It started when I was first working on my own middle grade novel and struggled with a crowd scene in which ten or fifteen people are queuing up for a ghost tour and getting impatient because it should have started half an hour ago. How I record the novels I readįirst, I have a stack (which is like a shelf of notebooks) called ‘FICTION EDITING: Fiction Bookshelf’ and in that stack I have several notebooks including one named ‘Clever solutions to tricky narrative problems’.įor the past few years I’ve been saving snippets from novels that demonstrate how to pull off specific storytelling devices or handle tricky situations. There are lots of similar apps out there so if you like the idea of recording your reading this way, shop around to find software that works best for you. It lets you create notes and organise them into notebooks and stacks and everything is fully searchable and tag-able. I’ve been using it for about a decade and after a couple of years I upgraded to a professional account because I use it for work a lot. What is Evernote?Įvernote is a free online note-taking app you can access through your desktop browser or on your phone or tablet. But my Evernote system might be something that works for you so I’m going to share it with you! This first part will focus on how I collect snippets from novels that demonstrate clever solutions to storytelling problems I’ve come up against. This is just one way I track my reading I also scribble in notebooks, keep Goodreads lists, write blog posts and write reviews for other websites. Lucky you! Of course I’m absolutely not suggesting you have to take notes like this when you read or that you should keep digital records rather than paper ones (and this is not an advert or affiliate post for Evernote!). How do you annotate? What’s the best way to record what you’re reading? So, friends, I’m going to take you through my Evernote system. I know it’s easy for me to sit here shouting ‘Read analytically! Take notes! Annotate!’ but that’s not very helpful without practical, actionable advice to go along with it.
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