Not books per se, but actual writing. Most of my academic background has been in history, and in particular Celtic history, and theat’s where I begin. The Celts had the Ogham alphabet and Scandinavian runes, but it was still an oral tradition. Early monks in the islands concentrated on writing and preserved whatever local lore they found important, interesting, or useful. So perhaps it was Christianity that preserved the Celtic tradition!

It’s a good reminder, that writing came late to storytelling. And the reality is that writing doesn’t come naturally to anybody. Writing isn’t a natural endeavor. Writing has to be both taught … and learned.

Sumerian culture was one of the first to teach writing … children went to schools where they copied cuneiform, using something to symbolize something else. And when they did that, their brains actually changed.

In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf explains how writing affects neurological development:

The brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: The visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words (…) and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meaning, function and connections.

So writing is good for us. But we’re doing it less and less. I’m not talking about writing the way that I’m writing this blog——my fingers moving across a keyboard to put the words on a screen. No: I’m talking about writing. By hand.

Of course this isn’t recent. We’ve been drifting further and further away from handwriting as a way of life since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Scholar Anne Trubek notes that

when a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.

So now you’ll meet people who hold, proudly, that they still “write real letters,” adding that real letters are those written by hand, and feeling a strange sort of moral superiority over those who don’t. It makes one wonder who will be clinging virtuously to keyboard writing when the next technological revolution has us all addressing our computers via voice.

But what do we do in the meantime? Stop teaching cursive writing? Make sure it’s seen as the Holy Grail of writing?

What about you? Do you still write with a pen? Tell me all about it, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

(I’m going to point out here that I am getting nothing out of this endorsement—I just love this product, use it every day for almost every writing project I have going, and want to share.)

One of the most difficult things about any writing project is keeping organized. Every time I write a novel, I find myself with a collection of snippets of information, photographs, timelines, lists and sketches of characters, drafts, phrases I want to use … the list goes on and on. (And if that’s what I need for a novel, imagine how much more information needs to be collected for nonfiction works!)

Even if I managed to lasso all that material into a folder, it was hardly accessible. Open the photos with one application. Open the notes with another. Open the websites with yet another. And so on, and so on …

Scrivener takes everything that you want to collect for your project and puts it in one place. Not only that, it makes the material accessible in ways that are intuitive.

For example, your articles are all in one place and at your fingertips:

But what about your ideas? In the offline world, you put them on index cards and tack them onto a bulletin board, don’t you?

Et voila: instant bulletin board!

But Scrivener isn’t just about organization. It’s about putting the book together. The “scrivenings” mode temporarily combines individual documents into a single text, so that you can see and edit different sections of your manuscript either in isolation or as a whole. Try that with Microsoft Word!

Outlining is a fundamental part of any book, whether fiction or nonfiction, and it’s not easy to do on a computer. I used to sketch my outlines out on paper. Scrivener lets me plan first and write later, or write first and use the outliner to make sense of my messy first draft, or … the possibilites go on and on.

I hear you already: I can’t submit a Scrivener document to my publisher! Never mind: Scrivener can export your manuscript into just about any format you need.

What if you need a script instead of a novel? Not a problem; switch to script-writing mode!

Take a moment to check it out. For a long time, Scrivener was available only for the Mac (which bothered me not a whit, as I’ve always been a Mac girl); but now it’s in beta for Windows and I imagine it will soon be as useful on that platform as it’s been on the Mac for years.

Work with Scrivener, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

A friend and colleague of mine, someone I respect very much, believes that the paper book is doomed. “Statistics show hardcover books selling less, ebooks selling more,” he says. “Tip of the berg: paper costs more every day, trees are scarcer, printing costs a lot more than setting up an ebook, huge bookstores consume energy in vast quantities, energy costs more every day, distribution in big trucks costs more than sending something over the Net.”

Kindle is indeed doing well, and its success—along with the more modest success of the Nook, the Sony ereader, and others, and the tremendous demand for tablets like the iPad—is leading to some really useful new readers coming along. We’re already seeing a marriage of technologies, with phones doubling as readers. And it’s hard to predict what’s around the next corner … only that the next corner is coming more quickly than we think. There’s a big wow factor in the technology.

And then there’s the cost. Even the setup for print takes a lot longer than releasing an ebook. I’m expecting to see large price increases for printed books any day now, as transport costs increase: I cannot see the “returnable” model lasting a lot longer with the cost of all that shipping back and forth.

And it’s not just the transport costs: it’s expensive to do the layout and print of any book. Then there’s distribution. Then there’s … the list goes on and on.

Once that consignment business model (sor that is really what it is) fails, I think bookshops are in trouble. We’ve seen with the failure of the Borders chain that mixing books, expensive food, and “gift” selections doesn’t work particularly well. Perhaps there will be a space for selling a range of on-demand video, audio, and books. Or maybe they will fragment into specialised markets.

Or maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about.

I can tell you that for authors the ebook phenomenon is a fabulous thing. With production costs down, authors are getting higher royalties than they did with the shelved paper books. For many of us, that is a Good Thing indeed.

What are your thoughts? What is the future of reading? What medium will prevail? How do you read? Do you anticipate that changing? Inquiring minds want to know … and then you’ll be beyond the elements of style!

But I’m also thankful. Beyond the window, the car itself was not damaged. I had a long and thoughtful conversation with the responding police officer about a death in his family. It did not rain. All is well, at the end of the day.

So let’s look forward, and here’s a blog with some suggestions for gifts for writers. Have any suggestions to add? Post them here. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

***

“Browsing my own website often starts me wondering about things I have no answers for. It can also nudge me into another web-surfing binge; this time about copyright ownerships in ebook publishing.

“Scrolling through my recent posts, I realized that many dealt with epublishing. Rapidly emerging epublishing is formidable in its potential, and like all first encounters with something new, it both fascinates and frightens.

“I confess that, initially, fear triumphs over my fascination. I’m afraid that the technology of writing ebooks might be beyond my grasp. And what about the business side of epublishing?

“In the early 1960s, becoming a local news correspondent required me to dust off an ancient typewriter, brush up on rusty typing and business skills, and surmount challenges as they came. That first writing leap scared me, too. However, within a year I was teaching other writers how-to avoid pitfalls (and lawsuits) while covering a newsbeat.

“Confidence came with experience. In the early 1970s, fellow writing group members said, “You should publish your stories in a book.” The allure of authoring a book to memorialize the homesteaders I revered was irresistible. Totally ignorant of the many aspects of authoring regional history, I began what was to become a series.

“Boy, did I learn!

I mastered tape recording oral history, writing indexes for chapters and for people included, and photographs. I created the bibliographies, wrote cut lines for photo reproductions, and worked with editors, graphics and printing departments.

“Attending to dozens of details I’d been ignorant of meant that by the time The Statesman-Examiner published my three-volume Behind These Mountains series (1986-1992), I was also inducted into book marketing.

“That really broadened my outlook!

“My experiences became subjects when I was asked to teach at writing workshops and history conferences. Idaho Writer’s League awarded me Writer of the Year. That, I have to confess, was because of my excellent documentation rather than the quality of my writing.

“Similar to today’s intrusion of epublishing in my life, back then, it was access to the Internet that came to my sparsely populated Montana valley.

“Maybe I was braver then.

“No matter the minimal instruction of the telephone company’s two-hour program on the wonders of the Internet and how to connect a dial-up, I just HAD to take the leap and gain the world!

“I whooped for joy over the 1996 Edition of Mecklermedia’s Official Internet Yellow Pages. I still have that four-pound book which was my most exciting Christmas gift, given me by my ever-thoughtful daughter.

“Overcoming daily computing challenges spun into articles like Fire In The Wire, which explains how to resolve computer modem failure; published by Mother Earth News in 2001.

“With research at my fingertips instead of a hundred-mile drive away and email query responses within hours, I soon thrilled at seeing my byline in national magazines.

“So why my apprehension about the challenges of epublishing when experience has taught me to overcome fear?

“Conquer fear in small increments.

“I took the first step about a year ago. Blogging is epublishing. I let it intimidate me far too long. But overcoming my fear of blogging quickly encouraged me to create a website, Montana Scribbler . Do those count as two baby steps toward publishing ebooks?

“I may soon succumb to the inevitable and begin using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Resistance is as futile as forgoing Paypal and teleconferences! All that really matters is determination. So why not tackle ebooks.

“Maybe my website posts are my way of building my courage to tackle learning the technology necessary to become a published ebook author? Wisdom tells me now is the time to begin exploring the business side of this endeavor, like how author’s copyrights and right to reprint elsewhere can be affected by epublishing.

“Minimal web surfing brought more questions than answers. But why delay while experts are still debating copyright details? Articles like The National Academies Workshop on Copyright in the Digital Age, Bill Rosenblatt’s Copyright and Technology website (which covers digital rights technologies), and commentaries on Laura Hazard Owen’s Publishing Trends are online. The complex issues won’t be resolved quickly.

“I’m secure in knowing experienced writers will encourage and support my efforts. My good friend, Clive Warner already pointed out one important factor, “Ebooks can be apps—and a programming team has to make the app. Increasingly, the writer may be only one part of a team making a ‘product’.”

“The writing journey need never be lonely, and at least four reputable organizations offer contract help: the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Authors Guild, the Authors Registry, Text and Academic Authors and the Writer’s Union (Canada).

“Years of visiting Ivan Hoffman’s website has made me prudent enough to consult an intellectual property attorney as well.

“My fascination with the future of publishing hasn’t abated one little bit, offering as it does new dimensions to enhance my life.”

*****

Mona welcomes help from tech-savvy readers! Email her at mtscribbler@air-pipe.com. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!