What do you use to write?

I’ve recently come into possession of the old Underwood typewriter that was in the office of the house I grew up in. After my mother threatened to throw it out, I inherited the thing, and now it’s serving as a decorative piece collecting dust in our front entrance way. I used to love that typewriter as a kid – I remember writing stories and school assignments and once a contract between my father and me for the purchase of a Rawlings baseball glove (he would pay half and I would pay half out of my allowance, collected over several months).

It’s an old mechanical typewriter – circa 1960 or 70 guess – with those beautifully heavy type bars that thwack into the rubber roller and page, with a certainty absent from modern keyboards. Text is kinetic when written on a typewriter like that, the sounds and motions and physicality of typing must have some effect on the cadence of your writing, in ways that the pitter-patter of the laptop keyboard never can. And there is something so pleasing and about the little flaws in a text from a typewriter, the angled letters, the off-kilter spacing, the idiosyncrasy of each machine.

I spent a few months in Ireland when I finished university, with the intention of “writing a novel,” though I didn’t really know what that meant. I bought a little Hermes Baby portable typewriter in Dublin, and took it with me to the town of Dingle, in Kerry, where I eventually found a little farm house to live in and type at. Nothing much came of the novel, but i remember those evenings of smoking rollies and clacking away at the machine trying to figure out what writing a novel might be like.

I haven’t touched a typewriter since (at least not to do any real writing). Everything happens on a computer, though I still sketch out my writing in notebooks, moleskines, and ideally, on a nice yellow pad of paper.

I’ve been happy enough with Microsoft Word. It’s not great for writing long texts, but seems to work well enough. I’ve tried others, like OpenOffice, but came back to Word. For short text that I really need to concentrate on, when I am having trouble concentrating, I use Write Room. Sometimes I use TextEditor, and occasionally TextWrangler.

But for real writing, Word is usually where I end up.

There are some others I’ve heard great things about, software designed for novelists and sceenwriters, but I’ve not used either of them: Scrivener and Ulysses are two of the big ones.

What do you use to write? Why do you like it? What don’t you like about it?

And, what would the ideal book-writing software look like?

[post inspired by Caet, at LibriVox]