Writing & Inspiration

Until recently, I didn’t know how to turn on inspiration. But then I started reading The Story Within: New Insights and Inspiration for Writers by Laura Oliver and that all changed. If you’re looking for ways to get inspiration jump started, it’s a good read. The suggestion she gave that has worked wonders for me is to do something you’d consider mind numbing or repetitive. That keeps the non-creative side of your brain busy but lets the creative side wander and make connections. So far I’ve discovered that driving works best for me.

What do you use to keep your writing organized? Once upon a tried using a program called yWriter, but it was too much for me. During law school I learned to use OneNote to great success, so for the moment I’m using that. If you’ve never used OneNote, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a Microsoft Office product that is meant for taking notes and keeping things organized. I used it in law school to take notes. I have one notebook just for writing projects, then within that notebook I have sections for various writing projects, including my writing exercises. Within each of those sections I have different pages. In the writing exercises section, each exercise gets its own page. One really nice feature is that I can make a to-do list and transfer those reminders easily into Outlook.  One other terrific feature of OneNote as opposed to Word for example is that OneNote automatically saves all the time. In fact, there is no regular save button in OneNote. It simply saves everything.  There is a save as option if you need to save a project as something else however. Hopefully OneNote can help me keep my novel ideas straight and organized.