Normally, I draft my stories in Scrivener — often regarded as the gold standard in writing software for novelists. But as time goes by, we keep hearing about sites and software ending up in digital graveyards.

Not that I think Scrivener will be going away any time soon, but as long as computers, big tech companies, and capitalism exist, it’s always going to be a possibility. Given a long enough time period, no one is too big to fail.

But there are perhaps some things that are too small, too old, too ho-hum to fail quickly. In this case, I’m talking about plain text.

Plain text is readable by just about every application you can think of, and there’s no shortage of applications that can read it — with new ones popping up all the time. Plain text is a quiet revolution that’s ticked along since the dawn of personal computing. Any computer scientist will tell you that every digital file is, at the heart, a plain text file.

Every now and then I dare to peek inside the guts of a Scrivener file, and am astounded by how hard it would be to manually pick out a scene if I wanted to. A Scrivener file is actually a bundle of different files — some of which are my story scenes, while others are full of funky code, presumably to tell the Scrivener app what to do.

If Scrivener were ever to no longer be the Scrivener I know and love, I’d need to scramble to get my writing into a format I can easily continue to work on with another type of software.

So just to get familiar with a different system, in case the unthinkable happens, I decided to try writing The Guy from the Wedding using a plain-text editor called Obsidian.

It’s an interesting app, and the writing is going okay so far. I like that even though it naturally has fewer features and tools than Scrivener, it’s very snappy and straightforward to work in — the way a plain-text editor should be!

One feature I thought I would use more from the get-go is the interlinking. I’m sure that’ll come up over the course of inspecting the story threads more closely, but for now it’s just a nice-to-have that I’ve not found a purpose for yet. Maybe my story itself is too simple to need links off to my research notes. Or maybe I just need to get with the program 😆

No one’s paid me to write this post, by the way. I just wanted to share a little of where I’m up to with my writing process. Trying out this new take on old technology is a leap of faith. I’m nervous about how Obsidian might fail to export my manuscript into the proper format, but I have some pro tips from writers who are smarter and nerdier than I. Fingers crossed it’ll all work out!