Keeping Track Of Your Words

Keeping Track Of Your Words 

If you’re writing as a hobby, it’s easy to get away with a notepad with your jottings, or a single word document or folder. But when you write professionally, or have aspirations to, it’s really easy to get swamped and lose sight of everything.

So, you need to keep track of everything you write. I’ve learned the hard way, and on lazy days, continue to write and learn the hard way about organising.

How To Keep Track Of Your Writing: Problems

Ideas come to you at strange times, and in strange places. Until sometime in the middle of 2014, I was a paper person and a computer person. The problem with that is that firstly, there was no central ideas repository, and secondly, you aren’t always at your computer and paper is notorious for being difficult to keep track of.

So I played around with solutions.

Enter the beginning of 2015, and I have a dictaphone app on my phone and tablet, I have evernote on all my devices, I have pens, paper, post-it notes, the computer, and an array of idea capturing `devices so that I can capture ideas at all times. So the first part of the problem was solved.

Making those things centralised is a pain in the behind though.

In summary though:

I use a Samsung Galaxy Tab for travelling, and I have an old Sony Xperia smartphone for when I don’t have the tablet.

For dictation and recording, I use Dragon Naturally Speaking. It’s great for ideas, but the amount of training you’d need for final drafts means I don’t use it for that.

I use Evernote for writing when I don’t need to be at the computer. This syncs my tablet, phone and pc together.

I use Excel for a publishing schedule that is also on evernote and printed out.

That is idea collection. Now for centralising.

Again, evernote is the free place to start. Evernote allows you to save notes into the program and access those notes on any device with evernote installed.

Microsoft Office is also essential. You can search word documents for content, as you can with evernote. This is a crucial feature, because otherwise you’ll find that you have to exhaustively title alll of your files. You don’t want to waste time looking for things. If I know I’ve written an article about a particular computer game, then that might not be in the title of the document but I still need it.

Excel is a lifesaver, because you can drop titles, word counts, client names and payment information into a single spreadsheet.

A final piece of software that is great for authors is Scrivener” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>Scrivener
. I’ll come back to Scrivener in a review at another time, because it has hundreds of awesome features.

But for organisation, it’s great. It’s like a Pro-Tools for the publishing industry. You set up a project, and it allows you to have multiple folders within your document. This is great for researching books and keeping that research and worldbuilding information away from the body of your text, whilst not having research files sprawl across your computer like an infestation.

Those are a great place to start. Quick topic today as I have a lot to get done!