Updated 2/17/26
Inspired by this article about how John Steinbeck used his diary while writing The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve been documenting my progress in researching and writing my non-fiction book in my daily journals. My journals are much more interesting as a result!
I then photograph my journal entries related to my book and use Evernote to transcribe them. Longtime readers know I’m an Evernote evangelist and use it for everything. I love it even more since Evernote actually transcribes my handwriting!
Authors who write in longhand could use this technique to quickly generate editable text rather than having someone laboriously type it.
I store these transcriptions in the Evernote notebook I created to house my book’s 1900+ (and counting!) research notes.
I tag the journal entries to be able to easily find them later. Once I launch the web site for the book, I’ll re-purpose all my journal entries into a new blog devoted to the book! The blog will certainly improve my SEO ranking for my book’s topic.
Since I was already doing that, I thought, “Why not transcribe the entire journal entry?”
