When participating in NaNo (National Novel Writing Month), you’ll probably need some tools to get your novel written. While you can write your 50,000 words in longhand (and some writers do, believe it or not), that can be quite a challenge. And if you want to have your word count validated by the official NaNo Word Count Validator at the end of November, you’ll need it in electronic format, so you can upload it to the NaNo site.

So here are a few electronic tools you can use to write your novel.

yWriter
This little writing program is marvelous. I use it myself and love it. It lets you set up chapters and scenes within the chapters, has a place for character information, including the viewpoint character for each scene, keeps a running word count for you and allows you to export your novel easily to a word processing document. It’s a self-contained program so you can run it on a flash drive. Best of all, it’s free. You can get more details on it here and also download it from that location. I highly recommend it.

Notepad
Don’t have any of the expensive word processing programs? Try using Notepad. It’s standard with Windows and works pretty well as just a text editor. There aren’t any fancy features to distract you from writing your story (definitely important for NaNo). You can save your novel as a text file and then open your text file in any other word processing program to format it for submission to an agent or editor. Free and easy to use.

Alphasmart
Don’t have a laptop? An Alphasmart might be the gadget for you. It’s basically a portable keyboard with a small digital screen that allows you to see about four lines of text. It’s battery powered and has memory built in so it saves your typed words. You can transfer the file to your computer via a PS/2 or USB cable and some models even have infrared capability so the transfer can be wireless. Portable, durable and again, no fancy features to distract you from your novel writing. You can read more about the Alphasmarts here and can usually find them available on Amazon or eBay for a good price.

You can find more information on tools to use in the NaNo forums. There’s an entire board devoted to NaNo Technology.

When selecting your tools for NaNo, remember that you need something that allows you to type quickly and has minimal distractions. Beyond that, anything goes!

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

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