If you’re a pantser, this is for you.
The problem with us pantsers is that we like to work fast, and the only way to do that is to get it done.
Where a Michael Crichton might spend a year or two researching a book, we like to spend a minute or two.
Where a J K Rowling uses dozens of spreadsheets to work out her intricate plotting (some of which may not see the light of day until many books later), we plot our story arcs on the fly.
And where J R R Tolkien drew maps galore, and collaborated with his friend C S Lewis until he was sure he had it right before a single hobbit could be etched into history, we go blindly forward to the abyss without a care in the world.
Try as we might, pantsers just need a place to start writing. We don’t want spreadsheets, or complicated word-processors. All we need is a working title and a blank page headed ‘Chapter 1’.
When you think about it, that’s all any pure fiction writer needs. Pen and paper.
There’s still a problem though. Pen and paper means more work later transcribing it all, and work is one thing pantsers don’t need.
It’s not that we’re work-shy. We’re not. We love work – but it must be easy work. We fly when we’re in the zone.
We might start working at 7pm and not finish until 5am, exhilarated and exhausted, but that’s how we work (I do this when programming too – back in the day when I was a smoker, I’d emerge from my garden home-office shed with a whooshing sound as the smoke escaped its prison!).
We might also start at 3am and give up 10 minutes later for no good reason at all.
That’s just how we roll.
So we need a place where we can write once and not have to remember or do anything about it.
A spreadsheet or wordprocessor won’t do because we know how to forget whatever it was we started and where we put it on our maze-like hard drives.
We also don’t need some desktop based software because, well, you know, the machine crashes and you have to spend days trying to explain that you already paid for it and simply want to reinstall it with a new licence (and no, you’re not trying to rip them off).
And that means a web app. You go to the website, login, and continue where you left off. The only thing you need to remember is the URL (https://arc.cleararc.online)
The web app will remember the page you were at when you left, so you don’t need to.
It remembers the new character you just added and you can go straight back there by pressing G (for goto) and see all the other recent pages you were looking at as well.
So you flip to the Writer and carry on. Zero formatting options. No weird popups getting in the way (other than the help window, but that’s because you opened it manually by pressing its shortcut key: ‘?’)
Fiction (at least 99% of all fiction books I’ve ever read) don’t have formatting. They aren’t full of emboldened words, footnotes, indentations, or other aesthetic markers. They are just blocks of text signifying paragraphs.
About the only thing that does need formatting are chapter titles, and that’s done for you anyway.
The point being that we want nothing to GET IN OUR WAY!
We are pantsers. We know what we want. We know what to do. Just give us the tools we need and we’re away.
If you’d like to test drive Clear ARC. Sign up today and you get to try the full app for 14 days without paying a cent.
I wrote Clear ARC for me. That means it’s been tweaked and tweaked (and continues to be tweaked) to make my life easier.
If I want a new chapter, I press the ‘New Chapter’ button, name the chapter, and I’m straight back in the editor with the new chapter waiting to go.
I don’t need to remember to save my work because it is all autosaved. When I’m done I turn off the machine (or go somewhere else) – I don’t even need to log out. It knows where I got to.
If I want to start a new book (no matter where I am with the old book) I press Books > Add Book, and give it a title.
If I decide my new book will be part of a series, I click Series, name the series, then Books > my book and add it to the new series.
If I want to add a character, I click Characters > Add Character, name the character, and then add anywhere I like within my book (I could add it to the book itself, or specifically to an event inside a scene within a chapter.
And when I’m back in the editor, I can open all that meta-data I created in side panels so I have everything I need right in front of me.
And then, when I’m done with the writing, if I want, I can add front and back pages such as the title page, a legal page, a dedication page and so on.
I can even add back matter such as ‘Other books by the same author’ (or I could put that as an advert at the front along with a string of testimonials).
And finally I can hit the export button, which creates a stand-alone file I can view in any browser complete with tabs for the story itself (cut and paste straight into Kindle or any other publishing platform), front and back matter pages, characters, places, and items.
You don’t need anything else once you have a Clear ARC account.