I rough outline and note-take with pen and vast quantities of paper. I find the ’scenes’ this way – eventually. Then I transfer these scenes to system cards… then wallpaper the wall with them. Play the ‘outline jigsaw puzzle’ game for several weeks/months. Then chuck the whole shebang into a Word doc.

I also read, print, re-read and highlight thousands of articles from the net. The highlighted sections then get typed into a document … which then gets put into the relevant outlined scenes.

Excessive? Yep.

I had 100 pages of outline on my current project plus 800 pages of notes in word document.

After all this drama actually writing the book is the fun bit!

The drawbacks include the extra time to dictate it, and the problems any transcription software will have with neologisms, made-up names, and all my other writerly quirks.

But once I’m onto a second draft (and reorganization) I much prefer the computer with spell checking, reformatting and exporting, outlining, and so on.

I also wanted to add that while I used (physical) notebooks for a long time, I’m finding myself more and more doing Spotlight searches to find info quickly. This is making me lean toward a “digital notebook” solution.

Which, of course, brings me to Circus Ponies’ Notebook. A very cool app that is, to my mind, closest to the only Win app I truly envy – OneNote – though Curio is a close second.

For organizing and arranging, Devonthink and Curio are both useful and wide-ranging, but with different interface styles. DT is currently in a 2.0 beta and it’s looking like an amazing app.

Evernote (for all platforms, not just Mac) is probably the most useful because it syncs crossplatform, including with an iPhone app.

Her list of books surprised me – in a good way! Some solidly helpful books on that list. One I would add is a little book called Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Also, Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. I read that a few years back when it came out, but it’s been making the rounds of the blog-o-sphere lately, so I thought I’d mention it here. (Note that while both books are splendid in helping an artist create, neither one is specifically written to writers, per se.)

The only downside to it IMO is that it deals only in rich text documents or rtfd directories, and each file, note, summary, and tags are put into separate files. This makes for some big *.scriv files (which are actually directories).

Once Snow Leopard comes, and when Scrivener updates to take advantage of SL’s built-in abbreviation-word-completion features, it will really be something.