The Tools I Use For My New Novel

For the last seven months I’ve been working — on and off — on a new novel. And in fact, I didn’t even start until I’d found the following tools to jot down notes, organize notes and do the actual writing:

* “Moleskine notebooks”:http://www.moleskine.com/ – they’re rather expensive, but I don’t care because I’m so fond of the quality of the paper and cover, and the handy extras like the elastic closure and expandable inner pocket. I have both a small ruled notebook, which I try to take everywhere and use to jot down just about everything, and a large ruled notebook, in which I draft larger bits and pieces for my novel.

* “Voodoopad Lite”:http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/voodoopadlite.html – I use this freeware OS X application to organize all the notes that I copy down from my Moleskines. The interesting thing about the Wiki-style setup of Voodoopad — in which I create seperate but linked pages about different chapters, characters and ideas — is that because I’m organizing everything in an interconnected way, new ideas seem to pop up automatically, in an associative way.

* “CopyWrite”:http://www.bartastechnologies.com/products/copywrite/ – not a copywriting tool, as the name suggests, this OS X application is perfect for writing novels. It allows me to create different chapter ‘documents’ within the novel ‘project’, save different versions of each chapter, and do all of this without having to resist the urge of fiddling with the layout (stuff like the font and the white space inbetween paragraphs are set app-wide). I never use the full-screen mode, but I do turn off all the extra interface elements. A bargain at $30.