Online Tools for Writers

"To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires."
- W. E. B. Du Bois

"If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job."
- Woody Allen

"My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage."
- Peggy Noonan

How do the words ANYONE, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME and FREE sound to you? That’s what you get with Writewith - unlimited storage space to collaborate over .doc, html, .rtf and text files with anyone, anywhere, anytime for FREE. The video [below] easily explains how two or more people can upload and edit or create and edit the same document online. You can see who is online and the changes they’re making to the document in real time.

This is an innovative tool for not only writing partners and ghost writers, but I can also see the benefits to editors and their mobile correspondents. I can remember in college the torment endured over group-paper assignments. Agh! Had this tool been around then, it would have saved me a fist full of hair and at least 16 ounces of pure, unfiltered agony. I’m patiently waiting for something this easy and inexpensive for .xcl and .ppt files. Come on evolution already.

Does your next premise include monsters?

Fiction writers and horror screenwriters alike will get a kick out of Monstrous.com - the largest site about monsters.  On the web now for 10 years, Monstrous offers a huge repository of monster information from classical, to legendary, to modern creatures.   Just about every category is covered: aliens, demons, dragons, vampires, ghosts, witches, zombies, etc. This online community has forums, galleries and videos to get even the most banal writer juiced with ideas.

The Evolution of the Library

The internet is evolving the human race with its point-and-click access to an abysmal myriad of information.  Monstrous.com is yet another example of what I love about technology and writing. 

Jump back to the 70’s and 80’s era where topics of interests were often discovered by schlepping a boatload of books home from the library after spending the entire afternoon scouring bookshelves and scanning microfiche. THE FLIPPING COPY MACHINE IS OUT OF ORDER! 

Back to my center of peace…  It’s places like Monstrous.com where you point-and-click and suddenly your neighborhood library is transformed into a museum dedicated to your favorite topic, which in this case is guts-and-gore.  Even better, everyone inside is just as obsessed as you.  To get there you don’t have to go anywhere, ignore the QUIET sign, food is welcome, shirt and shoes are optional, and you don’t have to check out anything.

There’s a lot to be written about screenwriting competitions.  Like anything else, some are worth the effort, others are a waste of time and a handful are downright scams - which is a topic for another article. On the menu today is MovieBytes which has collected 285 screenwriting contests for your consideration.

This website has made it easy for screenwriters to find the contests that best suit their needs.  The best part about this database, aside from the fact that it’s free, is the advanced search capabilities. You can sort by deadline, rating, professionalism, feedback, significance etc.  Delve even further and sort through student contests, TV contests, shorts, international, no-entry-fee, etc.

Life Goes On
My advice is to set a budget aside for contests ($150+) and pick a few that best suit your current script.  Do not use contests for feedback - that’s what coverage or script analysis is for.  Enter and proceed with LIFE.  Don’t sit idle and watch the mail/email every single day. Start your next script. A screenwriting career could take 10 months or 10 years, it all depends on what you’re attracting.

Second Place Prize - Free Screenwriting Software! 
Personally, I think giving free screenwriting software to one who has obviously already used some sort of software to create the very masterpiece they entered is cheap and absurd.  If you do land amongst the top entries cash is a sweet ROI, but it’s never a life-altering amount. What you really want is a guarantee that your script will be read by top production companies and agencies while garnering the attention it deserves.

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Still in beta RemembertheMilk.com is a web-based solution for helping you keep track of what you need to do. It’s more than an electronic to-do list, it’s a way of keeping you prioritized and synced to those electronic devices we have become so dependent upon.

If you lose your paper day planner, or your smartphone with a to-do list application it’s gone forever. However, with a virtual to-do list, like Remember the Milk, you can’t misplace it. Your info is stored on the web and is accessible from anywhere including your cell phone, smartphone, or personal computer. This is a great tool for writers, but more on that later…

Don’t you just love technology?

Remember the Milk allows you to receive reminders via email, SMS, and instant messenger (AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Skype and Yahoo! Integrated map features let you track your route to and from your next task.

Milk Money?
Remember the Milk is currently in beta and it’s free! If you want to sync your iPod Touch, iPhone or BlackBerry you’ll need the pro edition, which runs $25 a year. When you think about it, that’s a descent price when compared to one of those $15 - $25 weekly paper calendars.

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The digital age has brought us a more efficient process of communicating literary assets.  To date, this often means that writers submit their manuscripts and screenplays online via PDF. 

If you’re writing on a Mac that has Tiger or Leopard OS, and you’re creating your brilliant masterpiece inside of Word, Pages or a simple text editor; you have PDF conversion tools built right into your operating system.  If you’re using Vista, there is a free plug-in that will allow you to “print” to PDF just like Mac. However, if you’re using a later version of Windows such as XP or Linux and you’re using Microsoft Word or some other text editor to create your masterpiece, you will need PDF conversion software. 

Print to PDF??? I thought I was creating a .pdf file?  I know this is confusing to some folk so allow me to clarify.  When you are prompted to “print to PDF”, essentially what you are doing is creating a “printed” copy of the document in .pdf format and saving it to your hard drive.  So the document doesn’t forward to your printer spool and come out your printer.  You’re creating a .pdf “print” of your original document. 

Does my writing software already have PDF conversion capabilities?  Possibly. The latest versions of screenwriting programs such as Movie Magic, Final Draft and Montage already come equipped with PDF printing tools.  So there’s no need to purchase additional software.

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Sometimes it’s a passerby or an advertisement in a magazine or possibly a newspaper article that inspire your next story idea. Story ideas often start out as a tiny seed in ones mind. A book, an event, or even one’s life story can also inspire them.

Because blogging has become so popular, idea generators are sprouting up all over the internet.  These idea generators help bloggers with ideas about which to write. However, these generators are yet another useful tech tool for writers.

Random Logline Generator – throws out random scenarios that once expanded upon could be the next logline for your screenplay. Example: A guitarist, a district attorney, and a father start a homeless shelter.

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You’ve just started a new writing project which requires you do a lot of internet research. Or maybe you’re planning a trip that will be the inspiration for your next screenplay.  You could save all the helpful web pages you come across in your research in a Favorites Folder, or bookmark them,  but that’s so…1988. All that provides you with is a link.   You need a smart tool that allows you to surf the web gathering blocks of text, images, links within the web pages, etc., and you want all this info stored in one place - accessible from any computer. Oh yeah, and free would be good.  Sheesh, you writers are so demanding! Well lucky for you, Google has created Notebook.  

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• Seventh Sanctum (generates names of people, corporations, planets, vampires, pets, etc!)

• Fantasy Name Generator

• Behind the Name (best for ethnic specific first and middle names)

• Fake Name Generator (offers an entire identity suite)

• The Random Name Generator (uses the US Consensus to randomly generate names)