At work, I've been playing around with a software tool that is included in Office 2007, a software program known as OneNote. Both at work and at home, I tend to spawn a lot of ideas and if I don't capture them -- quickly -- poof, they're gone.
I started hearing about OneNote a few years back, as one of a wave of programs that try to help you organize your ideas. I've been using a program called Ascend at home for many years for managing things like To-Do lists and capturing miscellaneous notes with their Red Tab feature. At first blush, OneNote is a much more powerful way to capture notes and create links between related items. I've been doing this kind of thing for years, but in an improvised way. When Word added the capability of hyperlinking, I used it to manage projects that involved interaction between multiple documents. When I took notes at a standards meeting, I'd create a master document and use it to link to all of the subsidiary documents. Later on, the notes would be turned into meeting minutes and -- in somewhat different form -- into my standards newsletter, Human Communications Digest.
So, what does this have to do with writing? My newsletter example above shows what I did for non-fiction writing projects using Word, but OneNote is actually designed for capturing notes and organizing projects, so it is much slicker.
I tend to work on multiple writing projects at once and ideas do pop up about phrases I want to include in a new draft, entire new chapters that coalesce around a new direction for my characters, or perhaps, entirely new novels. I'm rather visual in my thinking style, so it really helps me to map things out before I get too deep into a new project. In my writing notebooks, I have a couple of very interesting pages, where I drew a map of the dimensions I wanted to explore in new novels and then showed how the ideas connected. In two cases, there was enough there so that I started thinking about the characters who would inhabit this novelistic world. I then took the more traditional tack of writing a rough chapter outline and then started to fill in background information on the characters. I did all of this in a hard copy notebook, but I really would have liked to have an electronic tool which could have supplemented my hard copy and helped me organize it.
OneNote looks like a tool that would be very good for this application. The GUI looks like a notebook, complete with tabs, so it's visually very friendly for a writer who has been working with paper notebooks. It's very easy to start a new tab, perhaps to jot down notes about that project that's in your mind and then put them aside until you are ready to take the next step. If you've already got other documents, it's easy to set up hyperlinks.
I'm starting to use OneNote for some work projects, but really want to get it going at home for my writing as well. I'll report back on my results.
