Last night, I went to chat with a writing group in Clapham. When one of the writers asked me about my writing process, I started talking about Evernote, and quickly realised that no one in the room had heard of it. So just in case you’re not aware of it either, I want to recommend it to you, whether you’re a writer or not, as the ultimate note-taking and remember-everything application. It’ll change your life, seriously.
Evernote is a free cloud-based application that allows you to create notes with text, photos, audio, and screenshots. You can organise them in as many different notebooks as you like, and by applying tags to them, and then sync them across all your devices. Its brilliant search facility can even read text in photos (if you photograph a page from a book, say). You can pay an annual fee, which allows you to upload more data to the evernote server, but the free monthly limit is 60mb, which I’ve never exceeded.
I have Evernote notebooks for story ideas, my personal journal, individual projects, a dream diary, and a scrapbook where I stick anything interesting I find on the internet, or while I’m out and about, that I think might come in useful for fiction projects at some point in time. I used to carry around a ‘paper’ notebook in my back pocket for ideas, but now, everything goes straight into Evernote via my iPhone.
Check out this video for a brief intro, and click here to create your Evernote account (I’m not on commission, I promise. It’s free after all. I’m just so grateful to these guys for creating such a knockout app, and I think you’ll love it).
I’ll post about more writing tools I can’t live without in the future – click the ‘writing tools I can’t live without’ tag to find them all.
Thanks Adam, the only tools I ever use are in my shed, but I’ll check this one out.