I recently (finally) moved a bunch of my poems and short stories and other writings off of Google Docs and into a git repo of text files. Right now I’m editing them with VSCode or Zed, which I just found and like so far. Both are fine but not really geared toward writing not-code. What have y’all found that you like writing in?
Interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing them. I assumed that you would want to have file versioning out of the way and focus on the writing. What about keeping a sort of change log (diary, if you want) as part of the document itself, like an appendix? That way you could maybe separate raw document history from the creative process.
Git is a technical tool intended for versioning sharing, manipulating and comparing pieces of code. I’m not sure that you need all those aspects for literary work. I imagine that writing a poem is more linear in the sense that you won’t merge a poem branch back to the “main” version of the poem. At least not in the way you would do it with code. You will also probably not submit or accept patches to the poem. So maybe the commit messages are not necessarily the best place to keep “creative metadata” about the content.
Just some random thoughts. I guess that you’ll have to try and see what method fits your creative process best (the natural trend you mentioned). Good luck!
Thanks! it’s probably not the best tool, but it’s one I’m familiar with. I love diving into commit histories and reading what developers say in their commits (especially giant corporate private projects where they’re so sure no one will ever read them… I read them 👻) and I really wish I could look at, to pick one at random, Tolkien’s commit history and see how the work evolved over time. Of course we have his diaries but there’s something very specific and personal about seeing a specific change to a line, or a word, that I’ve seen in code and wish I could see in other written media. That’s what I want to capture with my writing. If I ever do publish a book of poetry or short fiction (or a novel, assuming I ever finish one 😓) I imagine I’ll cut a release branch for posterity and keep editing them if I so desire, but that decision feels like a long way off.
Long-term, I want to write a tool for collaborative storytelling that incorporates a VCS like git but in a way that’s a lot more accessible to writers who aren’t also developers. git is a cool tool but it’s intimidating for non-devs and with good reason. Part of what I’m doing is figuring out a workflow that works for me, and then maybe I’ll build an editor that makes that workflow easier.