Pinterest for Writers

I thought I would post some of my favourite writing tools here. One of my top 10 is Pinterest. For the uninitiated, it's basically an online cork board where you can pin images and articles that take your fancy. You can choose if you want to share your boards with others, a select few, or keep them private.

I use Pinterest for my setting research and have one for all of my novels (as well as every room of my house). You can either search Pinterest itself for images you like, find pictures via Google or wherever and add them yourself, or pick from the recommendations based on your viewing history (my current recs are a combination of beautiful staircases, educational activities for kids and - bizarrely - sexy clowns). It's really simple and a great way of gathering images and bookmarking research articles all in one place.

In a previous post, I mentioned a book I wrote inspired by Ballard's A Drowned World. This is a Pinterest board I made when imagining the setting, plus there's a screenshot below.

As an aside, Pinterest have introduced a newish tool in which you can take a smartphone picture of anything and it will find you similar images online. I just tested in on my cat and found his doppelgängers from around the world. It will probably prove more useful in other, yet to be discovered, ways.

Read More

Word Count Goals, MS WORD Version

Here’s a trick for writers who need a bit of word count motivation to keep them inspired.

In Microsoft Word, I like to display my current word count, the percentage of my final word count that I’ve completed, and how many words I have left to write. It stares at me from the header and 'inspires' me to keep going until I get that % total ticking over to a nice round number.

This is what mine looks like right now:

I am hoping to get that completed percentage up to 25% by the weekend, but that relies on me actually writing rather than playing with equations.

Here’s how you do it:

1. To display your word count:
Press CTRL-F9. Inside the little { } brackets, type NUMWORDS so it looks like this:
{NUMWORDS} 
Then press F9

2. For your words left to write:
Decide on your final word count. I aim for 80,000 words for YA. You can always adjust this later if your book decides it wants to be longer or shorter.
Press CTRL-F9 TWICE to get { { } }
Make it say:
{ =80000- {NUMWORDS} }
Then press F9 

3. For your percentage complete: Work out what 1 ÷ (your chosen word count) x 100 is. For 80000 words, the answer is 0.00125.
Press CTRL-F9 THREE TIMES. You should see this: { { { } } } 
Now modify the equation to make it look like this:
{ =ROUND ( { =0.00125* {NUMWORDS } } ,1 ) } (n.b. That's a bracket after ROUND and 1, not a weird C)

Then press F9

Those will give you the raw numbers, so add in whatever text you want before and after, and you’re done. Whenever you want to see how you're progressing, right click on the number and hit Update Field. If you want to adjust the equation (to change word count goal, for example), right click and hit Toggle Field Codes. Once you've finished, press F9 to close the equation again.

Now get back to writing, those word goals won’t reach themselves.

p.s. My Mac died but, should it prove resurrectable (is that a word?), I will modify the above instructions and update this post.

Read More