So the consensus here seems to be mostly Microsoft Word. And that makes sense because pretty much every workplace office environment on Earth uses Word. And it's pretty easy to get Word on both Window's PCs and Macs.
And from my own experience, I can relate to how frustrating Word can be at times.
I used to say, "Microsoft Word was invented to drive me crazy!"
And that's because when you start doing things like creating professional documents that have all kinds of specialized per chapter headers and footers, using styles, creating tables of content and indices, and adding graphics to your document, or other advanced features (including linking it to Excel), Word can drive you crazy! Especially, when you are using older versions that are full of bugs.
The new section break bug in Word 2007 used to drive me nuts!
But I needed to get that to work in order to properly format my non-fiction book that I was self-publishing. Thankfully Word 2010 for the Mac fixed that bug, but then turned all the documents into XML files! That messed up a lot of other things for me!
However, Word and I have a understanding these days and even when I use its advanced features (like for a recent Capital Expenditure Report I did for my company), it pretty does what I need it to do.
That being said, it is a bit overkill for writing a simple manuscript.
It's like Word sits between the simple RTF word processing apps and the advanced printing/publishing apps like Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign. I've actually created professional marketing collateral with InDesign but I wrote all of the copy with Word first.
Anyway, there also seems to be a lot of support for Scrivener. I've been interested in this program for a while but I'm also wondering if that is too much software for my needs as well.
I had a program that paid a lot of money for and barely, barely used called StoryView.
Back in the days when I was gung-ho for using software and the Internet to help me write my books I came across StoryView. And the funny thing is that I was also writing screenplays so I had myself a copy of Final Draft for the Mac. So in order to use StoryView on my Mac, I needed Parallels for Mac to get Windows XP to run on the Mac and then install StoryView which only ran on Windows XP!
What a waste of money!
Especially when I used StoryView like only a couple of times before just going back to Word.
Though I am a big fan of Final Draft. When version 8 came out, it had these great new features called Scene Properties and Scene Navigation. And I actually populated those panels with tons of data, as I was writing my scripts. And they were very helpful with characters and scenes etc. However, a screenplay is a completely different animal than a book.
With my books, I do like 5 drafts in Word. I rarely go into a previous draft and edit it. I just write it, then save, then duplicate the file, rename to "draft x", and then start from the beginning making changes 'till the end. Then I repeat the whole process, until I think the manuscript is ready for something.
Is that efficient? Probably not!
But I know that I would rather be writing than populating panels with all kinds character, plot, and scene data. I know it'd be helpful but I just know myself; I'd be doing all of that work instead of writing because I am a PROCRASTINATOR!
I admit it. I'm like Richard Castle. I'd be out solving murders instead of writing! Even his daughter Alexis said, "…Dad, when you have deadline with the publisher, that's when you write like crazy in a caffeine infused frenzy!"
Yeah that's me. I've gotta work on that.
Anyway, anybody else have experience with StoryView?
Also, Final Draft has a book/novel writing template. I've never used it because it seems to bare-bones for my needs. Anybody else have experience using Final Draft for book writing?
In the meantime, I'll head over to the Scrivener site and give it another look-see.
I do like the idea of using Google Docs to hold the files in the cloud, so you can work on them anywhere. I've gotta look into that too.