Late yesterday, PG took a dip into the world of software created for the purpose of helping authors do their work.
He claims no expertise or knowledge of any of these programs, although he tried out Scrivener on an experimental basis several years ago.
To the best of PG’s knowledge, most authors use plain vanilla word processing programs for their writing. In the US, for all intents and purposes, that means Microsoft Word.
(Let the more mature among us pause for a moment of silence in remembrance of WordPerfect – The real WordPerfect, not the sad and hollow shell of its former self still sold by Corel.)
After his quick scamper through cyberspace, PG found the following story creation programs, listed in no particular order.
PG would be interested in comments by anyone who has used one or more of these programs and suggestions of others that PG has missed. PG did not include the several software programs that are focused on the particular needs of scriptwriters.
One of the inherent problems with creating software for authors to write stories and books is that (1) the market for such software is not particularly large and (2) virtually everyone in the target market is already quite familiar with word processing software, namely (today) MS Word or Word for Mac.
PG hasn’t forgotten Pages from Apple but is under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that most authors with Macs use Word.
Feel free to share thoughts, experiences, ideas, additional programs, etc.
Adding to the praise of Scrivener – features that have yet to be mentioned:
There’s an outline feature, where I can put index cards on a cork-board. Just a few sentences about each scene. These will stay there while I work on other scenes. But if I want to see the outline, I can flip the view to that.
There’s a way to create a folder, (like for a fragment of chapters) so I can drag and drop these index cards. I can change the color, or put a watermark on them, so I know at a glance if it’s a draft, a fragment or which POV it’s been written in. Merging them is easy, and the Index Card has the folder information.
Then, once all is done, I can compile the final document to epub. It isn’t fancy, but Draft2Digital can add a sweet smattering of formatting that make it look better.
Default fonts can be changed with Styles, just like in Word. But I don’t think they export to Word.
Under References there’s a place for character information, and an extensive bible, including pictures and links.
I’ve tried Plottr…but am a newbie. Having said that it seems to be a useful tool for at-a-glance plotting and characterizations (I’m a fiction writer). It keeps the focus on what should happen next, depending upon what sort of novel you are writing. I paid for a license and get all the updates.
If you want something to help plotting a novel, this might be your program.
Not a fan of Scrivener. It suits people who work in a certain way, I’ve observed, but I am not one of those people.
I still use my ancient copy of Word, most of the time, and a public wiki for worldbuilding bible stuff (bonus: other people can help me maintain it).
I still use WordPerfect. It’s one of those “when you pry it from my cold, dead hands” things for me. I wrote my first two novels in it. I’ll use Word when it’s the last program on earth and there are government fines for avoiding it.
However, discussions of Scrivener and screenshots on the old Kindle Boards left me so intrigued, I tried it and converted to it for novels. For me the transition was easy – imported a 3 chapter novella, played with it a bit, made sure I could get it out of Scrivener and into WordPerfect, and I was off and running. Maybe it was easy because I ignored anything I didn’t need right away. When I get to a situation where I do need a feature I know the program has, I look it up and incorporate it.
The other can’t-be-without-it writers’ program for me is Vellum. I used WordPerfect for final formatting of my paperbacks and an html program for the ebooks for years, but it was time-consuming and frustrating. Scriv is great for writing, but I didn’t want to mess with it for final formatting, especially after finding out it was making for messed up Look Insides on Amazon (which was probably fixed long ago, but too late for me). Vellum makes it child’s play.
I originally wrote exclusively in MS Word but then I discovered Scrivener. The fact that I can have distinct sections for research, notes, and chapters all visible on a tree beside my writing has made life much easier than when I had to either scroll back and forth through my document or jump out of it to find the ancillary documents of my notes.
I finally started using the ability to rearrange chapters by dragging on the menu tree with my current novel and it is so much easier than cutting and pasting and hoping nothing goes wrong.
Of course, that being said once it’s all done, I compile and then use another editor to prepare it for ebook formatting. As I’m too poor/cheap to get an MS Word license I use LibreOffice and then save it in Word doc format for uploading.
If ever I find a program easier and more helpful to me than Scrivener I’ll happily switch – I’m a tech so it’s all about functionality and ease of use not brand loyalty – but it is a high bar for me to consider jumping.
One program I highly recommend (but that is unfortunately Mac only) is Vellum. While not a word processing program per se, you can write in it. But it does an excellent job in converting to e-book and print. It’s pricey but pays for itself in very short order.
For the PC users, there is a new program out there, still in beta iirc, called Atticus. It is similar to Vellum, but is still lacking a few features. It is a better program if you want to write in it, imo. But exporting to DOCX is frustrating because it loses formatting (or did the last time I tried). Hopefully, by the time it is out of beta, they will have fixed it.
I don’t use the writing programs mentioned, although I’ve heard a lot about them in my writing groups. I primarily use Google docs now, and have been since 2020, when I got my first Chromebook. This, because I’m not an overly huge fan of M$ products, so I when i got attached to one (XP and Win7) I get upset when they do “upgrades”. I mainly switched to Chrome because I got a taste of Win10 at work and completely detested it.
I do import to Word when I want to save to an external drive a second copy of what I write. The stripped down version comes in handy when I have to start shipping it off to literary elsewheres.
Re WordPerfect: I remember throwing out dozens of perfectly good (and unopened) copies of said program in the early 2000s. My late father used to teach overseas and that program was the go-to word processing program for hundreds of students.
I’m a bit surprised that no one has mentioned yWriter, created by Australian author Simon Haynes, whose day job is programmer. The current version is 7.x etc., but since it works for me on my Win10 machine, I still use yWriter5-something.
yWriter works at the scene level, so the ability to move around scenes into various chapters is massive (and of course, you can move chapters, too). It can keep data on characters, locations, items, project, chapter, and scene notes, and a host of other stuff I haven’t bothered to learn to use. I have used it for, gosh, I don’t know how many years / novels and stories. I even did a cookbook with it once.
I think the best thing about yWriter is that it is free. Find it at spacejock dot com (the name of the site is from one of Simon’s characters, Hal Spacejock).
Reminds me of my first word processor: XyWrite! Loved that DOS-based thing. Here’s the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XyWrite
I use Plottr to plot the basic plot arcs of my novel. I import it all into Scrivener for writing, then export it to Word for final formatting and submission.
Scrivener is my darling. I like being able to concentrate on one scene, write alternate versions of scenes, and put annotations and comments on scenes for easy revision. It exports easily to Word. I like the automatic backup, and I also back it up to Dropbox.
I’ve also used Microsoft Project for creating timelines; I find it more useful than Aeon Timeline, though I’ve used that as well. But my current timeline creation favorite is Airtable, which I also use for keeping track of characters. Airtable lets me link between timeline events, characters, locations, and POVs.
I was all-in on Aeon Timeline for a while, but I ceased to need its close attention to detail eventually (since I’m not writing goat-chokers like Robert Jordan or GRRMartin with hundreds of characters, or mysteries with acute focus on timepoints and alibis), so it became a level of complexity I could bypass. Reluctantly… the product is like crack for my obsessive brain.
Airtable is nice for assortments of things (characters, guilds, magic items, project tasks, etc.) in its “database-lite” approach, and I do use it. I worry, though, about making it too integral to my processes, lest it vanish. I’d be happier with a PC-local version instead of an internet app. (If Scrivener goes away, I can move things to Word. If Airtable goes away, what can I move the content to… SQL? Unlinked spreadsheets? My entire career was with computer tech — you learn to think about end-of-lifetime product issues for useful platforms and tools.)
I’ve used MS Project professionally for SW projects, but it never occurred to me that it could be used for internal book development (and my life isn’t complicated enough to use it for my external book biz). I can see how that would work (clever!) but I find it much easier to do that within Scrivener. MS Project has always suffered from the inescapable problem of “paper project printout LARGE, laptop screensize SMALL”, and I find the Scrivener design is a much more compact way to manage all of that, at least for the actual manuscript writing.