How to use this Page

If you’re looking for some good writing technique books or online courses, I highly recommend Holly Lisle’s books and courses. I have her Create a Character Clinic, Create a Plot Clinic, and How to Write Page-Turning Scenes, and I’m seriously looking at her How to Revise Your Novel online workshop. Her books and courses are easy to understand and relate to, written in a conversational, approachable style, and full of useful information with an understanding of psychology and emotional depth and layers. She has a fresh way of presenting material, and it’s based on her years of experience writing and editing fiction (she has more than 23 novels published). I think I can always learn to make my writing better, deeper, more powerful…so I’m glad when I find more that helps my work. I hope these’ll help you, too!

Lately I’ve really been wanting software that allows me to easily organize all my notes, research, photos for characters, emails, etc for the manuscripts I’m working on. I use MS Word to write my novels (since I have to deliver it through MS Word–it’s industry standard), but it’s cumbersome and non-intuitive to add all the extra information that comes up while you’re writing or editing a draft.

I was putting links to research articles, character names and meanings, photos that felt like they fit my characters, all at the bottom of my manuscript, but it was a pain to sort through. And then I had a separate file for notes on what I wanted to add or change or do a separate edit for in the novel, and character names, descriptions, etc for all the characters of all my books…and it just got to be hard to sort through all the material. I also have so many bookmarks of great articles and information that I don’t want to lose–but that become hard to find. I was using OneNote for a while (which comes with MS Office), but it didn’t feel intuitive or easy to use, somehow.

And then I remembered a program I’d tried years ago. It hadn’t quite worked for me then, but it’s gotten so much better–in fact, I think it may be my dream software.

What is it? You guessed it–Evernote. And it’s free. It’s also easy to use, does all the things I want it to do, and things I hadn’t even thought of yet that are super appealing. There’s also a handy web clipper tool that you can add to most browsers. I easily installed it for Chrome and it works perfectly.

A few things I love about Evernote. You can:

• use it on all your various computers and phones, including Windows, Mac, and Android, and through their website
  
  
• sync everything in Evernote through all your devices and access it on any of them. So once you’ve entered something from one place, it’s automatically updated on all your devices, including online. That means you can use it at home, on the go, at a friend’s house–basically anywhere that has internet access (or, if you don’t have internet access but still have your tablet/laptop, there, too.)
  
  
• easily and quickly clip any article online
  
  
• create separate notebooks to easily organize all your various projects or topics (this works very well for the way my brain works)
  
  
• forward or send emails to Evernote, even to specific notebooks
  
  
• drag and drop photos, video, even music
  
  
• easily search and find articles, research, etc that you want–even *text within a document* (which is crucial to me; sometimes I forget what I titled a document and where I stored it)
  
  
• tag any note with tags that make sense to you
  
  
• have everything all in one place AND see everything easily. I love that all the different forms of media can all be accessed in one program (and within specific notebooks), with a file-like list on the left, the articles and notes down the middle, and new notes on the right. SO easy to see and find everything I want!
  
  
• attach paper notes (just take a photo and send it to Evernote) and audio notes
  
  

The ways I’m using it so far as a writer (and I’m only on my second day):

The Mandeville Special Collections Library has scans of more than 400 cartoons that Dr. Seuss drew during WW II.
It’s cool to see cartoons that Dr Seuss drew, not from his books but in newspapers during wartime. You can clearly see his style–it’s so vivid–which to me is also like an author’s voice. If an artist or an author has a strong enough voice, you can pick it out anywhere. And that’s one of the things (in my opinion) that make a great writer or artist.

Found via Huff Post