Writing Tools

I started to talk about tools while doing my World Building blogs, but realized it was too much of a tangent, so this blog is a supplement to that series, as well as general housekeeping-for-writers advice.

There are several different schools of thought for what program to write your novel in.  I’ve found that some people don’t really care while others will fanatically try to draw you into their cult-of-whatever.

I use Word simply because it has all the fancy tools I could ever hope to want when simply writing words and it’s easy to track my daily progress as far as words written.  Not all programs have a spell check, which is why I prefer Word over another free program, yWriter.

Now, I do use yWriter during NaNoWriMo because I don’t want to be distracted with things like misspelled words, sentence fragments or anything fancy at all.  However, yWriter has some seriously cool organizational tools.  In each project, or novel in the program, you have tabs to record important Items, Locations, Characters, Notes and divide your scenes and chapters up for easy navigation.  You can even keep track of each Scene as far as the Goal:Conflict:Outcome, or the day and time.  yWriter is provided free by Spacejock.

Scrivener has been out for some time for Mac users, but as of late 2010 there is a Beta version out for Windows based programs.  Currently you can use the Beta version from update to update without having to pay for it, but eventually it will be a program to buy.  I wrote in Scrivener for a while, and I think that when they settle on it and put it out for sale I might try it again.  There are some things that I didn’t like very much, but it gives you a lot of options for keeping research notes, characters, pictures and note cards on hand in one handy program.  It’s worth downloading the Beta and testing out!

The one program I am almost fanatical about is Microsoft’s OneNote.  You divide your projects up into Notebooks with tabs.  A lot of people organize and use it in different methods, so I’ll spare you how I set mine up.  It’s a handy program to paste and organize things in.  One of the things that stole my heart about it is that it saves automatically. You. Never. Ever. Have. To. Press. Save.  Because it’s already saved it for you!

This bit isn’t a program, it’s a template provided free of charge by the amazing Lynn Viehl, author of science fiction and romance and tons of other genres.  On the Freebies section of her blog, she has her Novel Notebook template in .pdf format for free.  I’ve copied this and pasted it into OneNote to create a template.

Dropbox.  Oh man, how my life was incomplete until I found out about this!  Dropbox allows you to have a shared file between computers.  You can even share that file between several computers, or even lots of your friends!  You can trade music, video files, documents – anything!  It’s super handy and you don’t have to keep those USB drives handy.

So those are a few programs and freebies I’ve used.  I’m going to use the Lynn Viehl template and walk through parts of it in my blogging series.

Hope that’s helpful!