My Writer’s Toolkit

Over the years, I’ve fine-tuned my toolkit in order to streamline my writing workflow. My writer’s toolkit is always a work in progress, but I’ve found a system that I’ve used for my past few books, including my current WIP, a Dark Academia suspense novel. 

I thought I’d share a bit about my favorite writing software. Hopefully, this will be helpful for other writers. By the way, this isn’t a sponsored post. This is what I actually use. 

Google Docs and Drive

Good ol’ Google Docs is a great way for me to get organized, especially at the beginning of a project when I’m not sure which end is up. If I have digital research that I need to organize, I’ll create folders for each topic in my Google Drive. It makes it easier for me to see what I have and what I still need. I have writer friends who use nothing but Google Docs to write their books and they’re perfectly happy. I wrote my first seven books using only Microsoft Word and it was fine. 

Notion

I use Notion primarily for journaling, and I have a separate section for The Professor of Eventide. This is where I brainstorm about the characters or plot. I try out various POVs (I’ve gone back and forth with first-person POV and third-person POV for this book, and I think I’ve settled on first, but we’ll see). This journal acts as a brain dump where I can think through everything about the story. 

I could use Google Docs for this as well, but my brain likes having separate things in separate places. All of my journaling is in Notion, so I keep my book journal there too.

Scrivener

When I first bought Scrivener, it made no sense to me and I ignored it for a long time. 

After hearing so many writers rave about it, I gave it another go. I watched a few YouTube videos, and once I saw how everything worked I began to appreciate its features. I’ve been using it as my main writing software ever since about 2015. I wrote here about how much I enjoy using Scrivener. And here’s a video from Joanna at The Creative Penn about how to use Scrivener if you’re as confused by it as I was when I first bought it. 

I like that in Scrivener I can look at the left-hand margin and see what chapters I’ve written, or chapters that need to be written. I add a little blurb about what the chapter is about so I can see at a glance what that section should contain. 

There are times, particularly in the first draft, when I don’t write in chapters but in scenes. Perhaps there’s a scene I know I’ll need, but I don’t know yet where it’s going to fit in the larger scheme of the story. I’ll write the scene in its own Scrivener page and then figure out later where it goes. Scrivener makes it easy to drag the scenes or chapters around and rearrange them until everything is just right, and you can color code chapters and scenes separately so you can easily see what’s what. 

Another thing I love about Scrivener is being able to upload photos into book’s main file. I like using photos for inspiration, and when I find one I upload it into Scrivener and pull it up to look at as I’m describing whatever it is–a drawing room, a garden, a building on a college campus. That’s a handy feature if you’re visually inspired as I am. 

If you prefer having everything in one place, everything you can do with Google Docs and Notion you can add to Scrivener. You can import your research into Scrivener, and you can also add a section for a journal where you think your way through your characters, plot, and anything else. If you use Scrivener for everything, you won’t need Google Docs or Notion. 

The reason I keep some things separate in Google Docs and Notion is because I only add things I’ll need to write my novel in Scrivener. I don’t like clutter, even in my computer files. I weed through what I need in Google and journal through my ideas in Notion. This way, I don’t have anything in my Scrivener file that isn’t necessary for writing my book. For other people, it may be easier to keep everything in one place.

A Dedicated Book Journal

Of all the writing tools I use, my handwritten journal is my favorite. 

While I’m working on a book, I like to change up my activities to keep my motivation from waning. I can only sit at the computer for so long until my back or neck start kvetching. Moving from digital to analog makes a difference in how I feel about working, and when I’m completing a long project like a novel, I need to keep the momentum going forward, not slamming to a halt because I’m tired of staring at a computer screen. 

I can’t go into detail about what I have in my book journal for my current WIP because, as my favorite River Song says, “Spoilers!” This is a book that’s nearly impossible to talk about without giving anything away. After my WIP is published, I’ll be more specific about what I have inside my journal and I’ll share how I organized everything. 

Writing my research into my journal, along with other tidbits like sketching out a map of the fictional college where the story takes place, adding information about Maine, where the story takes place, and adding my chapter-by-chapter outline helps me figure out the story from the bottom up. When I write, I have my journal beside me so I can find what I need. 

I like bigger notebooks because I have more room for writing. You can see below that I pasted a scrapbook paper collage on the inside cover, not to be crafty, but because I was going to use this notebook for something else. When I decided to use it as my journal for Eventide, it annoyed me that it had all this information for the other project so I covered it up and used stencils and stickers for the title. 

Sometimes I think of my book journal as a commonplace book since it is a receptacle for knowledge, in this case knowledge that I’ll need to write this story. When I started my first commonplace book, I didn’t create an index since I didn’t feel I needed one for that particular book. Here’s a bit about my first experience with a commonplace book. My first commonplace book was small, so it was easy for me to flip through to find what I needed. For this project, with so many odds and ends, I felt an index was necessary. John Locke had an interesting way of indexing, and while I like the idea of an alphabetical index, I didn’t feel it would work for this project. 

The first thing I did was number the pages. Some notebooks come with the pages already numbered, but this one didn’t. I left a few pages at the end of the book (10 for this book of over 200 pages) and I titled it “Index” and left them blank. As topics come up, I write them in the back and note the page numbers so I know where to look for information on that topic. I also color code the topics; for example, all of my information about Maine is highlighted in brown. I don’t know if the highlighting is necessary since I have the page numbers, but it only takes a moment and it makes the book more colorful. A journal doesn’t have to be aesthetic, though it can be if you want it to be. I’ve seen examples of crafty journals if that’s what you prefer. 

If you’re just starting out, play around with different software to see which way of streamlining your writing workflow is best for you. If all you need is Google Docs, or if all you need is Notion, or Scrivener, or something else, that’s great. Writing software doesn’t have to be complicated. The more simple you can keep things, the easier it will be when you’re stitching your project together.