probably a result of good marketing on Apple’s part, great reviews from other creative types/Mac lovers, and confidence in the fact that a new laptop (of any sort) will have a lot more power and features than my current one.

What are your essential portable tools as a writer?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under freelancing, good habits, resources, writing by hand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.