The big thing I use is Scrivener*, the word processor that some writers adore to pieces (like me!)... and some writers hate with a passion. I forgot who, but a writer I follow on Twitter talked about his dislike for it. Hey, no hard feelings, writer friend. You work with what works for ya!
Ahem, either way, Scrivener is my main tool. I love the notecard feature, how each chapter/scene/whatever you wanna call it is organized like that. A giant corkboard! It's aesthetically pleasing. You can customize the colors of the pins, the labels you stamp on the cards (I have custom ones like "Incomplete" and "Kill it with Fire"), and folders upon folders for random-ass crap like character files and pics (I use a lot of stock photos to help me visualize them), pictures with a few descriptive paragraphs on certain locations (like real places or even fictional towns, like the one in Spiders), and a special folder of parts I've written but haven't found their places in the story yet.
[I talked about how I won a 50% coupon from winning NaNoWriMo in 2011. That's the "easy" way to get some savings off of the software if you already know you want it OMG. But there are free trials, so best to give it a test run before you throw money at it. But if you already want it for sure, the best way to save money is to do NaNoWriMo this year and write 50,000 words. You get the satisfaction of doing something great and fun, and you can get some awesome software on the cheap(er)!]
While I like writing on Scrivener's word processor portion, I love the sound of manual typewriters, so I often use Writer: the Internet Typewriter. Holy Moses, whoever created this, you are a saint unto humanity and should have a church built in your honor. You can customize it to make the sounds of a manual or electric typewriter, font size and style, even the background and text colors! I use white text against a blue background as a throwback to my early days messing around with WordPerfect for DOS on my grandfather's Tandy computer.
But converting text from the Internet Typewriter to Scrivener can cause some headache-making issues with formatting, so I open up Microsoft Word to fix the spacing, paragraph indents (more so on Scrivener), change straight quotes and apostrophes to smart ones, and of course check for spelling and grammar. I used to do a ton of my writing on Word, but I've all but abandoned it for my creative projects. I still use it for other things like making lists and job-hunting related work (e.g. resumes and cover letters).
I do all my writing on my laptop with an external keyboard that is solar-powered (not cheap, but it was awesome. Oddest impulse purchase I ever made, for sure!). I used to write a lot on my bed and using only the keyboard built into the laptop, but the screen hinge cracked earlier this year and I can barely move it around, let alone close it. That, besides the Vista software I still have (I know, I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me...) are the reasons I'm looking into getting a new laptop very soon. I've had this thing for over five years. That's above average for me. I usually replace things within two-three years. That's what working part-time and paying important bills will do to ya: make use of what you got. Until it breaks. See: my car, which is not only used but also turned 10 years old this year and is a model that doesn't even exist anymore.
So, writing peeps, what do you use to create words on computer screens? Do you go all out and have folders upon folders of writing with character files and pics of random buildings, or do you prefer the simpler WordPad just to get the damn thing down? Let me know in the comments!
*I use the Windows version, which is not as fully-stocked with awesomeness as the Mac version, but frequent updates are fixing this!
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