Freelance writer and novelist.
The best thing I have ever done for my fiction writing was download the Scrivener beta for Windows. The first time I looked at that screen, I felt like a “real” writer, like the program was designed to get the book out of my brain and into the document. I didn’t even get into a lot of the real novel-writing features, this was purely a reaction to the layout and design of the page - I wanted to see my words in that space.
And if that wasn’t enough, Scrivener took things up a notch by having a space for note-taking on the right hand side. I have to write in a lot of different places, so keeping paper nearby for notes is a pain, and keeping another document open on my laptop means I get distracted by switching between windows. In Scrivener, I could jot down anything that floated to mind without leaving my novel document, and I had all my little ideas on hand when I needed them.
I look forward to buying the full release version of Scrivenerfor Windows in 2011, I feel like I owe the designers for creating such a fabulous tool for my writing. Thanks, Literature & Latte!