Itchy Bitesized 35: Ten Reasons to Write on a Big Monitor
Why and how being able to see more of your words at once makes your writing process more natural and effective.
Do you write in bed? In your car during lunchbreaks? In cafés? At the beach? At the kitchen table - and not because there’s nowhere else that isn’t covered in Lego, Plasticine, packets of denture fixative and tattered copies of Radio Times? Or because there is nowhere else? Your laptop is your faithful companion on your writing adventures, just as a car or a dog is on the non-writing equivalent.
Trust me, I really do know why working on a laptop makes sense - and it’s axiomatic, at This Itch of Writing, that every writer is different. But as someone who managed without a laptop at all for the best part of a decade, I want to suggest that it’s really, really worth working on a big monitor when you can. There are so many writing processes which are made clearer and more efficient, which is to say, more effective.
Don’t forget that you don’t need a whole desktop setup: it’s easy to hitch your laptop up to run the monitor, either in parallel with your laptop’s screen, or instead of it. I’m basing what follows on my experience of a 27” display, but 24” or 22”, or even smaller will still be infinitely more effective than the 14” or 16” of a laptop. These are some reasons why:
You can display three whole A4 pages at an easily readable 100%, side by side, on a 27” monitor. In that shot of mine, which has footnotes and widows-and-orphans disallowed, I can see 960 words at once: without those specifics, it’s over 1000. Even if your screen only really shows two pages at once at reading-size, it’s a godsend for both drafting and editing.
When you’re drafting, you have more of the scene immediately under your eye. It’s much easier to stay in touch with the pace and dynamic of the scene evolving under your fingers, when you can actually see all or at least much more of it.
It’s easy to get those crucial overviews that you need for editing by looking across the pages:
Does the story keep the reader on the hop, using fortunately-unfortunately, and then-but-therefore-but? For what it’s worth, I check that there’s some such reversal or change of gear about every page and a half: i.e. at least once and preferably twice per screenful
Does the rhythm and dynamic of the narrative look and feel right? If you’re consistent in how you set up your standard working page - font, line spacing, margins, paragraph indents - you develop an instinct for this. That’s also why I work in ‘page view’, so it looks the same on screen and on hard copy.
Is there there a balance of action, description and dialogue?
Do acres of dialogue and long individual speeches cause the narrative to lose touch with the physical presence and interaction of the actors in the scene?
Do slabs of description and scene-setting cause the narrative to lose touch with the forward movement of the story?
There’s enough height to show the full Word ribbon, or other toolbars or necessary interface gubbins, without losing an annoying amount of text. It makes formatting and editing so much less fiddly.
On a laptop, it’s impossible to have both the monitor at the right angle for your head, neck and upper back, and the keyboard at the right height and angle for your hands and forearms. With a freestanding monitor, it comes naturally - and you could add a separate or even ergonomic keyboard. Never underestimate the trouble (and physiotheraphy/osteopathy bills) waiting for the writer who ignores their body’s needs.
Any time you want to have research notes, another manuscript, another part of the same manuscript, or a website open alongside your main word processor window, you can, and still see your original ms page at full width. On a 27” monitor I can even see the comment balloons! Depending on the two programs involved, you can often also drag-and-drop stuff between them.
Programmes such as Scrivener benefit hugely from you having enough space to exploit them: you can use both split editing windows at a sensible reading/working width and both sidebars. I actually set one editing window to a width which matches my standard Word and printed pages, to stay with that sense of pace and shape, and use the other for the outliner, corkboard, or another section that I want to refer to.
You can scoot through two or three pages at a time, using PgDn and PgUp, to polish away tiresome formatting slips: Do your chapter headings all look alike? Have you actually numbered them correctly? Do those little postcripts to each chapter all start on a new page, as you’ve decided they should? With a slight zoom out you can survey six or more pages at once. No, agents and editors won’t reject a manuscript for such slips, but this kind of attention to detail says a lot about how seriously you take your writing - and that’s before we start talking about self-publishing.
The admin of the writing life - updating websites, wrangling email dates and details, ploughing through the social media work, processing images, preparing presentations - is all soooo much easier when you can have several programs and windows visible, working size and interactable-with, at once.
A webcam built into or clipped to the top of a big monitor will always be more flattering than a laptop camera looking up at you from below. Separate webcams tend to be higher resolution and have better microphones, too.
What it comes down to is that working on a large monitor helps you work more effectively and efficiently. Instead of all the to-ing and fro-ing between tabs or windows that you do on a laptop simply because of the smaller desktop, the things you need are all just there, in front of you.**
If that all sounds good, but your mind’s going but-but-but, some further thoughts:
You really don’t need a top-quality 4k or professional-level monitor to work comfortably on writing. Indeed, big, fierce monitors that prioritise gaming may not render text very sharply and a cheaper one will be better for you. Mind you, when you discover how big, good-quality monitors make working with Lightroom and other photo-processing software a joy, you might succumb. Just sayin’…
Monitors don’t cost nothing - but nor are they necessarily as expensive as you might think: a 24” Samsung that Which? calls great value is £69*. Their current highest-rated 27” monitor is an Apple, with a price to match, but the third-highest rated, a 27” Dell, is £157 - and on Ebay good-looking specimens of that one are under £100. Putting the word out among friends and family might yield one that’s being ditched in an upgrade, while Ebay, Backmarket and local second-hand tech and office equipment shops are all worth a look; there’s really not much to go wrong with a monitor, so there’s little danger in buying secondhand. Just be wary of Black Friday ‘deals’.
Larger monitors take up more space, obviously, but though wide they’re not deep. Just bear in mind that you may need to sit a bit further away to have the whole screen in your field of view. You might even find you could hang it on the wall or tuck it away in a ‘home office cupboard’
It may be possible to use your TV as a monitor, although the much lower pixel-density can be a problem, so it’s unlikely to be a long-term solution. That link goes into all the details.
Every writer is different, I know. But if you can find the money (or the upgrading friend or family) and the space, the only reason I can think of to resist getting a big monitor is the fear that once you have, you might never want to work on your laptop again. Except in bed, perhaps. Or on the beach.
*For the record, the only thing that’s tipped me into buying a laptop to replace my MS Surface tablet - think iPad Pro for the Windowsiverse - with its admirable keyboard, has been three weeks of marking students’ work while away from home: it’s agony on 12½”. But the 16” screen of my laptop is still not a patch on doing the same kind of work on 27” at home.