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Writing Tools I Use All The Time

My go-tos for reporting, research, and writing

Clive Thompson
Age of Awareness
Published in
8 min readOct 31, 2022

Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash

Every once in a while someone asks me — what tools and apps do you use in your writing?

After giving that answer a couple of dozen times, I realize I should probably just write it down, so that it’s all in one place.

So: Here we go!

A throat-clearing preamble: I’m a nonfiction writer. Mostly I write long-form magazine pieces, books, and a Niagara of blogging. So long before I do any “writing”, I do a massive amount of research: I pore over books and reports and interview people, taking notes all the while. The tools below are focused heavily on the reporting-and-gathering-info process, far more than on “the act of crafting sentences”. So if you’re writing novels or screenplays, this list may not be useful for you.

(BTW, if you dig this piece, it’s part of a series I’ve been doing on nonfiction writing techniques.)

Forthwith, here’s A Guide To The Nine Essential Tools For My Reporting And Writing …

1) Scrivener

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Age of Awareness
Age of Awareness

Published in Age of Awareness

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Clive Thompson
Clive Thompson

Written by Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net

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Brilliant stuff. Back in the day, there was just me and my trusty cassette tape recorder. I travelled the world interviewing people and always had the trauma of translating my recordings when I got back. It took an age! In the ten years I wrote for…

Thanks for the nice list. I've been using GitHub "issues" for note taking which is rather impressive. It has links, image uploads, and connections to code artifacts. And it's all cloud based, for free.
Then FrameMaker for full book creation is the…

Scrivener is brilliant! I dropped Notion for Milanote, fabulous free-form canvas to bring in various media, note cards and long-form content.