So, as I’ve said, I’m currently researching and worldbuilding and generally getting things in place before I start my draft. (Seems like I’m always talking about writing and planning my writing and never actually writing, doesn’t it? Yeah, it does to me too.) A while ago, I came up against the problem of how to organize all the research and notes that I was amassing.
The most obvious answer was to keep several documents or spreadsheets or what have you saved on my computer. It’s a very practical option, but doesn’t really work for me because of the restraints of my regularly-scheduled life (or perhaps I should say rarely-scheduled life). I needed something that I could update quickly and easily on the go, something I could update from anywhere. A notebook filled with scribbled quotes and plans, while portable, wasn’t exactly organized — just a catch-all place to store things in a heap. So I turned to modern technology.
At first I tried out tumblr for keeping track of my inspirational images, notes about setting and characters, and the quotes from my research books. I already have a public one that I use for whatever catches my fancy, so I set up a second, password-protected tumblr and started reblogging. It worked great for a while, until I had gotten a pretty good collection of things going and I realized that I needed to go back and edit the keywords I had used for some of the things I had saved.
To do that on a regular tumblr, you just go to the page of entries with a specific tag, find the one you want, and edit it. With a private/locked tumblr, the edit option is removed from individual posts. I don’t know why. The preview feature is also disabled when you’re posting. That meant I had to go through my dashboard, page by page, until I reached the entry I needed to edit. Time consuming like crazy. There was the mass-post editor, of course, but it was easy to miss a post that way and I still has to comb through a display of thumbnails to find what I needed. (To give you an accurate picture of the trouble with this method, I had over 200 entries on the tumblr at this point.)
So I started to look around for other options, and I happened upon a free service called Evernote.
Evernote is kind of like tumblr, without the social network aspect, crossed with cloud backup. You can upload and store entries, organized by keywords and grouped in different notebooks.
For example, say I was writing a regency-era romance. I’d have a costume notebook, with clothing description and images organized by keyword based on which character would wear what style. I’d also have a notebook about daily life, with descriptions about different activities that different characters would take part in, again organized with character name keywords. If I wanted to review all notes I had for the heroine, regardless of topic, I’d look through her keyword across all the notebooks. But if I only want to find the notes on her gown for the big ball scene, then I’d only look at her keyword in the costume notebook.
All this can be accomplished in other ways, of course, but the benefit for me is that I can add things to Evernote in multiple ways: through their website, a program on my computer, or an app on my phone. It syncs across the board, eliminating the problem of not having what I need wherever I’m able to work.
Evernote isn’t perfect. You can only upload 60MG month (I haven’t hit the limit yet) and I have no idea if it has a storage maximum. If space becomes a problem, the downloadable software allows you store any or all notebooks locally on your computer, although that negates the ability to access the information anywhere. The other choice is to pay for a premium account, which costs $5 a month or $45 a year. (I don’t plan to do that, personally, but it’s an option.)
I feel like I should add that I’m in no way affiliated with Evernote. I just thought it was a cool resource and wanted to share. Here’s the link again, if you want to check it out.
(image copyright Evernote, used without permission)
