The Writer's Technology Companion

Image via Wikipedia Ideas are paradoxical. While hours of urgent deep thought might leave us without a clue, at other times ideas seem to pop into our heads effortlessly, dazzling us with their perfection. Alas, these brilliant moments of inspiration come all too often when we’re busy doing other things  —  driving, showering, drifting off to sleep, […]

Image via Wikipedia While coming up with ideas might be easy, coming up with good ones is a bit harder. You increase your odds, of course, by coming up with lots and lots of ideas  —  out of a hundred or so, surely there ought to be one or two you can do something with! Brainstorming is […]

Image via Wikipedia “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” poet Robert Herrick advised his readers  —  for all too soon, you’ll be old and rosebud-gathering will be just one of many things you are no longer capable of. That’s the normal reading of the poem, but it occurs to me that it is in the very nature […]

Enso Words is a free program for Windows XP and Vista that puts the tools writers need the most  —  spell check, word count, dictionary, and thesaurus  —  a few keystrokes away no matter what application you happen to be writing in. It’s an ingenious little program that deserves a place on every writer’s hard drive. Enso Words lives in […]

One piece of advice that’s floated around a lot to help people stay on track with their big projects is to set a deadline. In my experience, and probably yours, this doesn’t work very well because there are no consequences for not meeting your “pretend” deadline  —  allowing you the fudge room to keep procrastinating. Stikk has […]

One of the most important things writers (or anyone) can do is set clear, explicit goals about what they want to accomplish. Most of us have a bunch of vague goals, like the “one day novel” (as in, “one day, I’m going to write a novel). We want to “someday” do x, y, and z  –  get […]