Five Canva features for writers

Writers worldwide use Canva to create mood boards, social media promotional material, and even book covers. But there’s more to Canva than template-driven design, so here are five ways to use it as part of your writing process.

Planning with Canva Whiteboards

Canva’s Whiteboard is one of my favourite features of the platform. It’s a free-form, infinite canvas ideal for brainstorming, planning, and storyboarding your project. Whiteboards are similar to Scapple and Apple’s Freeform App but offer greater versatility and work well with the rest of the Canva platform.

Since the possibilities are endless, here are some ways you can use it:

1. Use sticky notes, text or images to brainstorm ideas, plot scenes, and scratch out characters.
2. Connect story elements and notes with arrows or group them together using shapes.
3. Arrange scene cards into your preferred story structure.

Write in Canva Docs

Canva provides a capable alternative to Google Docs, with most of the features you’d expect in a modern, rich-text, cloud-based word processor. Its UI is simpler than Google Docs’, displaying only minimal tools and hiding options until you need them.

Organising your manuscript

In theory, you could write your entire manuscript in a single Canva Doc (its document model certainly supports it) and use…