My Favourite Writing Tools

Following on from last week’s post about plotting, here are some of the tools I use for writing. Just to say, none of the links are affiliates or otherwise. I’m not important enough for that. I just thought I’d link to what I use.

For plotting

Scrivener. I know a lot of people swear by this for writing, but I prefer to use it for structure and research. I do all the technical stuff in here. I plan my beats, I write my character bios, I put in photos and links. Everything that I imagine as I’m planning and researching.

It’s £55 one-off fee for the standard licence, which is what I use, and has a lot of different templates for whatever your project, be it a novel, a screenplay, a documentary script, whatever.

Google Docs/Sheets. I’m quite a visual person and if I’m planning a timeline or if I need to work out a gradual change in a plot, I need to see it. Enter Google Sheets stage left.

The Matchmakers, for example, plays into the haters to lovers trope, so I made a spreadsheet with every chapter listed, and whether Abby and Fraser were haters or lovers at each point, detailed the tension and threw in some conditional formatting so I could easily see if the journey from haters to lovers was paced well.

I also keep an ongoing spreadsheet for names I’ve used for characters across everything I’ve written, to help me avoid recycling names. Everyone appears on it, and I include their character type as well as their name. Each book has a tab. I like the idea of crossover between stories in my books so this helps keep track of that, too.

For research

Aside from Scrivener, I keep a folder in my Google Drive for each book, which serves as a dumping ground for documents and spreadsheets. Someone once told me I was a born administrator, and all my files have a proper naming convention in neat little folders so I guess they must have been right.

I also make mood boards in Canva and pin inspiration pics in Pinterest.

For writing

I’ve used a beautiful piece of software called Vellum for years and years. It’s technically more for formatting for self-pubbers than for writing, but for some reason I’ve become attached to actually writing the drafts in there. I like how the chapters are easily split and that you can see exactly how it would appear on ebook or paperback in the right hand panel as you write. For me, seeing a finished-looking book as I’m writing a draft spurs me on.

I tend to get the draft to a point that I’m happy to share it and then export to Word and save in Google Drive. It’s not cheap, but it’s regularly updated and I love it. The downsides are that it’s only for Mac and as mentioned, it’s quite spenny. It’s my little writing luxury.

For backups

Good ole Google Docs! I can access it anywhere on any device, so that’s a win.

I do also have an external drive with more space on than I could ever want, and I back up completed projects on to this as well (when I remember).

So there you go! I know lots of writers are true blue Word fans, but if you use something I don’t know about, I’d love to hear it!