Evernote for Writers
Evernote is one of those apps that seems useful from the outside, but can sometimes feel overwhelming and overly complicated when you first try to use it. In that way, it’s a bit like Scrivener. And, as with Scrivener, it’s easier to get past feeling overwhelmed if your entree into the program is through one key feature and you branch out from there. That’s what the Evernote For Writers series podcasts are about: getting you comfortable with Evernote one feature at a time until you know enough to get started, even if you don’t know or use every single thing.
I started using the app regularly when Evernote introduced Page Camera. Using the camera on your smartphone, users can snap a picture of handwritten text, save it to a note, and search the text later. Yes, your own handwriting scanned and indexed — awesome! The early version was somewhat rocky, but now it’s solid and improving all the time.
Listen to the episode and find a ton of supporting links in the Show Notes.
When I first put out the call asking for authors to talk to me about how they use Evernote, I expected them to talk about using it for keeping notes or research or maybe outlining. But several authors mentioned that they sometimes write prose in the app, which surprised me. I asked a few of them to talk to me about how and why they write directly into Evernote, and the advantages and disadvantages they face in doing so.
Author M. K. Hobson was one of the first to pop up to say she used Evernote as a place to actually work on her drafts. She likes it better than Google Drive and Scrivener.
Author, playwright, and journalist Aude Konan also uses it to write, but only in specific circumstances, such as when she’s commuting or traveling and either can’t use her laptop or really needs a distraction-free environment.
Listen to the episode and find a ton of supporting links in the Show Notes.
The thing most writers talk about using Evernote for is collecting research, be it web information or data from books and journals. But having all your research in one place won’t help much if you can’t find the specific information you’re looking for because your Evernote is a tangled mess. That’s why I tackled organization first. In this episode I break down the ways Evernote gives you to organize as well as some strategies for how I and others have made it work for us.
Particular shout-out here to Jamie Todd Rubin, whose Going Paperless blog is an excellent resource for learning more about Evernote.
Listen to the episode and find a ton of supporting links in the Show Notes.
Listen to Evernote for Writers #4: Using Evernote for Research
It’s all been leading up to this! Now that you know how to use Evernote to capture handwritten or typed text, and now that you have strategies for organizing with notebooks and tags, you’re ready to start putting all your research into the app. In this episode I talk about using Page Capture, the Web Clipper function for desktop and mobile, and how Evernote can be a great Scrivener companion (and maybe a better place for your research notes).
Aude Konan and M. K. Hobson join me for this episode as well.
Listen to the episode and find a ton of supporting links in the Show Notes.
There’s a playlist over on The Write Gear’s YouTube channel with Evernote how-tos and tricks.
This won’t be the last time I talked about Evernote on the podcast. As I publish more episodes in the series, I’ll add them here.
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