Writers used to use 3×5 cards and colored tabs to keep organized and focused and to keep their data in order. Computers make the organizing your writing neater and easier. To tame a large project, a writer needs to break the big project into small tasks. Submissions go more smoothly, tracking is easier and book projects stay controlled. Here are ten no-fail ways to tame the lion of disorganization as you write and sell your writing.

1. Use Outlook Tasks to set up projects with a follow up date and an assigned completion date. You can track progress with the completion meter. Outlook is not the perfect tool and it has its limitations, but working with it for a while, you’ll train yourself to respond to cues of due dates, follow up dates and so forth. If you need to collaborate with another writer or someone else, Outlook allows you to assign a task and deadline to that person, email it to them and then follow-up. Once you have those tracking skills down, you might consider purchasing a writers’ database program.
2. If you write from a home office, shut off the phone, ignore your doorbell and don’t surf the web unless you’re doing specific research.
3. Take the TV out of your office. No kidding – you can zone off and watch an hour of The View or half an hour of Jeopardy before you catch yourself. That was a few hundred words you might have written.
4. The rule is you can’t leave your desk until you finish today’s task(s). The exception is, take measured breaks for lunch, bathroom, stretching or a walk, just as you would in a company setting, because it makes you work smarter.
5. Motivation – from one who has worked freelance for two decades, making a terrific living. If you don’t meet your deadlines, you will see your stream of work dry up. Editors talk. Word gets around. Sloppy writer habits multiply and become infectious. Additionally, if you like what you do, you’ll probably take a strong sense of ownership in the the quality of your work. It represents you. If you don’t enjoy the work – it isn’t right for you.
6. Don’t use writers’ block as an excuse for laziness – an excuse for goofing off. Having trouble focusing? Set small rewards. If you finish writing the next 700 words by 11:00 a.m., run out to the coffee drive-through and get something really gourmet. If you get through a section of proofing in half an hour, you can play 15 minutes on Dsi or Wii.
7. Keep healthy munchies and ice cold water right next to you so you don’t start feeling sleepy and sluggish. Eat good little meals, frequently, away from your writing work.
8. Do something active right after work each day and you’ll be better able to focus on writing on the next day.
9. Set realistic, measurable goals, and refuse not to meet them. However, be practical and willing to reevaluate writing goals that are not attainable. .
10. If working on an overwhelming project, leave yourself enough time in the writing project proposal to step away from it time to time and tackle something you really love to write.

Even if you don’t adopt all these writer rules, pick up a few of the habits successful writers rely on and your writing career will swing in a new, positive, productive direction.

WriteItNow’s good points

I liked the spell check, import and export features, readablility checker and word count – things every writer wants at hand. The ability to save or export manuscripts as in a variety of formats like PDF, text, rich text and HTML is helpful and streamlines the end process.

For the experienced writer, this package may be like an art kit is for a painter. All of the tools you use are together in one container and you can rotate easily from working on a concept, to polishing a chapter, to setting a scene. Then, using the charts tab, you can see how they manage the relationships between elements or even between characters. Just an an artist wants paint, brushes, cleaner, pencils and sketch ideas all together at hand when it’s time to work, so an author can benefit from having this neat package. WriteItNow allows you to work productively without searching all over your hard drive for the last set of notes you made, the final graph of chapter 12 or your missing character sketch.

If writer’s block rears its ugly head and you’re stuck, there is an idea generating feature that’s cumbersome, but workable once you get used to it. You select the characters involved in the situation you’re trying to create, then choose which type of event will be central, and WriteItNow will theoretically hand you an idea of where to go next.

There’s a free trial download http://www.ravensheadservices.com/download.php.

Note: WriteItNow’s producers offer free background editor add ons intended to reduce research for certain novels. Currently, they have one for Tudor Britain and the other Ancient Egypt. The editor is pre-loaded with cultural and physical details of those subjects. The company will accept additional subjects from anyone who wishes to share their research. An interesting value-added idea.

WriteItNow’s tragic flaws

The tutorials run very quickly and are a bit of a challenge to follow – they really need audio in order to be of much use. Additionally, the screen size is too large for even an upscaled laptop, requiring the user to scroll in order to see the call outs in the video or to find the controls for the video. My laptop screen is a 17″ wide format and I could not see the entire movie screen at one time. The documentation is not well organized and, again, not very intuitive. It is not easy to learn this program and I can see where some users will give up and find something else.

It’s interesting that customers must download and install add-ons, ten of them, to get the full funtionality of the software.

Conclusion

At price points of $19.95 to $59.95, depending on whether you’re upgrading, doing a new install or buying a CD version, WriteItNow is competitvely priced.

If you have never used writing software before, this is probably not your best choice as it isn’t intuitive or beginner- friendly and has a substantial learning curve. I’d like to see the producers redo their tutorials as step-by-steps with sound. If you are a working writer who has written manuscripts before, this program may serve you well in helping to organize and track your pieces and elements. WriteItNow isn’t the best software out there for writers working to understand and perfect the process of creaitng a novel, nor is it the worst. It’s a set of capable organizational tools for working writers.

Blake Snyder's latest title for writers

Hollywood screenwriter/producer celebrity Blake Snyder sells scripts to Disney and Spielberg, among others. He knows what he’s doing and shares with other writers via his software, Save the Cat. Snyder taught at Chapman, UCLA, Vanderbilt, and the Beijing Film Academy. His book is highly visible in screenwriting classes at U.S. and Canadian universities. His software connects users to a forum, related books, a website and live seminars.

Save the Cat, built to handle screenplays of four to 250 pages, is priced at $89.95 for MAC OS10.3.9 and higher for Win Vista and XP. The narration is lighthearted and upbeat.

Why is it called Save the Cat? Snyder tells you but I won’t spoil it. It has to do with audiences connecting with heroes. The title’s cleverness carries through the program, which is equivalent to a college course. Work it, baby, and it will work for you. Screen writing and movie scripts are not my writing focus, but I was sucked in.

By the time I worked through Save the Cat, I felt I could write a screenplay. Snyder’s method of organizing, outlining and visualizing simply has to result in a fleshed-out project.

screen shot Save the Cat

Save the Cat features:

• Develop a powerful Logline and Title
• Choose one of 10 genres, each with recognizable traits that will help you write something that is “the same, only different”: Monster in the House, Golden Fleece, Out of the Bottle, Dude with a Problem, Rites of Passage, Buddy Love, Whydunit, The Fool Triumphant, Institutionalized, and Superhero
• Fill in a Blake Snyder Beat Sheet with the 15 key beats for every screenplay: Opening Image, Theme Stated, Set-up, Catalyst, Debate, Break into Two, B Story, Fun and Games, Midpoint, Bad Guys Close In, All Is Lost, Dark Night of the Soul, Break into Three, Finale, and Final Image

The Save the Cat Board

What’s to like about Save the Cat

• The Board, that which Snyder calls, “the fabled device seen in executive offices all over Hollywood,” puts your movie or play in front of you before you write so much as a page. I learned a lot about how movie pacing.
• Save the Cat has an effective tutorial that gets you up and running in a short time. There’s a lot to learn, but it’s well thought out and structured. It’s fun that the interface uses SpiderMan 2 as to illustrate concepts. Not hard to get into reading about Spidey and contemplating your own work.
• Save the Cat can be docked on your desktop, kept always visible, a reminder that you’ve a pot simmering and can’t afford to let it cook out. You feel compelled to attend the sauce. Good discipline.
• Show or hide auto tip feature. With practice, you might want to shut them off and get them out of the way.
• The software is robust, but doesn’t take up a ton of disk. Navigation is straight forward.

What’s not to like about Save the Cat

• It takes a lot of desktop real estate.
• If you compress the screen view, you can’t read the text.
• The “how to” gets a little wordy sometimes.
• I had to struggle to pick out something to not like.

Save the Cat is fun, with movable parts you shuffle and arrange without ever risking a paper cut. The software moves you to define settings, plotlines, characters, directions, set ups and payoffs. You’ll consider emotional changes, the whys and hows of character development. There are rules for successful writing in stage plays or movies. Save the Cat makes you understand and internalize them as you compose. If you’re slogging through getting your screenplay out of your head and into a script, this program should shake you loose. If you can’t do it with Save the Cat, you don’t really want to do it yet.

Read more celebrity writers sharing their secrets:

Paretsky talks about writing as a career

Ali Hale shows you how to become a staff blogger

Fran Silverman on marketing your writing