Besides Word, which I've used to write books for 35 years, my go-to tools are:

- Dictate, on the iphone, for when ideas come faster than I can write them down. I send my dictation files to a human transcriber via Dropbox; she returns them to me as Word docs.

- Scapple, on Mac laptop. When I have a complex outline, including integrating multiple plot lines, I put ideas in little boxes and move them around until I get them in the right order. Then export to Word as an outline.

- I also rely on my leather-bound journal to write things out when I get stuck. Writing them down works better for me than typing them out. It must tap into a different level of creativity.