iA Writer
I don't like to plug things, for a couple of reasons. One, I find it hacky when others do it, and two, who the hell am I to recommend anything. But every now and then I come across something that I think other people just need to know about. And, when it's the kind of thing that no one I know in real life would give two shits about, I guess this is the best place to mention it.
So, one of the reasons I have all this web hosting is because I aspire to write more. It's something I enjoy, and having an extracurricular activity helps keep me from taking my day job seriously. The problem is that I'm absolutely terrible at it.
I don't mean structure, characters, dialog, pacing type of stuff. I'm below-average to passable at craft; certainly no worse than Kindle self-publishers. What I suck at is the actual mechanics of writing--sitting down and getting words on paper.
Half of this is pure, unbridled laziness. With a side of being easily distracted. I can work on that. The blog thing is one of things I'm trying, along with carving out a chunk of time every day or two to sit in front a keyboard, not working, not reading the SomethingAwful forums, and not jerking off. It's a battle every time.
The other half is a paralyzing fear of blank pages. I hate trying to get started, staring at a stark white screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. Too much pressure. A minute or two of that, and it's too easy to tab back over to work, SomethingAwful, or pornography. Or all three.
One approach I've tried is to go low-tech, pen and paper. This has helped some. It's easier to stay focused with fewer distractions. But there's an issue of legibility. I've been typing instead of writing for nearly twenty years--my penmanship has gone to complete shit. There are advantages to this--since I can't read that first draft, only get the gist of it, it forces a re-write. When you consider that the the two places I'm most likely to be able to get anything done are on the train or at a coffee shop, though, I think it's more trouble than it's worth. The train's too bumpy for me to get anything readable, and I feel like a colossal tool writing longhand at a Starbucks.
So I get distracted too easily at my laptop, and I can't read what I write in a notebook. One approach would be to suck it up and focus, and quit being a distracted little bitch.
Another would be to look for a middle ground. I have an iPad that I had never really found a justification for having, so I looked around for writing-related applications. After trying a few that weren't really any better than the built-in Notes app, I found iA Writer from Information Architects.
Holy shit.
It's really amazing, and dead simple. It's a plain text editor that syncs with Dropbox, with attractive typography, a more writerly built-in keyboard, and the best thing ever for someone that hates plain white pages--Focus Mode. Focus Mode blurs all but the most recent three lines, and moves the cursor on a blank document down to the middle of the view. It's such a simple thing, but it makes a huge difference in overcoming the inertia of starting a new project. It gets you started, then gets out of your way. They could have called it Shitty First Draft, the App.
I can't recommend it enough.