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.

 

[C.L Castle]

I've written a 90k fantasy novel on a smartphone by thumb and during work lunch hours. All I used was a tiny, lightweight markdown writer called WriterPlus.

Since, I've acquired a bluetooth keyboard and a little metal holder to prop up the phone on my lap. But smartphone writing has taken a backseat at the moment, because I've dug out my ancient tablet from 2016 that still runs on Android 5, and installed a new markdown app on it: Markor. It's a dream to use for my own creative work.

Something about the smartphone makes me focus better, maybe the small screen.

I write for a career and have deadlines to make, and I find the smartphone incredibly useful for working through concentration dips. I can work sitting up, laying down, walking around. I can take my novel everywhere with me. The casual typing on a phone lessens the perfectionist pressure I feel when working on my laptop.

Ergonomically it's not the best option, but I pick my battles.

 

[big soft moose]

Keesha da sket was originally written on an old nokia dumb phone... so you definitely can, whether you should is debateable, i can't imagine it will be good for either RSI or eye strain

 

[Amontillado]

I've heard that production is now underway and my BYOK is shipping. That's a writing device, not the helpless sound one makes after drinking all the rancid Falstaff in the deer blind from back in '87.

Here's a link - BYOK. It's a smart phone sized hardware text editor. Long ago, I got a lot of good out of an Alphasmart Neo. It let me write anywhere and had a great keyboard. And the display was - well, I just can't say enough about how great the keyboard was.

Which is overly snarky of me. The display was fine. I didn't look at it that much, the keyboard was so easy for touch-typing.

I have high hopes for the BYOK. My iPhone covers the bases for minimalist writing but it's a lot more heart-rending to drop an iPhone overboard on your sailboat than a more disposable device. I'd hate to lose a $200 BYOK, but it would suck less than losing a smartphone.

I also bought a Freewrite when they first came out. There was a month or two between their kickstarter campaign and the first hint on their new web site there was no cursor navigation. If you made a typo three lines up, the options were ignore it or backspace three lines out of existence. That and other idiosyncrasies led me to give my Freewrite to a reviewer.

The Freewrite wasn't for me. With luck, I'll get some good out of the BYOK. If not, I'll drown my sorrows in rancid Falstaff. That would serve me right!

 

[Amontillado]

Feel free to scoff at my silliness. I got my BYOK.

Many would find the LCD display too limited and the LED lighting isn't smooth. I have some tolerance for such things. If my iPhone falls overboard, I'll forever have a sick feeling when I revisit that lake. The BYOK is less of a risk. That inspires a little bit of acceptance.

It's about the size of an iPhone. It optionally syncs with an online writing app and they are working on syncing with Google Drive.

I think my preferred setup will be to sync it to my Mac using its disk mode, using ChronoSync. That works great - after an update.

When I got it, I found a bug in the disk mode feature that made it pretty much useless as a USB drive. About 6 hours after alerting customer support, I got a reply they had replicated the problem and were testing a fix. Today, two days later, a firmware update was released fixing my bug and a couple of others. That's good support.

It updates itself automatically. Tell it to update the firmware and it takes care of the rest. The update was painless.

As to how much I'll actually use my new BYOK, that's to be determined and my iPhone plus BT keyboard will certainly be in heavy use.

That doesn't mean the BYOK isn't a serious tool. I remember a letter I wrote on an Alphasmart Neo at a local Whataburger that impacted a bureaucracy's policies. If the recipient had seen the "computer" I wrote it on or my surroundings while I was sounding off, I might not have been taken seriously.

Such is the nature of written communications. I don't have to wear a cummerbund to have impact.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

I write for a career and have deadlines to make, and I find the smartphone incredibly useful for working through concentration dips.

Well, there's one answer to the question, "Why?"

 

[Amontillado]

Pages on the iPhone has a Screen View setting that I initially overlooked. It's like Word's web layout view. Once in Screen View you can set the font as large as you need to see it without affecting your document's layout for print. It's not like editing on a laptop, but it's workable.

 

[Kallisto]

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.

I tried this idea myself. I used a blue tooth keyboard.

 

[Naomasa298]

Screen too small, buttons too small. I could maybe have done it on a Blackberry, not that I would have cared to.

 

[Amontillado]

I wrote an essay last night while waiting at Walmart for wife's order to be delivered. I used my Logitech Pebble Keys BT keyboard and Pages on my iPhone in screen view mode, with large text. The iPhone sat on the dash at some distance. Large text made that somewhat OK.

The keyboard worked fine. My lap didn't.

A better solution would be a dedicated fixture for the keyboard with space for maybe even a full size laptop or regular computer. I think I'll call that fixture a "desk". As soon as my patent goes through I'll be rich!

Quick tip for writing in your car - have the steering wheel removed. You won't be able to drive anywhere but the writing experience will be better.

And which do you need more, a means of navigating to traffic jams or a nice place to write?

On a serious note, if I were going to do much of this I'd look for a lap desk. Even a plastic kitchen cutting board would likely help for keyboard stability.