A thesaurus is a fruitful tool when you use it befittingly. If you fathom what you’re performing, a thesaurus patronizes you find the merited word for your specific ballgame. But if you ply synonyms without kenning their shadinesses of gist, you will look really speechless. You need to apprehend each word you utilise, or else people will jape and jeer at your calligraphy.

We all have certain special characters that we use all the time, and finicky little ways to type those characters. You might google the name of an emoji, or download a menu bar app for copy-pasting, or learn key combinations for adding diacritical marks to letters.

Here’s another option: Bookmark CopyChar.cc.

Do you have the start of your novel in a Google doc? A note on your phone? Or perhaps you spent the first week of NaNoWriMo meticulously organising an empty outline in Scrivener? Here are some of the writing tools that amateur novelists swear by.

Writing is something everyone should do on some level. No matter what makes you put pen to paper, these three tips from Jennifer Egan will help as you continue your own writer's journey.