Join Now Novel for constructive feedback or work with a writing coach to make smoother, easier progress.Scrivener understands my writing needs in a way that other word processors never have. Clip articles into an organized system for retrieving factual information to use in your story, or use one of the many templates offered to structure your process.ĭividing your writing time and your novel itself into manageable parts is core to staying productive and building a publishable manuscript, scene by scene. Milanote is another versatile and flexible tool for brainstorming, saving story research and more.
Use this free text checker to find unnecessarily complex words you can replace with simpler ones, to spot and remove weakening passive voice, and more. Hemingway App is another useful tool not in the productivity sphere. It’s a simple drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to create glossy promotional materials. This online design tool includes useful templates with the correct dimensions for all the major social platforms, as well as an abundance of free and stock photos, illustrations and fonts.
It’s easy to create professional designs for your social media accounts or author blog using Canva. Additional useful toolsīesides apps to bolster your productivity, there are many other useful online tools for authors. Leave audio notification on and your timer will beep when it’s time for a break. If you simply Google ‘Timer’, you can use Google’s no-frills timer and stopwatch. There are several web-based timers you can leave running in the background. Working for 20 minutes at a time with 10 minute breaks between stretches is one way to approach this. You can also portion out writing time and breaks better so that you avoid burnout. When you track how you spend your writing sessions, you become conscious of productive versus unproductive sessions. A web-based timerĪ timer is an essential tool for boosting your writing productivity. That way you won’t see what you’ve just written until you highlight your text and change it back to your standard colour. ZenPen also lets you save your writing in HTML or plain text formats – useful if you plan to put together an eBook.Ĭalmly Writer is another minimalist distraction-free online writing app.Ī tip: If you tend to go back and edit what you’ve written while drafting before you’ve completed a section, change your text colour in your regular word processor to white.
From ZenPen you can copy and paste drafts into your favourite word processor for revision and storage. Try ZenPen, for example, a simple browser-based writing app that consists simply of a white background with a bold heading you can edit and minimal text markup features. We haven’t listed a single option here as there are many good ones. A low-distraction writing environment can really help you to stay productive for longer. There are many good browser-based options, too. Most full-featured word processors such as Microsoft Word now have minimalist full-screen modes that let you write distraction-free. Staying organised will help you to progress smoothly from scene to scene as you draft. Nabokov wrote his best-known novels (such as Lolita) entirely on index cards. Incidentally, this is how the celebrated author Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novels. Here you can arrange virtual index cards, rearranging and shuffling snippets of text visually. One of Scrivener’s best features is the storyboarding virtual corkboard.
Scrivener by Literature and Latte is a useful writing app for Microsoft Windows, macOS and iOS that also makes it easier to structure your writing and plan your research.
There’s an in-depth post here by a staff writer for Evernote on using the app to organise your writing. The basic version of Evernote is free, but the premium version offers a host of additional features. Because you can write and organise notes, you can also use Evernote to structure your draft and stay focused. Enter Evernote: This handy app lets you save full articles or quotes into Evernote for later viewing. It slows down productivity if you have to stop to try find an article you read once that was relevant to your story. This makes it easy to keep a global view of your work-in-progress. Create a folder per chapter, and keep the outline and draft for each chapter in its own, named folder.
This you can access either from within your Gmail account or by navigating directly to Google Drive and signing in. You can organise your Google Docs documents in folders in Google Drive. Stuck in line? Get out your phone and resume drafting in Docs while you wait.
You can also download the app for your phone and access your scene or chapter drafts when you’re on the go. Not only is it a free, in-browser word processor. Google Docs is useful for multiple reasons. It’s tricky keeping productive when you have countless other demands on your time.