My personal favorite form of procrastination, when it comes to working on a novel, is angsting over what I’m going to use to write it. I have a friend who has written multiple (albeit short) novels longhand. In spiral-bound notebooks. And then painstakingly retyped them. My hand aches just imagining it.

I have had folks in writers groups tell me with supreme confidence that if you write your novel in Google Docs, Google owns it, and if it becomes a bestseller, they’ll steal it from you. I’ve known a lot of people who write novels in Google Docs. Some of those books have become quite popular. But I’ve yet to hear about a legal case where Google stole the rights to a published novel because it was drafted in Docs.

It’s possible they’re actually afraid of that happening. I’m not saying it couldn’t. But I think it’s much more likely they’re afraid of putting words on paper. Google can’t steal a book you never write, right?

Look, I’m not saying there aren’t legitimate concerns for writers. With the advent of generative AI, ensuring that your intellectual property isn’t going to be feeding some Skynet Authorbot is a legit worry. Free online software is great until it goes out of beta and starts costing a monthly maintenance fee. Or worse, never comes out of beta, and disappears entirely (along with your half-written manuscript). Desktop software goes obsolete, too (anybody else remember WordPerfect?)

But then again… all this worry is often just another way to avoid putting butt in chair and words on page. You can always back up your online draft to a text file. Or your desktop file to the cloud. Or both!

Bury copies of your drafts like pirate treasure in physical print-outs, on removable hard drives, or in loose-leaf notebooks like my friend. Scatter them to the four winds. Literally put them in bottles and send them out to sea.

You’re not really worried you’ll type out gold, and lose it. You’re worried you’ll type out crap, and be stuck with it. Or that the story that looks like gold in your head will turn to pyrite as it exits your fingers and becomes real.

And I hate to tell you, my friend, that fear is entirely justified. Because writing is mostly re-writing. It’s creating clay, then figuring out how to turn that gloppy mess into something, ideally, beautiful.

But creating clay from nothing is still a miracle, even if it initially looks like a pile of 💩.

So pick a tool. Any tool. As previously mentioned, I do not care how you write this novel. Come up with a mitigation plan for whatever could go wrong. Because there’s always something that could go wrong. Waiting to find the perfect tool is just a way of avoiding actually writing the damn book.

So pick a tool, and do the thing.