Novel Writing Software

I use Final Draft and love it and scoff at the people who say Word is just as good. Yet I'm the opposite when it comes to writing prose. Word IS just as good as anything else I've seen. Organization for me is folders and sub-folders. Progress...something I don't really like to pay attention to...is done by page and word counts. I don't do character bios. Word is good for me.

Ben King said:

Yeah, revolutionary!

Microsoft are stealing more and more and more things from Apple. Hell, Windows Vista is basically Mac OS X with a different theme. At keynotes they go on joyfully about "instant search of your computer", when Mac users have had it for about 4 years.

Click to expand...

And Apple based their UI on work done at Xerox in the 1970s. Not only that, they based OS X on an ancient free variant of Unix. Revolutionary, eh?

bsolah said:

Also, Simon is a member of ours here. I'm sure you've seen him around.

Click to expand...

(Waves) That'd be me.

There are two kinds of 'writing software'. One is supposed to generate plots and all but write your book for you, which is the silliest idea since battery powered trouser zippers.

The other kind of writing software is just a word processor in slightly different clothing. Instead of keeping your novel in one long file (or a load of chapter files) this kind of writing software organises the books into chapters and scenes. That's all yWriter does.

I'm a programmer, and nobody sits down to write a 50,000 line program in a single text window. You'd be laughed off the planet if you tried, since it would be impossible to find anything quickly. Instead, we work with short code modules, which are held in source files. They show up in a tree view, and you edit a particular module by double-clicking it. The parts make up the whole. It's just so much easier to work on smaller pieces, while still being able to view the whole.

All I did was transfer this method of working to the act of writing a book. Several years back I was getting more and more confused the longer my book got, until I hit the wall at around 25,000 words. I could no longer check previous sections quickly, and splitting the book into chapter files meant I had nineteen copies of Word running simultanously.

A novel consists of chapters and scenes, and if you put the chapters into a tree and break them down further into scenes, you've got a structure the brain can work with. In yWriter you can drag and drop scenes between chapters, move chapters around, and open any scene in any chapter in its own editor window - simultanously.

I've written three novels using yWriter, and when time came to rewrite them for my publisher it saved me weeks of headaches. I used the scene description feature to keep notes about what needed to change, and used the auto-synopsis feature to print off a working framework for the book. AND I used the work schedule to see what I had to do every day to meet my deadline.

I put the software on my website for others to use, but I really don't care whether they write books with it or not. I'm not selling it, I'm giving it away, and I get nothing out of that than even more emails.

Still, it's very rewarding when someone sends me a message to say they're finally getting their novel into shape, thanks to my software. Every one of those makes me smile.

Cheers
Simon

(PS I'm currently running a draw for ten copies of my first novel. I'm going to pick five winners this Sunday, and another five next Sunday. See the sig for details - you can enter without registering for anything.)

spacejock2 said:

(
I'm a programmer, and nobody sits down to write a 50,000 line program in a single text window. You'd be laughed off the planet if you tried, since it would be impossible to find anything quickly. Instead, we work with short code modules, which are held in source files. They show up in a tree view, and you edit a particular module by double-clicking it. The parts make up the whole. It's just so much easier to work on smaller pieces, while still being able to view the whole.

All I did was transfer this method of working to the act of writing a book. Several years back I was getting more and more confused the longer my book got, until I hit the wall at around 25,000 words. I could no longer check previous sections quickly, and splitting the book into chapter files meant I had nineteen copies of Word running simultanously.

Click to expand...

Also a "software engineer" (Hate the term programmer) and that's pretty much what I do, except in Visio and UML.

Flapdoodle said:

Also a "software engineer" (Hate the term programmer) and that's pretty much what I do, except in Visio and UML.

Click to expand...

In the early 80's I used to write code for my 16k ZX-81, and later the 48k ZX Spectrum. They were only a few steps above calculators, and programming is what it was.

Cheers
Simon

spacejock2 said:

In the early 80's I used to write code for my 16k ZX-81, and later the 48k ZX Spectrum. They were only a few steps above calculators, and programming is what it was.

Cheers
Simon

Click to expand...

LOL. I started out in the early 80s writing machine code for my VIC20...!

Innkeeper said:

If novel writing software allowed me to input parameters prior to crunching the data and writing a wonderful novel complete with a thought provoking "must have" query letter, I'd love it.

If such a system could dance, so much the better.

Click to expand...

I think we all know what she's thinking...

I am generally not in favor of anything that slows me down or takes me away from the work in progress. I can very easily get sidetracked into another project, which can be the kiss of death for the project I'm on. So I tend to just write. If I get stuck (never stumped; just puzzled for a moment) then I'll go for a walk, drink some tea, eat something, pester one of the cats.

I'm 60,000 words into my novel that's for the novel deathmatch, it's about my halfway point I think. I've stopped and am trying to outline the rest of it on index cards, because I've got a lot going on and I don't want to start losing major plot lines.

I'm miserable. I hate it. It's a disgusting thing to do. I wouldn't be doing it, but I feel like the novel's going to keep ballooning in size if I don't.

(this started out as an analogy, and degenerated into Pete-gripes-about-working.)

Word 2007 is damned sexy, and I like it. It's pretty, I like the menus up top. I adore the word count. That little running word count makes me happier than anything. And if I select a chunk of my story, it tells me how many words out of the whole it is (200/15,000 for example) which I very much like. It shows me how much I've done in a day without any other work.

It's been a long time since Microsoft has sold me on a product (and the last time, it was just because I thought the idea of 'windows' was cute and definitely better than the list of DOS commands I'll carry in my head until I die) but I think that this time, they got it right. Even if they're ripping off of Apple (the two companies rip off each other for a lot of stuff) I don't care if I'm the one who benefits.

Word 2007

A quick question for the Word 2007 users, how do you write your MS? Office came with my tablet, and the ability to ink comments is nice, but I'm curious about a few things.

One large word document? Each scene a separate document? Each chapter a document?

I've never done anything other than each scene by itself in a MS-Specific folder, but tallying up for wordcounts or for structure can be a bit of a pain, and I was wondering what new to Word features that might have been added.

I hate slogging through and playing musical scenes if I have to correct something in an earlier revision.

yWriter sounds neat for those who model a lot, as something they might derive value out of. Anything that helps you get BIC and writing.

--Dru

Dru said:

A quick question for the Word 2007 users, how do you write your MS? Office came with my tablet, and the ability to ink comments is nice, but I'm curious about a few things.

One large word document? Each scene a separate document? Each chapter a document?

--Dru

Click to expand...

Sorry, it may just be me, but I read that and went "What!? Dur. Dur."

Good lord, no, none of that. Each work is in its own file. That's it. If I happen to cut a scene out, I'll put that in its own file/folder, but that's about it. Otherwise, it's just one long file for me.

That's just me, though.

spacejock2 said:

A novel consists of chapters and scenes, and if you put the chapters into a tree and break them down further into scenes, you've got a structure the brain can work with. In yWriter you can drag and drop scenes between chapters, move chapters around, and open any scene in any chapter in its own editor window - simultanously.

I've written three novels using yWriter, and when time came to rewrite them for my publisher it saved me weeks of headaches. I used the scene description feature to keep notes about what needed to change, and used the auto-synopsis feature to print off a working framework for the book. AND I used the work schedule to see what I had to do every day to meet my deadline.

Click to expand...

I've used 2 different paid software programs, and while those helped me in certain areas (with one, getting the backstory on the characters, the other a tabbed structure that let me easily go back and forth in the story), those programs still didn't offer what I needed - and I'll admit I wasn't sure what that was.

I now use yWriter (thanks, Simon). What decided me on this program was the descriptions you can write in for scenes; this has helped me tremendously. At least now I can look at a scene and say, "This is what I have to do here." If my muse decides it has to be changed in some way, I simply retype that description. Oh, and another lovely thing is if I want to move scenes around - this program makes that a snap.

One problem I had using it was having to be an Administrator to use it (no go here at work). Simon suggested putting it on a jump drive or thumb drive at home and bringing it here to work...voila! And he got back to me pretty quickly - pretty good for free software.

But I think people should use whatever suits them, be it the hated Word (and I do hate Word, being an old WordPerfect person myself) or whatever else is out there that gets you writing on a consistent basis.

~Nancy

I use Word Perfect, which allows you to open different docs in different tabs without running multiple copies of the program. Every chapter gets a new doc. If I need to go back and find something, I consult my outline as to which chapter it's in, and then I open that chapter's file.

Wordcount has been a bit of a pain, but only since my copy of Excell went poof. When I get my spreadsheet back, it'll be a walk in the park.

As it stands, I usually only have two or three documents open at once: my outline, the chapter I'm currently working on, and maybe the wordcount doc or a past chapter.

I really liked yWriter, just to chime in. It's not a 'novel writing software' -- it's an organizational tool suited to writers. What I especially liked is that you can get your text back *out* if you need it -- I've been burned a number of times by proprietary formats.

The only reason I don't still use it is that *anything* (including spreadsheets, flow charts, mind-mapping software) I do that isn't actually typing on my WIP tends to take over until I'm not actually typing on my WIP at all.

I do one chapter per file, by the way, with a short for-my-eyes-only "what's going on" paragraph at the beginning of each chapter. Safer that way, plus it's a nice balance between complexity and number of files.

I use openoffice to write most of my scenes, usually on my laptop. Later on I paste them into yWriter. No distractions that way, because the laptop isn't connected to the internet. (Far bigger time waste than anything else!)

I've never done anything other than each scene by itself in a MS-Specific folder, but tallying up for wordcounts or for structure can be a bit of a pain.

yWriter shows you words per chapter and words per scene within the chapter. It also shows the word count for the scene you're working on, updated on the fly. It also shows a cumulative word count across all chapters.

I recently added an importer so you can take a TXT file with chapter headings (Chapter X on its own line) and '* * *' scene breaks (also on their own line) and import the whole thing, generating a yWriter project with all the bits in the right places. It's now easy to save a word doc as text and import it, just to see how it looks in yWriter.

Anyway, I'm not selling it. It's just that most people don't realise what it can do.

Cheers
Simon