Taking Notes

This sure sounds like fun, doesn't it?

Well... fortunately, it's nothing like taking notes for class. It's more like journaling. Or blogging. You do it when you do it, and you do it because you have a reason.

While you're writing, one of the most useful tools on the face of the planet is a set of notes. Your thoughts on the plot, random musings about the characters, et cetera, et cetera. They don't have to be in paragraph form, and you're not turning them in at the end of the week. It's just a place to keep track of the things you come up with while you're NOT working on your story (that's when ~50% of my ideas come to me).

This is especially important for your general writing weaknesses. Whatever you're not good at (in my case, it's coming up with names), you do as much as you can in whatever note-taking medium you prefer. This helps so that when it comes to the time you need to put that skill to action, you have a repository of information you've stocked up from the hundreds of hours you're not at the keyboard, and you can just pull from it instead of halting your writing.

In a sense, it's like a Writer's Block antidote. Sure, notes won't solve all your problems, but they sure help (especially if you're just over two hours from starting a month-long writing extravaganza).