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Writing Programs

Phantom

Phantom

Uh, I didn't do it.
No I'm not talking like Word, I'm talking like actual programs designated for writing a novel or book.

So I found this program called ywriter... Okay, I don't know if I've been living in a hole for most of my life, but I've never heard of it. It seems to be a very organized program from what I've explored. Beats Word by my book. It lets you organize by chapter, then each chapter is organized by scenes. You can also make a profile for all your characters.

Plus its free, which always helps.

yWriter5

Anyone else heard of it? Should I bother keeping it on my computer?

I am not advertising this, it's not mine, but I didn't know it existed until the mother of a friend of mine told me about it and how she used it to write her book. (been published which is cool)


Are there any other programs like this? Are there better ones out there?
 
I've tried it, and it's pretty interesting if you can get used to breaking stories up that way. I haven't used it since the beginning of last November, though, when it ate much of the beginning of my NaNo and quite a few notes. That's not a regular occurrence at all, and it generally keeps pretty detailed backups of most things so I was able to recover the most important stuff, but... yeah. Whatever glitch happened to me may be fixed in a more recent version, assuming there is one, but I didn't go back and probably wasn't using it all that effectively in the first place.

The thing is, though, it's probably not worth keeping if you don't feel you need that kind of organizational structure. I'm disorganized enough that I find hand-holding like that helpful (though I prefer Celtx--it's not specifically for novel, etc. writing, but I like the way it lets me structure things, it's more open than yWriter and it's cross-platform... also it didn't eat my story), but do you really need something like that? If you tend to keep notes and things in more than one document but are able to organize your stories well enough with a few simple folders, then no, I wouldn't bother.
 
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I like to use directory structures and plaintext files which I then read and create latex from. then I use mercurial to version-control it if I remember.

uh.
 
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