Pam Alison Knits

Creative writing practice
13th-19th July 2025

I thought it might be fun to review the creative writing pieces I’ve worked on this week. Care to come along with me?

Writing with Scrivener

I’ve been trying out a variety of software to see which I prefer for my writing. Just basic word processing using Apple “Word”? Even more basic Apple “Notes”? Massively complicated “Scrivener”? Something different – say, “Ulysses” which would do double duty to draft my blog posts? Give up on it all and just hand-write them? Ultimately, I’ve defaulted back to Scrivener because, despite being more complex than I need it to be, it does have the best combination of views for my taste. I like being able to mark entries with tags that I can set up to reflect the status of a piece (you can see all the pieces from last week are yellow which means they are still at draft stage). I could, of course, do this in Pages, but I’m pretty sure the tags are universal within the Mac ecosystem and I only need tags such as ‘draft’ or ‘review’ for my creative writing.

I suppose at heart I still adhere to the concept that you use different tools for different jobs, whereas modern software wants to be a multitool. It makes me uncomfortable. Scrivener is a very comprehensive writing tool, but it doesn’t also want to be your main word processing software, or run calculations for you, or store everything about your life, or sync with your calendar. So I run back to it and then I spend the next few months worriting away about not having set it up perfectly yet. It works, Pamela, leave it alone.

The week’s achievements

I wrote 6 pieces through the week. Although it would be nice to write every single day, I have set myself the goal of writing 5 days out of 7 each week. I won’t be writing the exact prompts I follow each day on the blog, since these are subject to copyright. I will mention enough for you to see where the prompts took my thoughts (or didn’t in some cases).

Sunday
Yet, on every planet she left some tiny piece of herself, just a few atoms of breath expelled from her lungs, and these fell upon barren ground and they bloomed.

Sunday’s prompt had me thinking about a person lost in the past. This aligned with the sci-fi idea that’s flitting around in a lot of my creative writing so I wrote about part of the back-story to that.

Wrote: 263 words.

Monday
But in the background of the photograph, beneath a bowler hat, a familiar face stared at the seated lady. The alarm even sounded like it was trilling “The Captain! The Captain!” 

Monday’s prompt was to write about a photograph. I was still thinking about my sci-fi idea and how a fugitive might be revealed in the background of a photograph.

Wrote: 509 words.

Tuesday
A well-trained dictator would learn to speak at a suitable pace. I mainly handled tapes from the board of directors so I didn’t often have to suffer the misery of the garbled rubbish from the lower ranks.

The prompt was to write about flying but it turned into a piece about office work in the 1980s. I had a lot of fun with it, dredging up memories of the sort of person I thought I could potentially be, though it turns out I wasn’t.

Wrote: 601 words.

Wednesday
It was as if the “till death do us part” bit of the marriage vows was the only thing which had stuck. Even apart, that thread connected them, a steel cable, never to be severed.

A prompt about betrayals had me writing rather a harsh piece which probably doesn’t fit in anywhere at all with the things I want to write. Some days are like that, though, and you just have to go with the flow and see what comes out.

Wrote: 556 words.

Thursday
I’m not feeling it tonight. I’m not sure what is up, either this isn’t the dream for today, or something else is on my mind. I can’t summon up the imagination, and the words are stilted, too explanatory. Maybe I am tired.

I wrote 343 words back on the subject of planes again, before coming to the above conclusion. When I don’t manage to write a piece that I feel is achieving my goal, I write about why and count that as part of the writing, too.

Wrote: 402 words.

Friday
But the ships running on solar winds could only go so far, for so long, then more efficient ways of powering the fleet came along and the clippers fell into legend.

A windy prompt for the evening and back to my space theme. Considering how much this is on my mind, I have to presume I am working towards something concrete.

Wrote: 588 words.

Conclusion

I did well this week. I wrote a total of 2,860 words and came up with some good ideas for my sci-fi story. There were a couple of days where I didn’t feel so happy with my writing, but that’s par for the course. In fact, being happy for 4 days out of 6 sounds like a pretty fine achievement to me.