How I write – Planning and Plotting
Hello and welcome to the first in a five part series detailing the apps, service and sites I’m using to keep me firmly on the road to writing success. I’ve loved gadgets, gizmos and general geekdom since apps were called programs and the net was affectionately known as The Information Superhighway (seriously, who came up with that?!) and, as you’ll see, the sheer amount of useful services I’ve been using proves I not changed a bit since the heady days of dial-up.
On that point, living in South Korea affords me one of the fastest wi-fi connections in the world. I get 96mb at home and, thanks to an advanced digital infrastructure, I can connect to free wi-fi all over the city, including the subway system (on which I can also get phone signal). It puts London, my hometown, to shame. All these internet waves flying through the air allow me to use all of the apps below on my laptop, phone and tablet, making me far more productive than I’d be just working from home.
Evernote – Reference and Notetaking
‘Ideas are like butterflies; they may land, but they soon take off again. Write them down!’
- Brian Seaward, Managing Stress.
That sounds like something Winnie the Pooh would say. Most of my ideas tend to come when I switch my brain off. I’m not sure if it’s a common phenomenon, but my ‘muse’ tends to turn up at the most inconvenient times; when I’m in the gym, on a night out, teaching in the classroom etc. Thankfully, I always have Evernote in my pocket to jot down a little reminder in one of the notebooks, so I don’t forget something could develop into a masterstroke of an idea. Evernote then syncs to my other devices allowing me to work on the idea the next time I fire up my laptop.
Evernote helps to organise your notes and documents into notebooks (folders) and notes like so :
Notebooks can be filed under other notebooks to make related ‘stacks’ and each note can be tagged to allow for even faster searching. Notes can be comprised of text or other file types and, outside of writing, I use it to organise invoices, scanned copies of other documents amongst other things. I use the Premium version (which I luckily got a year’s free subscription to via O2) allows document sharing, handy if collaborating with other authors or cover designers, and offline notebooks in case you’re not living in a cloud of fluffy, pink internet bliss like me. I’d say the free features are enough for most users.
Evernote works well with a number of other apps, including this one…..
Penultimate – Sketching
‘All art is but dirtying the paper delicately,’
- John Ruskin, The elements of drawing.
Not it isn’t; sometimes it’s but smudging your tablet until you have something that resembles the thing you hoped it would. Penultimate, one of Evernote’s sister apps, allows me to ‘draw’ (for want of a better phrase) something resembling an aspect of my novel, like so:
Someone’s been murdered amongst those scribbles!
This is a very basic sketch of an area from ‘Redback,’ my second novel. I’ll add locations as they come up in the book and my artwork will only improve with practice! The annotations are done with another program, ‘Skitch’, which is useful for adding arrows, emoticons and text to various file types. I use a stylus with it, which make it far easier to work with than trying to use my clumsy fingers; years of playing video games as a teen rendered them useless for anything remotely artistic. Incidentally, some people use stylus’s like these to write notes on their tablets, but I find this far too unwieldy. Penultimate allows me to save my drawings, alongside my text notes in my Evernote notebooks and cuts out having to use pen and paper and scan it all in.
Mindnode – Organising thoughts
‘Do one thing everyday that scares you.’
- Eleanor Roosevelt
That quote doesn’t have anything to with Mindnode; I just like it. Unless, of course, you’re scared of spider diagrams. They’re rarely called that anymore, probably due to the difficulty in marketing something named after creatures most of the world has a phobia of. They’re often called brainstorms, ‘thought showers’ or mind maps. Every so often, as with most things, some clever marketing type will rename it and sell essentially the same product under a different heading. I don’t know about you, but given the choice between being showered in other people’s thoughts or trying my luck with the spiders, I’ll take a slice of Tarantula tart to go.
Mindnode allows you design diagrams featuring topic hubs that develop off into various tangents and help you see your ideas develop in a very visually appealing way. As ever, a picture paints a thousand words, so here’s my initial plan for the first six months of the website (you’ll have to open it in a new tab to have a proper read):
I’ve deliberately omitted prices from the posts in this series as they are in no way intended as a sales pitch, or even to push you in any particular direction with regards to the way you work. I like these kinds of thing as I’m a bit geeky, maybe a little pretentious with my overuse of gadgets, but do genuinely find them useful. In reality, the essential, barebones features of the apps above can be replicated with a pen and paper. Authors far superior than I have produced works that shook the world with just those two simple tools. The mental processes, techniques and methods presented are more important than apps used to produce them.
It’s been a brief rundown as I know you’re busy, eager to return to your blossoming manuscripts or half-finished chapter in your latest page turning purchase, so if you’d like any further detail on anything above, post a comment below and I’ll answer as best I can.
If you’re looking for more plotting inspiration, check out this fun and informative article by @theryanlanz on plotting styles.
What apps do you use? Prefer pen and paper to today’s tech? Maybe you paint the feet of local squirrels and let them run around your driveway until they spell out that perfect opening sentence?
Let us all know below. There’s no judgement here!
