From the category archives:

Writing Tools

National Novel Writing Month

Interesting Tidbits

Well it’s here again.  The National Novel Writing Month begins November 1st.  For 30 days the goal is to write 50,000 words by midnight November 30th.  In honor of this, and for those Mac fans out there, Jason Snell over at Macworld has put together a short list and video review of writing tools to [...]

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How To Keep Track of Your Ideas

Writing Tips

As a writer, how do you keep track of your ideas? Especially when you are bombarded with them during the day?  This is the opposite of writer’s block.  So what do you do?
I once read an interview where Stephen King talked about having a drawer full of scraps of paper.  Each paper contained a thought [...]

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MindMapping Your Way to Greatness

Writing Tools

I recently started a research project on an early 20th century writer.  His body of work meant that I had a tremendous amount of data to collect. At first the prospect of compiling it all was daunting. Should I gather it all in separate documents or outlines?  What I was looking for was themes in [...]

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Hats Off (again) to Scrivener

Writing Tools

I’m a diehard fan of Scrivener. If you don’t know what Scrivener is or what it looks like you can visit its website.  And no… this is not any sort of paid endorsement.  I’ve spoken about Scrivener before and find myself going back to it over and over again.  When something strikes me as being indispensable [...]

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Backing Up Is Your Best Defense

Writing Tips

I had a friend, let’s call him Leo, who was writing what he considered his masterpiece. Now Leo had been working on his novel for months.  He’d get up early in the morning, fire up his laptop, and allow his creative, caffeine-induced juices to flow.  He was almost done when one morning everything changed.  It [...]

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MindMap Your Novel

Writing Tools

Outlines serve their purpose.  But what if your novel has a literal cast of thousands? How do you keep track of them and the places they habit? There’s an answer.  Mindmap!  
Huh?
There are different software solutions on the market that will allow you to mindmap your novel to your heart’s content. My latest favorite is [...]

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So You Want to Be an Expert

Writing Tips

Here’s a common dilemma. I had an idea for a book in which one of the main characters was the sheriff of a very small town. The problem was I knew nothing about it. What was life like for a sheriff? What fills their days? Is it anything like Andy [...]

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The Write Stuff

Writing Tools

The pen might be mightier than the sword, but which pen is the victor?
For those Mac aficionados out there I ran across a great article comparing Word 2008 to Pages ‘08. It comes right on the heels of my post a few days ago regarding Scrivener.
Spoiler Alert: It appears to me that Pages may [...]

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The Write Tool

Writing Tools

When you’re ready to craft the next great novel what program do you rely on? Are you an MS Word fan, or do you despise all things Microsoft and turn to the world of the Mac allowing Apple’s Pages to capture the denizens of your imagination? There are choices out there. I [...]

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