Hesitance

I’m old enough to remember hand writing papers for high school. Sometimes I typed them up and printed them, but I didn’t start doing that exclusively until college. Today, I hardly write anything on paper, since the place I need it to be is on the computer anyway.

I use Google Drive to store my documents. All of them. Hardly any of my writing is stored on my computer’s hard drive, and the reason is simple: I don’t trust it.

Those three heartbeats worth of blind panic when you’re not daring to breathe as though that would bring back your lost file is not a moment that I enjoy living through. I’ve lost plenty of homework and personal writing work because the computer I was working on decided to die forever.

That Vader-esque “NOOOOOOO” feeling is not pleasant, nor is the look on the professor’s face when you’re asking for an extension to re-write what your computer lost, the one that is trying to decide whether the bags under your eyes are there because you waited until the last minute (and let’s face it, you did) or if they are truly evidence of your frustration with the faith which you put in your computer.

So my reluctance to use a writing program that stores things on my hard drive instead of my computer is understandable. I’ve heard that Scrivener is a really great program. It certainly looks interesting, with its vows to organize everything from various projects and its zillions of folders, but I’m still hesitant.

One thing I know I can’t do with Scrivener is easily share something online. And I can’t work on a problem sentence in the same document at the same time as my writing partner. Those are things I can do in with Google Drive.

I’m happy with the way I work. Learning a whole new software program seems like a lot of work for who knows how much gain. And what if my computer dies and loses all of everything? There’s no ‘undo’ button for a crashed hard drive.

I’m not sure about Scrivener yet. We’ll see… I’ll reserve judgement for when I’m done with this 80 page tutorial.