Writing a novel on a smart phone

[Amontillado]

No. In a word, no — except writing a novel on a smart phone is so crazy it just might work.

I've been getting support gear ready for the expected arrival of a Mac Mini and I have odd plans for the thing.

A zipper case is a compact package for carrying the Mini, docking station, keyboard, and cables. For less than $50, portable displays can be found. Mine folds up like a folio cover for an iPad.

Display resolution is fine for word processing, so two and a quarter AI left thumbs up for that. The display was about $45, so I didn't expect miracles.

It will be great for mobile writing, and I have a convenient way to pack my new Mini along for a writing retreat. Laptops are really great for that. I want to use my Mini. It's hard to explain.

Then something else caught my eye (good work, Amazon). Earlier today I got a Lightning to HDMI adaptor for my iPhone.

USB C power from a battery pack runs the HDMI adaptor. Another USB C power cable runs the display, and the display's HDMI port connects to the iPhone adaptor which in turn plugs into the iPhone. No configuration was necessary other than to tip the phone to get the display into landscape.

With a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, Apple Pages on the iPhone is bearable. I suspect for re-reading and review exporting to epub for Apple Books would be nicer than scrolling through Pages. I haven't tried that but it's on my list.

If I had no writing implement other than an iPhone, life could struggle on. It's not optimum. You could say it really stinks. But I don't think it's fair to say it doesn't work.

 

[Homer Potvin]

Meh. Use your thumbs if you want to keep it real.

 

[GlitterRain]

It absolutely would work. I haven’t ever written an entire novel-length manuscript on a smart phone, but when I was in high school, I wrote my very bad version 0 (maybe 40k words total) of what would become my first book on one (had to if I wanted to work on it at school).

But it definitely comes down to the technology you have to assist you, like the keyboards and such you mentioned, or how you feel using your fingers to type ~80k words, and your feelings about smaller screens.

For people who are on their phones a lot anyways, I don’t think it would be that bad. Back then, I was texting my boyfriend/future husband for at least an hour every night. Not a text every once in a while, but like rapid-fire conversation that could’ve easily been a phone call. So what was 40 minutes of typing during a class I had nothing to do in?

Also, with Apple at least, everything is connected, so at home, you can work on your bigger screen if you have one.

Currently, I write exclusively on an iPad mini with a Bluetooth keyboard. It’s a lot more portable than a laptop, and due to space constraints, I don’t have a desk I can sit at to write. This setup is reminiscent of the phone writing, but the bigger screen is nicer now and feels more “official.” I don’t know that I will keep my setup this way forever, but it has worked well enough that I wrote 2.5 novels on it.

 

[Amontillado]

I definitely need to get out more. I see there's a split screen app for iPhones. It appears that would let me have an outline and a word processing document open at the same time. That would help, although I don't anticipate working on the phone. I've written letters at lunchtime in Pages with a BT keyboard. That's as far as I've gone. A lot more is possible.

Any contemporary phone has truly serious compute capacity compared to the eight bit CP/M system I did my first plain text word processing on.

When I was but a young EE student at UT Austin, the pride of the CS department was a new-ish CDC 6600 mainframe, a supercomputer of the day.

It would blast out an amazing 3 megaflops of math computation.

My Mac Mini is coming with an M4 Pro processor. If the discussion forums I found can be believed, it can hit 7 teraflops on its main processor, and a staggering 236 teraflops on its GPU cores.

I have no idea if that's true. I hyperventilate every time I consider the possibility.

A teraflop is a million megaflops. My brave little Mini will chew through 2.3 million floating point calculations in the time that CDC 6600 could compute one.

That's on the main CPU. The GPUs are insane. They can do more than 78 million floating point ops in the time that CDC 6600 could do one.

I'm probably comparing apples to oranges. The teraflops benchmarks I saw were 16 bits of precision. The 6600 was probably working on 64.

It's trite to say we carry the equivalent of supercomputers in our pockets. Trite, but true.

A present day phone packs quite a punch.

 

[Naomasa298]

It occurs to me that if you want to write on the move, you could just use a notebook.

The old paper kind.

 

[Amontillado]

It occurs to me that if you want to write on the move, you could just use a notebook.

The old paper kind.

Indeed, the key difference between us and AI. We can write, even if nobody provides any support.

Of course, once one commences writing on paper, fountain pen addiction is sure to follow.

 

[Dogberry's Watch]

Of course, once one commences writing on paper, fountain pen addiction is sure to follow.

I have three boxes of really low quality purple Bic pens. But the purple ink makes the words good, so I go with what my superstition says.

Good luck with your technological marvels and stuff! I look forward to hearing more of your saga.