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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Realizing that not everyone has the ability to write their own writing management software, I went looking for something that would suit my needs without requiring me to spend a huge pile of cash or write my own software.

What I found was Microsoft Office OneNote. You can either buy this separately or it comes as part of one of the Office 2007 bundles. Additionally, if your day job involves working in an office, you can probably get a copy from your office IT people. Amazon.com sells this software for $68.49 so it’s only a few bucks more than an Xbox game.

When I write, I typically have a bunch of different types of documents. I have actual drafts, which I always keep in Word documents. But then I’ve got my daily conversations with myself (see David Morrell’s fantastic book about writing for this technique), Research, Scenes, info on Characters, Places, cultures (when doing Fantasy), additional thoughts on Plots (cause and effect plots, not chronological lists of events). Finally, I have a dump bin for random stuff that will get organized later. The huge problem is that all of this is scattered across my hard drive and it is very hard to search through it and find something useful without opening 500 Word windows and bringing my poor computer to its knees.

Here’s a screenshot showing the top navigation strip in OneNote that I have set up for my “Writing” notebook:

The great thing about OneNote is that everything you enter is in the same application. You can do full formatting like Word, but it’s optimized for doing notes, comments, highlighting, bulleted lists, and other shorthand things to truly help keep you organized. Here’s a link to Microsoft’s OneNote site, and there are plenty of books available on OneNote.

Some of the features that truly make OneNote stand out in my mind are:

• Ink support and handwriting recognition : if you’re using one of those HP touch monitors or a tablet PC, OneNote lets you hand-write your notes and it will convert them to text after
• Dictation – just click the Microphone button and you can create a little VCR playback style control right in the middle of your notes. This way, even if you want to dictate a scene, you can mix the dictation right in with all your other typed notes for the scene.
• Searching – everything is right where you need it and so organized that you often don’t need to search what what you need.
• Easy backup – Just copy the top-level folder of your “Writing” notebook to a flash drive and you’re backed up. You do back up everything you write to multiple locations, don’t you?

I’m not a salesman and I’m not trying to get people to buy Microsoft products. However, OneNote has changed the way I organize my digital information and in this day and age, writer’s don’t spend too much time in front of a ribbon-and-hammer typewriter so I thought this tip might be helpful.

In the next blog post I’m going to talk about a tool that can keep you from losing that fleeting moment of inspiration no matter where you are or when you have it.

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