Oh come on. Of course you can't. At least I couldn't. I'd go mad. No proper editing, no change tracking, no <em>oomph. </em>My books come in at around 125K words a pop. You think I can write all that lot on a coffee table toy?

Mind you, that's not to say you can't write <em>parts</em> of a book on an iPad. Chunks jotted down here and there. That I can buy. I just did it on a 90 minute flight to Florence. Here's how.

<!--more-->First things first. The iPad has lots of writing apps (I've bought a few myself). Most stink. Not through any great fault of their own but because the iPad stinks when it comes to serious writing. It's the keyboard. It's made for children. You have to switch to the numeric keyboard to find the apostrophe/quote marks/brackets. Clearly someone on Apple's dev team doesn't read or write much. If they did they'd have noticed how often these small typographical things come up. I would have to have switched seven times for this paragraph alone and that's (oops make that eight -- no ten now with the brackets) and that's (eleven/thirteen) plain ridiculous.

Apostrophes, quotes and brackets aren't bizarre characters or phonemes from some exotic language. They're part of plain everyday prose. You shouldn't have to switch to an entirely new keyboard to type them (please fix, Apple, or at least offer an option. If a small developer in Japan can do that you can surely).

The awkwardness of that puts me off writing at length outside a paragraph or two. Or it did until I found IAWriter, a cheap little minimalist app that does not a lot more except type text but comes with an extended keyboard. You can see it below.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/reading-time.jpeg"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-6198" title="reading-time" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/reading-time.jpeg?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="480" /></a>

Important punctuation marks! Cursor keys (even if left and right only)! Someone noticed!

Good for <a href="http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/writer-for-ipad/" target="_blank">Information Architects</a> who produced this software. All it does is write really, in a single font, without formatting or choice of layout. Words and words alone which can then be emailed or sent to Dropbox so you can import them into something else.

How much did I write on the plane? About five hundred words or so. And note: these were words that were in my head already. I used IAWriter to set them down. In that sense this thing is a handy notepad, not a writing tool in its own right. I like it for jotting down quick notes and first draft short scenes in situations where I can't pull out a laptop. And that's it. Whatever IAWriter claim about this way of writing cleansing your mind... well it doesn't work like that for me. I'd go mad if  anything of length was in this thing. No undo, no up and down cursor keys, no... well, it's that word oomph again. I write full-length books. I need some horsepower. The rather odd focus mode, below, which allows you to pull up the last three lines you wrote and focus on them and nothing else doesn't ring any bells here at all I'm afraid.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/focus2.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-6203" title="Focus2" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/focus2.png?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="298" /></a>

There's also the distinctly holier than thou attitude of the designers (sorry -- but I get annoyed when software engineers tell people how they should write). Alongside some basic instructions they then go on to advise you to forget about (yuk dude!) Microsoft Word as a final revise application and use something like Adobe InDesign instead. They clearly know absolutely nothing about book publishing. If I sent an editor or agent an InDesign file they'd come straight back and say, 'What the hell is this?'

And quite right too. Word is the lingua franca of text publishing. Live with it.

But IAWriter is pretty good for getting things down straight on the iPad screen keyboard. I did try it with my Apple Bluetooth physical keyboard too but that felt to odd for me. I mean -- it was just a dismembered laptop then, wasn't it? And not a very good one.

So I wrote my 500 words or so and then discovered that I was sitting next to a very interesting designer from a famous shoe company in New York. Since we took off from Heathrow she'd sketched something like fifteen different shoe designs with nothing more than a drawing pen and paper. That's the way to do things really (and she'd just got off the plane from the US). Me with an expensive electronic toy, she with a pen and a notepad. Her productivity beat mine hands down.

Word sketching... that about sums it up. And really, watching the woman in the seat next to me happily dash off design after design for shoes, all with nothing but a pen and paper, I wish, I <em>wish </em>I could do it that way. But after all these years I can barely read my own writing. So I can't and if a tablet with a little writing app -- iPad, Android, Windows, whatever -- helps me manage a little of that instead, then great. I'll tap out a few words in odd moments when I feel like it then  transfer the results onto my laptop to be polished in a proper piece of writing software.