I have what seems to be a never-ending quest. I love to write by hand. I do my best thinking when I do so. I’m at my most creative.
I create my characters, write the story of how they received their wound, describe their goals and motivations, go into detail about what’s holding them back from achieving their goals. From those notes, I create my plot — first the major plot points (instigating event, first major turning point, point of no return, black moment). I write out paragraphs of what should happen at each point and then begin to get into the sequence of events that move my characters from one plot point to the next.
This list of scenes is not always in the exact order in which events unfold, and they usually don’t contain every scene I will eventually write, but it’s the basic outline of my book, a place to get started.
All this is great.. It’s my creative process. But it’s rare that I write all this down in order and almost never in the same place. Ideas come to me while I’m focusing on plotting, yes, but also when I’m writing in my daily journal—which I write in the morning as the first thing I do when I get to work, and at night just before I go to sleep. And because I can’t do anything in a simple or consistent manner, I have two different journals for the different times of day (a nice, hard-bound book for the mornings and my Kindle Scribe for night, so I can write in the dark after my husband has gone to sleep).
So, my biggest problem with all of this wonderful writing and creating is gathering all my notes into one place or finding that one idea I had… was it two nights ago? Last week? And I lose things, I lose ideas because I don’t know where to look for them.
What I need is to be able to digitize all of my notes and keep them in one searchable place where I can re-order them as necessary, and tag them (so I can get all of my notes on one character or one act of the plot).
There are many note-taking apps, but then I’d have to manually type all of my notes in. And there are many apps that will organize your notes—once they’re in your computer. But what I need is something that will turn my hand-written notes to text so that I can then add them to one of those great organization programs.
This is the main reason why I bought my Kindle Scribe and it does a really good job of that. But what about my journal? And my notebook where I love to write with different colored ink?
Well, I’ve been playing with different apps that will convert my handwriting to text. Next week, I’ll tell you all about them and how they performed. Stay tuned!