Evernote + Nanowrimo = writerly nirvana?
WARNING: THIS POST IS FOR WRITER NERDS. ALL OTHER EYEBALLS WILL ROLL INTO THE BACK OF THE HEAD WITHIN FIVE SENTENCES.
Are you doing Nanowrimo this year? For those who haven’t heard of it, Nanowrimo is an annual online event, held every November, where a community of writers hammers out 1666 words per day of their book for one month.
Resulting in a pile of horrible, wonderful first drafts.
(If you’ve ever done Nanowrimo, you know what I mean.)
This year, I’m writing the latest Shirley Link kids mystery novel (#5!), titled Shirley Link & The Party Poopers. I’m using software called Scrivener, which we covered in previous posts. It’s a wonderful bunch of 1s and 0s that allows for organized and distraction-free writing.
But I’m always on the lookout for new tools to create! So I’ll be experimenting with Evernote as a writing program next. Evernote? Do I mean that organizational thingy that sounds like a virtual slush bucket of discarded data? Yup!
Apparently, if you spend some time learning Evernote it can act as a good word processor/research tool. TheEvernote blog claims the following benefits for us writerishes.
1) Distraction-free writing. Yeah, whatever. Everyone has that these days. Next!
2) Formatting of selected text. So what? That’s the oldest… oh wait, you mean you can format the text with a small buddle pop-up within the the distraction free view? Ok, that’s cool.
3) Tag and categorize your work any way you want. This could be cool if I find one or two ways to use it. Otherwise my brain might explode from the possibilities of this option. I could see myself tagging every third word of my manuscript in some over-analyzed attempt to track my story.
4) Search. True, it would be cool to easily search for my research materials and the WWW within the writing window.
5) Scheduling. Another nice touch! Integrated scheduling is a fantastic idea. Scrivener has it too, but it’s about as easy to use as a particle accelerator (I’m looking at you Large Hadron Collider!)
6) Free. Oh. That.
So all in all, an impressive package. Most of these features are new by the way. Evernote claims to have spent six years building the latest roll-out.
My one hour with the new Evernote is a good experience so far. The tools all work as advertised and have me excited to tackle my next project.
What do you think? Is Evernote appealing to your inner scribe?
