Recommended Tools
You could write in almost anything, from a scrap of paper to a full-featured word processor.
But certain writing tools are naturally better for creative writing.
Things You Will Need
- Autosave: Nothing is worse than losing what you have written. It's a surefire way to kill off your desire to work on an idea any further. Whatever tool you use, if it doesn't autosave, you are asking for trouble.
- Cloud Syncing: This is like autosave times ten. If you are saving all your writing in just one place, that's only one dead hard drive or lost device away from zero copies. There are so many cloud storage services now that having at least one should be simple.
- Wordcount: Writers think in words; publishers think in pages. A single font change or tiny tweak to the margins will reflow all your pages into some entirely different number, so think in number of words, and use something that counts them instantly for you.
Things You Won't Need
- Page Layout: If you are making your words look pretty, you are focussing on the wrong thing. Do not spend time adding page numbers and chapter titles to your headers or playing with the margins to make a certain paragraph break nicely across a page break. In fact, it's better if your words are just in one endless scrolling view with no page breaks at all, honestly.
- Fancy Fonts: Similarly, even if you are working in plain text in a single endless flow of text, you should not worry about how nice your early drafts work. Your first draft will be kind of ugly, so it's appropriate that it also looks kind of ugly. Don't use a fancy script font or a formal serif font; Courier is traditional.
- Too Much Structure: There are lots of tool for arranging all the parts of your book and tracking all your characters and taking notes on all your worldbuilding details. That's all great, but those are parts of a later stage of the writing process. Early on, you want to just get words written down and get a feel for the story, so try to stay fluid. Don't be afraid to just leave a big gap and a note that actually this is what happened earlier and move on from there.