Have you ever been in the middle of the line at the grocery store and all of a sudden that plot device that gets your characters from point A to point B that’s been eluding you for weeks hits you like a ton of bricks? You promise that you’ll remember it but by the time you negotiate traffic to get all the way home, the magic cure-all solution to all your plot problems has vanished as quickly as it arrived.

Have you ever been at work and had this fantastic idea for a scene for your book and you wrote it down in a Word document at the office but forgot to put it on a flash drive to bring it home? Or worse, you resorted to emailing yourself ideas from your work email to your home email and your home mailbox is positively littered with subjects like “Dude, you need to remember this” or “IDEA!” ?

If this describes your life, then EverNote can fix your problems. When you’re done with this blog post, head to this link for a complete set of videos showing you the incredible power of this tool. EverNote has a web interface for viewing and creating notes, but its true power lies in its ability to synchronize notes you create from anywhere. You can create new notes from your iPhone, from your Windows machine, from your Mac, from the web, from a mobile phone that has web access. Every time you create a note it synchronizes that note and the next time you connect any of your EverNote devices, they’ll get the notes you created. This makes it so that you will never lose an inspiring thought ever again. EverNote lets you record a voice note which is great for dictating some narrative that is just too painful to write on an iPhone or mobile phone keyboard. You can also take snapshots and upload existing pictures from iPhones or any of your computers.

Based on the volume of notes that I create, most writers can probably get by using the free EverNote account. If you want to allow other people to share your notebooks, edit/contribute to shared notes, or you want to be able to upload larger attachments then you can pay $4/month or $45/year.

Bottom line is that ever since I started using EverNote, I haven’t lost a single middle-of-the-night inspiration or awesome location inspiration picture or great new grocery-store-express-lane book idea. I highly recommend that any writer take a look at this tool. It is absolutely, hands-down, the most important writing tool I have after my brain and my computer.

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