Articles specifically about writing, including but not limited to: characters, scene-building, descriptions, style, tone, voice, methods, note-taking, research, world-building, monologue, dialogue, pacing, filtering…
Why “Building”? Why not “Creating” or “Designing”? Building feels like the better verb here, because although this is the first map I’ve made, it felt like I was building a house. It has foundations, structure and decoration. So the analogy stands. It also feels like a good way to explain what I did, starting from the ground up, as it were.
Wait. I have to critique other people’s writing before I can get my work critiqued? What madness is this? Scribophile’s karma system is anything but mad, it’s exceedingly clever and I wish I had thought of it first.
Writing a book was one of the coolest project I’ve ever worked on, and I learned so much about myself in the process. But as much fun as it was, there were some unforeseen mental effects that caught me unawares.
I wrote my entire novel (all 145k words of it) within Evernote using the tagging system and Notebooks for structure. It was a mostly successful venture too…
I don’t know how Dickens, Wells or Lovecraft researched their characters, all I know is that these days the Internet makes things very very easy for authors. If you know where to look.
Researching a novel is as important as writing one, but how do you keep track of your notes? And don’t say Microsoft Word. No. We need something that can format the data into something cohesive and searchable, and I just so happened to be using a little service called Evernote…
This is the first article in a series where I explore the creative process I used embarking on my debut novel: The Path and the Way and the tools (like Evernote and Miro) that I used to get there.
