13 Best Writing Tools You Must Try: Online Tools For Writers

The idea of writing sounds easy, but the act of writing may seem harder. To write more and write better, implement a set of tools and strategies to help organize your manuscript with an outline, plot or storyboard, and complete your book efficiently. Avoid viewing writing as an intense, round-the-clock endeavor, but as an essential part of your daily experience. Create a daily routine and eliminate distractions. This will allow you to be disciplined with your time, energy, and focus. While developing discipline is a long process, it gives you the breathing space to be more artistic.

With free online tools for writers in place, to ensure you commit to your writing deadlines; create mind maps; schedule writing goals with customized productivity graphs; develop complex character personalities; and eliminate grammatical mistakes, you can make writing manageable, efficient, rewarding, and fun.

Write at least 750 words per day consistently

Follow the simple premise of writing tips before you are ready. Write about 750 words every day, even if you feel you cannot face the manuscript or if you are at your lowest in motivation. There are many benefits to writing incrementally, and this strategy follows suit. If personal issues arise making it impossible for you to concentrate, write about those issues.

If your goal is to aim for consistency, try the online tool 750 words. They offer a 30-day free trial, which follows a small monthly subscription of $5. This online tool for writers has prime privacy, giving only you the access to your writing. It also has a scoring algorithm, which calculates points for a given day’s writing. Merits are associated with long streaks of writing. The calendar and monthly challenges incite a spirit of competitiveness, which enables writers to hit the 750-word target quickly. If you write for five days per week, it gives you 260 writing days. This leaves you with much time in the remainder of the working days for research, reflection, planning, and editing previous work. The main benefit of committing to the online tool 750 words a day is, it gives you the confidence to achieve the writing output required each day for your book, even through stages of being preoccupied through other aspects of your life. This will ensure you can commit to deadlines without experiencing any kind of race-to-the-finish or writing up-to-the-deadline fervor. By the time you complete half your manuscript, writing every day will be a deeply ingrained part of your weekly routine.

Schedule writing goals and make it a priority

To make the process of writing a little more streamlined and a little less overwhelming, set “SMART” writing goals: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound. Rather than procrastinating or leaving the work aside for too many consecutive days, set short attainable goals and adapt them as necessary. Make a conscious effort to complete your goals every day.  Setting ambiguous goals like ‘writing every day’ can be counterproductive and turn writing into a chore. Set timelines and make to-do lists by using the following apps with an easy-to-use interface, and delegate tasks to your smartphones to stay on track.

Marinara online productivity timer can help limit interruptions and complete tasks more efficiently. It has timer options that give you flexibility and can be customized according to your needs.

Any.Do is a great app with beautiful themes and turbo-charging powers that allows you to create to-do lists and categorize them under ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘upcoming’, and ‘someday’; so you get to see an overview of your daily and weekly projects. You can also access your list on your mobile, laptop, desktop, tablet, and even your watch.

Another feature-packed app to get tasks and the ever-expanding range of plot ideas out of your head and onto your notepad is Evernote.  You can store random bits of dialogue, descriptions, and research notes in Evernote, and eventually use them when you sit down to complete your manuscript.

Todoist enables you to easily organize and prioritize your tasks by setting goals and to visualize your productivity trends on the customized productivity graphs. You can also use the paid version for advanced features.

However, getting started on any given day can seem daunting. To be unfazed by this, always ensure you write a starting piece for the next day before you end your writing session. Hardwire your brain and commit to this habit as it will help you to get back into the right headspace easily. Consider setting a reading or writing target as per the number of chapters or word count. By matching your plans with the aim, you have a better chance of achieving what you set out to do. If you planned to complete 5000 words each week, see how often you are doing it. The purpose is not to feel dissappointed if you are not meeting your goals, but to find new ways to achieve them.

Create a mindmap

Another strategy you can incorporate to organize your creative ideas and boost productivity is to create a mindmap. A mind map is a visual thinking tool that helps writers develop initial ideas further with ease and precision. A creative idea may occur to you when you are not actively writing. Mindmaps help in brainstorming and give structure to these ideas by presenting them visually. It allows you to analyze and unearth truly unique ideas when you find yourself re-editing the same phrases and sentences over and over. To create your mindmap, picture it as a tree, whether it’s hand-drawn or made digitally. First, write any fundamental ideas and vivid thoughts that come to mind in the center of the page. Take your time and consider all your options while personalizing your central idea. It can be related to a character, scene, or the overall structure of your book. The next step is to add branches. Expand the central idea in greater depth by adding related ideas that serve as branches. There are no limits to the number of branches. Remember to add some color to your mindmap to make it visual and memorable. Non-fiction writing gives rise to the challenge of deciding the best order to present the information. A mind map lets you organize your ideas and put them into a visual sequence.

Mind mapping can also help with your poetry writing projects. You can extend the title of the poem into multiple branches such as layout (stanzas, lines), language – which is defined by figures of speech (personification, simile, metaphor), forms (ballad, sonnet, odd, elegy), and sound (rhyme, metre, sound devices). You can use various online tools for writers to map this efficiently.

Scrapple gives you complete freedom to experiment with your ideas on a virtual sheet of paper and make notes anywhere and simply connecting them using lines or arrows. This will fuel your writing by helping you think outside the box.

To make compartmentalizing your ideas into focused, manageable chunks simpler, Scrivener lets you plan your manuscript first and restructure later. You can write multiple scenes or chapters in different documents and go back and forth between different parts of your manuscript, notes, and references with ease.  The versatile features of integrated organizational tools, and outlining and storyboarding views allow Scrivener to stitch your writing together. You can download a trial version of the macOS or Windows versions before you purchase the app.

Develop vibrant and complex personalities

The best books are not only about a riveting plot, but also about interesting characters. To mould complex characters, writers must delve deeper than simple archetypes and easy characterizations. The key to developing characters that feel alive on the page is by gaining insight into personality types through the understanding of 16 distinctive personality types. Take your time to explore your character’s personality. Answer all the questions on the test as if you were your character from your manuscript while avoiding neutral answers. Be uniform with your answers and keep a note of the personality traits.

Once you complete the test and receive a personality assessment, ensure you keep the character consistent throughout the manuscript by creating a profile for each character on Writer Tools. Note everything about the character’s personality, appearance, and history in the 50+ fields that the app provides.

Use automated writing tools

Numerous automated writing tools for writers are designed to produce tighter sentences. The Hemingway App is one such unique, easy to use, and free writing software that highlights words and phrases that can be made stronger. You can paste your manuscript directly into the app editor for suggestions. The app then highlights complex sentences. It is up to you to employ the advice. Each color represents a specific instruction. Adverbs and weakening phrases are helpfully highlighted in blue, purple indicates a complicated word. When the Hemingway Editor highlights something in green, it represents a passive voice. Yellow highlights complex sentences, whereas red means the sentence is tough to read.

Eliminate overused words and expressions by using Cliché Finder. It uses a unique algorithm to identify and highlight clichés in your manuscript so you can improve your book writing.

Use Ulysses or Ilys for a hassle-free writing experience. These online tools for writers offer a distraction-free interface with a library to store everything you write with options to attach images, PDFs, notes, and keywords. You can enjoy complete privacy and automatically save your manuscript along with a backup of your entire text library.

Grammarly is an automated grammar checker that instantly corrects over 250 types of grammatical mistakes. It works great with all kinds of writing: work, personal, and academic. You can enter the text that you want to check for your grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes and get a list of wording alternatives, corrections, suggestions, and explanations at the click of a button. This online tool for writers also offers a wide variety of tools for spotting plagiarism by checking against 16 billion webpages. This is a free tool; however, for additional features, you need to purchase the premium version of this tool. The premium version requires you to sign up for an account and choose a payment option, at an annual $11.66/ month.

So there you have it, a guide to online writing tools and a foundation of essential techniques that every writer needs. Invest in these online tools for writers to illuminate your writing world, simplify your editing process, improve your concentration, and gamify your experience. Choose the writing tool that best suits your needs as a writer. Regularly use software that helps you make significant progress by speeding up the writing process, with fewer distractions. At the end of the day, using your stocked arsenal of online tools for writers to accomplish writing goals is down to you.

Immerse yourself in reading the kind of books you want to write. Only writing consistently and working on your craft can aid you in overcoming areas where you struggle, with a little assistance from the best writing software out there.  By enjoying the creative process and keeping the passion for storytelling alive, you can build a lasting relationship with your readers.