My Digital Toolbox

I think this phrase was coined by Stephen King in his fantastic book On Writing – half autobiography, half writing book, both halves fantastic. Since then, many people have talked about the writer’s toolbox and what they have in theirs.  I’ve actually got two toolboxes which I dip into when I’m writing. I’ve got what I call my digital toolbox – that would be all of the computer programs I use to write; and my analog toolbox – my worksheets.  Today I’m going to tell you about my digital toolbox, next week the analog.

My newest toy, er, tool in my box is Scapple. I have to admit I haven’t had a lot of chance to play with this yet because they’ve only just released the PC version, but it looks really interesting and potentially very useful. It is basically a blank piece of paper. You can create notes on it and link them together with lines or arrows (going in one direction or both). This is terrific for people who like to mind-map (although my mind is much more top down, I can certainly see the appeal). And for me, I’m going to use it to map out my story structure because I can create a W structure with it and have it be all pretty and colorful. I’m thinking of having one style of box (you can fill in the box with a color and change the color of the text within the box) for my protagonist and another for my antagonist. This way I can map out both of their character arcs and the story as a whole and show the overlapping structures since it can be tricky to blend all the different plots and subplots of a story together. I really think this tool will be perfect and produce some pretty and more legible structure graphs than my handwriting.

My other new-ish tool is by the same company that produces Scapple, Scrivener. So many people have been raving about Scrivener for years and I’ve nodded and thought that maybe some day I’d give it a try. Well, that day happened early this summer when it went on sale and I could justify spending some money on something that I wasn’t sure I would really use. Well, so far, I’ve detailed out two books on Scrivener and I’m working on a third. Yes, they are books I’d already written but which needed extensive editing. It was really fantastic to be able to see (on the virtual cork board) how my story mapped out. I love using 3×5 cards or sticky notes on a storyboard to map out my books. This was exactly that, only in virtual form so it was easy to manipulate and shift around.

There are many more features of Scrivener I haven’t even begun to play with – keeping notes, worksheets, and pictures in one place associated with a particular book, and even formatting (although I don’t know that I could ever give up the control I’m used to having by formatting my books directly into HTML, but I think I may be able to export a Scrivener file to HTML too!).

I do have to admit, despite Scrivener’s awesomeness, I still use Microsoft Word for my editing. It has track changes and allows comments – two functions that I simply cannot live without. So, I think I’ll be doing a blending of tools using Scrivener to write my first draft (because it keeps track of word count which is awesome!) and then editing my work in Word.

And finally, I’m discovering the wonderful organizational benefits of OneNote. That’s a program that usually comes with Microsoft Office. For years I’ve been using it to keep track of shopping receipts (because it’s super-easy to highlight an internet page and save it to OneNote) and other personal information (you can add security to your notes by requiring a password to open a particular note). But recently I’ve been collecting a lot of terrific blog postings into OneNote. These range from writing tips, to publishing tips, to the state of the current market – all things which I’ll want to use in both my own work and teach in my classes. With OneNote, I’ve set up a separate notebook to hold all of the blogs and organized them into tabs by class (Chapter One, my beginning writing class which covers Characters, GMC, Story Structure and Setting; Craft of Writing, which covers Dialogue, Show and Tell, POV, Pacing, Voice and Editing; Publishing where I give a low-down of the publishing industry currently and teach how to format; and Start Write where I teach how to organize yourself for writing). Within the tabs, I’ve got sections for each topic. I just copy and paste the blog post into a new page wherever it belongs. Easy-peasy!

So, what are your favorite writing programs? What are the tools in your toolbox that you love?