I spent last week organizing my thoughts, ideas and notes for my newest WIP - Secrets in Silver Bay, first in a trilogy for SuperRomance set in, what else?-Silver Bay.

In an effort to gain control of the piles of papers and notes, I opened up OneNote, a program included in Microsoft Office.

I plan to use it for keeping track of my notes/pictures/research etc but I will be using WORD for writing the actual MS. Which, quite honestly is a relief because I think I’ve reached my saturation point with learning new software programs at the moment. And I fear I’m dangerously close to using all this new tech stuff to procrastinate getting started on my book.

OneNote is a good tool but like all OFFICE products it does a great deal – which is a good thing and a bad thing. Keeping things simple is a challenge.

Here are some tips from what I learned over the past week.

Open the OneNote program and take a look around. Don’t be afraid of it. I decided to play around with the program, this wasn’t the “real” thing and I would Delete everything after I checked it all out.

Michelle Helliwell wrote a blog about her initial intro to ONENOTE,  so take a look at that as an introduction: www.michellehelliwell.com/blog

If you think of ONENOTE as a binder, with tabs, and pages within those tabs, this will help you conceptualize how you want to set up your notebooks and pages. Remember, though YOU CAN ALWAYS CHANGE IT LATER.  Don’t get so caught up (like me) in making the whole thing perfect and workable in the initial stages. Already, I’m moving things around and rethinking the structure. That’s okay, it’s easy to fix.  And from my days working in offices: don’t have so many notebooks, sections and pages that you spend more time deciding where something should go – or where you filed last weeks notes. I’ve worked places where  you needed a diagram and flowchart just to find a piece of paper.  Seriously.

My advice: Keep it simple!

The basic building block of the OneNote notebook:

NOTEBOOK

• Section Group (not required, you can just go with “sections” but you can also group things like characters and then set up a section for each character within that group)

• —– Section

• ——– Pages

• ———–Subpages

If I remember correctly, the program opens with a “Personal” Notebook set up. You can just rename this or set up a new Notebook.

In the toolbar: Click on “FILE”

 

Choose “New”

Save to a location on your computer

And choose “Create Notebook” on the lower right hand side.

Return to Home.

Right click on the Notebook and you can add sections, pages, etc to your notebook:

Here’s how I organized my notebook

NOTEBOOK: Secrets in Silver Bay

Sections:

• Three-act Structure
• Synopsis
• StoryBoard
• Research
• Settings

Section Group: Characters

• Section: Hero
• Section: Heroine

And you can move these all around by dragging and dropping – and you can change the names, add pages, move the pages, etc.

 

In addition to the links on Michelle Helliwell’s blog, here’s the link to Microsoft’s Onenote support page.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/onenote-help/

I’ve used the program to diagram a brainmap for each of my characters, to jot down notes while on other sites and to save pictures of my characters. After I’ve had a chance to become more familiar with all the features, I’ll do a future post.

Anyone using OneNote for writing? If you do, what do you find most useful?

Or if you don’t use it, do you think it’s something you might try? Or are you perfectly content with pen and paper – or Word?

Or are you one of those totally intuitive writers who opens up the blank page and just starts typing (or writing on paper) until you reach the end?