My Writing Tools

As an author I'm often asked the same question:  How do I write my stories?

This post contains affiliate links.  You are under no obligation to purchase.  If you do purchase anything, I get a few pennies.  

Writing the Manuscript

Many authors use fancy computers or programs that do everything but come up with the story.  I don't.

I use a Lenovo Ideapad laptop and Office 365 only because that's what came installed.  Before this laptop I had a Dell that was more than five years old and had Microsoft Word 10 or something like that.  I was totally content. 

Then it died.

Printing the Manuscript

To print my manuscripts, I use the Canon Pixma MG3220.  It's a good little scanner and printer.  I might swap it out one day for a top loading one that can handle more pages with less time.

Sometimes to get inspiration on what my characters should look like, I'll go to Google search or Pinterest.  There is so much to look at, you can find yourself losing whole chunks of time just surfing the net.

Notetaking

There are times I'm not with my laptop and inspiration strikes.  If my phone is on me, I'll use Samsung Notes.  It's just like a memo.  You can type what you want then save it for later retrieval.  You can also use the speech function to orally dictate what you want then save.

More often than not I will have notebooks, or notepads filled with scenes or notes for my story.  I used to have dozens of pieces of paper all over the place.  As you can imagine, they got lost or ruined.  This prompted me to create a notebook just for stories.  It contains everything I need for a story with space for notes.  You can find it on  Amazon.  You are in no way obligated to purchase (and that's not what this post is about anyway.)  This book, though, has made a difference in helping me keep my characters straight especially since I tend to write multiple stories at the same time.

Other Tools

Pens - Any pen.  As long as it is a fine point like the Pentel RSVP.

Correction Pens - Red Bic. I used to correct papers with red pen before they proclaimed it to be bad.

Pencils - to draw maps and such.  Pro Art or Daler-Rowney Simply sketching pencils, Ticonderoga, or .5mm Silver Zebra mechanical pencil or .7mm Sakura mechanical pencil.

Paper - Graph and college rule for notes and regular printer paper to print manuscript.

I've found my print books to be limited.  For vocabulary help I use powerthesaurus.org.  They have an amazing database with synonyms and antonyms.  It also offers some colorful phrases for some words as well.

Hope that answers any questions.  Have I left any out?  What are some tools you use in your writing?  Leave a comment below.  

Happy writing!