Writing Software

LadyVonFright · Dec 17, 2008

I was just wondering, does anyone use any writing software when writing a novel? I am asking this because I want to know if it is worth it to actually use one. Are there any recommendations of a good one?

I have come across this one in researching...
http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html
If you have used it or heard about it, would you mind sharing your thoughts on it?

alleycat · Dec 17, 2008

The guy who wrote yWriter is a member here. Just do a search and you will find some additional information.

Don · Dec 17, 2008

I use it and it helps me stay organized. You might want to do a search of this forum for 'yWriter,' I think there are already several threads discussing it.

ideagirl · Dec 17, 2008

Power Structure. Good stuff.

LadyVonFright · Dec 17, 2008

Excellent! thanks I will check it out

scarletpeaches · Dec 17, 2008

I use WetWare 1976.

Dave.C.Robinson · Dec 17, 2008

I've used yWriter quite extensively and like it a lot. It's written as a project management tool, so it's really good for organizing a novel, but doesn't pretend or try to do the work for you.

Any word processor or text editor can work. I wrote a novel in Abiword and later revised it once in each of Open Office and MS Office.

It really depends on which program works best for you. Ideally the one you want is whatever gets in the way the least, so you can focus on what you're writing not how you're writing it.

Carmy · Dec 17, 2008

I downloaded yWriter a while back, tried it and then deleted it. I'm not knocking yWriter but I find I can do the same organizing with Word or WordPerfect and a lot faster.

As for the other programs out there--the ones who write the novels for you--I haven't tried them because I feel the story might turn out to be 'wooden'. I wonder if anyone has ever published anything by using one of those programs.

jeany · Dec 18, 2008

yWriter sounds good. A year ago (before I joined this forum) I was getting ready to do a rough outline draft, and I had to round up all my scattered research notes. Thousands of them were scattered in boxes all over the house. I got WritersBlocks3.1. It's like electronic index cards plus a regular word processor. I like it a lot, because I really have a hard time organizing and pigeonholing things. I tend to forget where I put things. I can use it from beginning to end.

LadyVonFright · Dec 18, 2008

hmmm sounds like its worth a shot to at least try it out, that way I can see for myself if it will be useful.

Thanks for all the input everyone

RJK · Dec 18, 2008

Over in the Tech Help Section, Roger Carlson has a thread where he links to several macros that he's built as add-ins to MS Word. They are very helpful.

I use MS Word, pound away at the first draft, then go through it fixing all the mistakes, ugly scenes, typos, and other errors I can find. After I finish with that, I run the manuscript through an online editor called Autocrit. This program finds many mistakes that I missed, and makes many suggestions for fixing wording and style. It cost $50 for an annual subscription for this service. Many would not think the program is worth it. I, for one, do.

psykeout · Dec 18, 2008

OpenOffice is one choice. I tried using yWriter, but it just got too disjointed for me. Too much pointing and clicking, whereas with OO, I can leave windows open that have the notes in them.

But, that's just me. I think that everybody has different opinions and you just need to figure out which one works best for you.

LadyVonFright · Dec 18, 2008

TnD said:
OpenOffice is one choice. I tried using yWriter, but it just got too disjointed for me. Too much pointing and clicking, whereas with OO, I can leave windows open that have the notes in them.

But, that's just me. I think that everybody has different opinions and you just need to figure out which one works best for you.

Actually I had OO at one point and I got rid of it because not everyone has that program, so if I wanted to submit my work to a publisher, or a magazine etc...I would have to use a .txt file, im not entirely sure what the whole problem was, I saw conflict and I evaded as quick as possible

Dave.C.Robinson · Dec 18, 2008

Another option is roughdraft which has a second window for notes.

The Lonely One · Dec 18, 2008

Hmm. I dunno about all this new-fangled writing software, but I've been using Corel's Word Perfect pretty much since I started writing and it's never done me wrong, except for the occasional need to shake my head in disgust at spellcheck--but I think that's an epidemic among processors.

Best spell checker is a careful eye or two, I say.

I think the program should just be comfortable enough to the user that it is basically ignored the entire time they're writing. I don't need any fancy shmanciness tailored specifically to novel writing, though those things could be nice; dunno, never used one. Point is, what works for me works for me. Whatever produces the least amount of frustration and interruption (I'm not going to mention the name of a certain paperclip and a certain dog that could cause said interruptions...).

RJK · Dec 18, 2008

Only the lonely would damn the darkness (paperclip) rather than turn on the light (turn off the feature). Although I agree, that was one of the most annoying things that ever came out of Microsoft.

One of the most frequent problems with spell checkers is that they miss words that are spelled correctly but are not the word you meant to type. Homonyms, and the infamous you - your plague. One of the last edits I do is a 'Find' for "you" to insure I didn't mean "your."

The Autocrit program I mentioned above has a homonym finder. It just finds them and offers alternatives, you still have to read the sentence and insure you've used the correct word. If you click on the word or alternative word, the definition pops up from Dictionary.com. It's really a nice feature, but still requires quite a bit of drudgery.

caromora · Dec 18, 2008

I'm another RoughDraft user. It's excellent.

The Lonely One · Dec 18, 2008

RJK said:
Only the lonely would damn the darkness (paperclip) rather than turn on the light (turn off the feature). Although I agree, that was one of the most annoying things that ever came out of Microsoft.

One of the most frequent problems with spell checkers is that they miss words that are spelled correctly but are not the word you meant to type. Homonyms, and the infamous you - your plague. One of the last edits I do is a 'Find' for "you" to insure I didn't mean "your."

The Autocrit program I mentioned above has a homonym finder. It just finds them and offers alternatives, you still have to read the sentence and insure you've used the correct word. If you click on the word or alternative word, the definition pops up from Dictionary.com. It's really a nice feature, but still requires quite a bit of drudgery.

I think the paperclip being equated to darkness is a good representation of the evil harvested within its curly metal strand.

But why should I have to turn off the feature? It should have to be turned ON by those who can't find the keyboard and the blank WP page. But no, paperclip strikes again! Just another socialist Microsoft marketing tool to stumble over... :rant:

skyscrape32 · Dec 18, 2008

YWriter is ok because it lets you organize your writing and the sequence of events you are making for your novel.

M.R.J. Le Blanc · Dec 18, 2008

I have a wrimo who uses ywriter, and she loves it. I use LiquidBinder myself, and am quite pleased with it. It's got a whole slew of things like dossiers, outlines, sequences, chapters, photo galleries, song playlists, etc and stores them all in one folder. So if I make a playlist of songs, it makes copies of those songs and stores it in the appropriate place instead of pointing to the original file. Which works for me, because I'm always reorganizing my files lol

WWWWolf · Dec 19, 2008

prrrfukt said:
Actually I had OO at one point and I got rid of it because not everyone has that program, so if I wanted to submit my work to a publisher, or a magazine etc...I would have to use a .txt file, im not entirely sure what the whole problem was, I saw conflict and I evaded as quick as possible

OpenOffice.org Writer uses OpenDocument, which is not a format that's specific to that application - it's actually an ISO standard and more and more apps are using it. And, of course, it can save as plain text or HTML or RTF or Word or whatever else. And since Word and most of the other apps on the planet can also open most of those files, I've never had any problems with it. The only problem I've ever had was getting the exact formatting through, and people who publish the texts aren't generally interested of that. If there's any ambiguity I'll just send the PDF along with the editable file.

Currently, I have to say all office applications aren't very optimal, but they're the best I could find. The less I spend looking at formatting the better, but the problem is that I can't quite get out the results I need. I'm still working on the easy solution of getting zillion different kinds of outputs from same source file.

Aside of OpenOffice.org, I've had a gigantic bunch of other tools for various reasons:

Revision control software - I've moved from Subversion to Darcs to Git. No need to rely on the slow and fickle revision control features in word processors, just use powerful modern software to keep track of changes. It also makes it easy for me to keep files synchronised across multiple locations; I can work on stuff on separate computers, even off the Internet.
Wikis - Locally installed MediaWiki (for maintaining an in-world "encyclopaedia", material that could possibly be public when I'm rich and famous ) and MoinMoin (for story planning other random notes and pieces of information).
Random little pieces of software that serve various special needs. I've used Inkscape for drawing maps, and there's been need for stuff like genealogy software (characters have ancestors too...) and even level editors for games (I can just build a mockup of the area to help visualise things a little bit).
Custom software. I wrote my own dictionary program for the fictional language I designed. I have my own wordcount tools. The text-reformatting question is somehow becoming more and more managed too.

Well, I'm a computer geek, so this stuff probably works for me and I'm happy with it, but I'm saying people who can put all this power in nice simple box would be making a lot of money

scarletpeaches · Dec 19, 2008

I don't see what any of these various softwares do that MS Word (or a mere pen and paper) couldn't.

Don · Dec 19, 2008

scarletpeaches said:
I don't see what any of these various softwares do that MS Word (or a mere pen and paper) couldn't.

It depends mostly on how you like to work. As an ex-programmer, I need some structure, and the easier, the better.

yWriter4 gives me that by making it easier to organize by chapter and scene than Word. My chapter/scene outline is always right in my face, so moving from one scene to another to check continuity is fast. I can keep notes about characters, locations, or items and access them with a click or two. It's easy to drag a scene from one chapter to another.

It's easy to store a short description of each chapter and scene along with the main text, and I can print either of those sets for a synopsis or overview. I can set a scene as unused and it won't clutter up my printouts. I can still get a printout of a scene, a chapter, or the whole thing, with or without all the notes. I can export the whole mess to .DOC, .RTF or HTML if I need to, so there's no problem with portability.

When I used Word, I could still do all those things, it just wasn't as easy.

I got used to those organizational tools when I wrote software, and I really missed them when I went from writing code to writing novels.

Actually, I didn't realize until writing this post that without my programming background, I probably wouldn't have known how important those tools are for maintaining a big project. There are a lot of parallels between writing software and writing a novel. The programming environment I used and yWriter4 have more in common than I had realized until now.

YMMV.

WWWWolf · Dec 19, 2008

scarletpeaches said:
I don't see what any of these various softwares do that MS Word (or a mere pen and paper) couldn't.

Yeah, and while we're at it, who uses these "written words" anyway, let's go back to oral storytelling.

But seriously, while specialised software doesn't technically do more, they can do things differently and perhaps do some parts of the workflow more efficiently and robustly. Writing is more than just, well, writing. Writing involves a tremendous amount of organising of information, too.

How do you archive old versions of texts? Using the built-in version tools that may or may not work with other tools? Manually, saving stuff as "My Story 2008-12-19 15:39.doc", which gets tedious pretty fast? I save it under whatever name I want and type the command "git commit", and add a few notes on what I actually changed. If I ever get curious about questions like "what did the story look like in mid-December last year?" or "at which point did I came up with that airship idea, and since I've changed the description like dozen times, how did I describe it originally?" or like, the answers are usually a couple of commands away.

I'm not saying anyone should be forced to archive versions. I'm just saying that I personally sleep better when my stuff is properly archived and I can get answers to questions like that. I'm not saying this makes me better writer - on the contrary, my notes can be pretty disorganised at times, and I forget things. But I am saying that if getting specific software helps you to write, by all means, go for it. That's what the computers are here for - help you do stuff.

scarletpeaches · Dec 19, 2008

WWWWolf said:
...How do you archive old versions of texts?...

I don't.

Writing Software

LadyVonFright

alleycat

Still around

Don

All Living is Local

ideagirl

LadyVonFright

scarletpeaches

Dave.C.Robinson

... with the High Command

Carmy

jeany

LadyVonFright

RJK

Sheriff Bullwinkle the Poet says:

psykeout

should be writing instead...

LadyVonFright

Dave.C.Robinson

... with the High Command

The Lonely One

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

RJK

Sheriff Bullwinkle the Poet says:

caromora

Still alive. Kind of.

The Lonely One

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

skyscrape32

M.R.J. Le Blanc

aka Sadistic Mistress Mi-chan

WWWWolf

Look! A carnival wolf!

scarletpeaches

Don

All Living is Local

WWWWolf

Look! A carnival wolf!

scarletpeaches