yWriter
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Copyright © 2012 The Office of Letters and Light :: All posted novel excerpts remain copyright their authors.
yWriter
It's free, it's written by a Wrimo, and it even has an option to scramble your novel. What's not to love?
Re: yWriter
What about BACK Up? How do you back up files when using this program. Can you use it with Google Docs?
Also can you use it on two computers at once....I prefer to use my laptop but when Im watching the minis I need to be on my laptop...
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Best way of backing up is to use yWriter in conjuction with Dropbox. Save your work in your Dropbox folder and it'll be backed-up to the cloud and syncronised with your other computers that have Dropbox installed. Dropbox also keeps past versions (up to 30 days), just in case you make a mistake somewhere.
To use yWriter on more than one computer is easy. Read this page: http://www.spacejock.com/RunFromThumbDrive.html about running yWriter in "portable" mode. Then put yWriter in a folder in your Dropbox folder.
It will sync/backup the whole thing (including settings) along with any other files that are in your Dropbox folder (including your novel/project, if that's where you save it). When you move to another machine, just go into the Dropbox folder and run yWriter from there. Everything should be as it was on your first computer.
Even if you decide not to use yWriter later, your scenes/chapters are all saved as bog-standard RTF files - which any word processing app should be able to deal with.
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A note about Dropbox:
Dropbox, and other similar storage solutions, can lead to problems with yWriter. This is because the connection can drop out, thus causing an error when yWriter tries to save your project data.
I've fielded *hundreds* of requests for help from Dropbox users over the past couple of years due to this. To such an extent that if an error occurs during saving to a Dropbox folder, yWriter reminds you NOT to run your project from Dropbox and won't allow you to submit an error report.
I'm sure it works for thousands of people, but you need to be aware of this. The recommended method is to run your project locally, then copy the project folder to Dropbox AFTER you exit yWriter.
Note: I'm not saying Dropbox is faulty. It's just that yWriter can save out a lot of files on closing, and a network connection is always going to be slower than writing to local storage. Something in the combination of yWriter/Dropbox can lead to issues.
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Thanks so much
Sounds a bit complicated but doable. I don't have time to putz with this during Nano. But yWriter seems worth it
Thanks
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Love, love, love yWriter! It makes it easy to concentrate on little pieces of the puzzle at a time and still see (and rearrange) the big picture. Perfect for Nano and beyond!
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yWriter? I ask myself this question every year around November, but I haven't been able to answer it so far.
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Lol.
I love yWriter. You can download it at http://spacejock.com.
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used it last year, and wish i could use it now on my tablet!!
Really liked being able to break up my chapters. the layout was perfect for my first novel
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From the little time I have spent with it, yWriter seems more than capable of handling novel-related tasks. The only reason I don't use it is that I'm too stubborn to learn something new.
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Trying ywriter this year because my ideas weren't very cohesive and I needed to get organized. So far I love it, and keep finding features I didn't expect (like photos on character notes). I probably won't write my novel in it, but it is great for sorting my notes.
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I don't use it for the actual writing, but I love it for planning and revising before and after my novel's written.
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Ditto. EXCELLENT planning tool, lack of a spell checker (maybe they've updated this?) makes me do my writing in an actual editor.
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I LIKE that it doesn't have a spellchecker. That's exactly the type of thing that slows down my momentum and creative process! At the end of the month, just export the document from yWriter and look for the little red squiggly in MS Word or some other editor. ;)
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I have used it for mayor rewriting and revising, and it was VERY useful, I liked to print out all the lists and see the big picture, doc character sketches and the lot, it really helps getting thing organized... but I cannot actually write outside of word, just as I can only use one brand of notebooks, I just have to.
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I'm using yWriter on my netbook. It's been good so far :)
Re: yWriter on netbook
yes...most software makes this netbook go "no really...you're seriously going to put that crap on me?"
I have Word starter 2010...but I hate writing in it lol
Soooooo...on with the ywriter.
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Just downloaded it a couple days ago... hopefully it will help me stay on track this year.
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I love yWriter. I love how simple it is to use and that I don't have to write in order. Because I never write in order.
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Any problems just let me know. (I don't think the sigs are working on the forums yet, but I'm the yWriter guy.)
Also competing in my sixth Nano this year. Possibly the first where yWriter is the same version as the previous year, although there have been incremental changes.
Re: yWriter
When looking for a program to manage barcode based checkin/checkout of her quilting guild's library, we stumbled across your library management program. It proved to be a godsend for managing a 700 plus book collection. (They have a big guild, one that has a show with 600 some odd quilts.)
I've been looking at the same program for managing our home library. The last time we attempted cataloging things, we were using PFS: File and hit around 1200 books before things fell apart. That was a few decades, and a few thousand books/magazines ago.
I have looked and played with yWriter and like what I see. I just haven't had the time to familiarize myself with the features. It looks like it would work with my style of story development.
Keep up the good work!
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I've tested BookDB2 with 35,000 entries on older hardware and it was okay. That's an extreme test though - my library has about 3400 books in it and it works fine with that.
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I always use yWriter, I love it. It's simple and it's not too distracting perfect for a procrastinator! :P
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Another yWriter user here! I love the organization.
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I use yWriter for all of my books. It's the one writing program that I've found actually works for me, especially since it's offered for free. I'd love to try out other programs, but I can't afford the prices. I definitely encourage any curious Wrimos to try it out. It's simple to use and in the time I've been using it (at least two or three years now) I haven't run into a single problem with it.
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Of the programs I've tried so far (Scrivener, LSB, and yWriter) I like yWriter the best; but it doesn't quite fit my mental process. I was trying to figure out a way to detach and/or rearrange tabs, for instance - is that possible? I'd like to be able to have the Project Notes and Characters windows side-by-side so I could easily copy and paste between them. I also couldn't find any way to customize the fonts or colors.
Really I'd be happy with just being able to rearrange things. It's a lovely program though.
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I have ywriter on my main computer, but I'm a little worried about how it'll run on my ancient laptop... going to download it on this silly old Toshiba now, and pray it works, as a good portion of my writing will be done on said laptop at work. (Oh, nightshifts, how I love you)
Does anyone have experience running it on low-end machines?
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I've run it straight off of a flash drive and it's worked great.
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The first versions of yWriter (up to yWriter4) were designed for Windows 98 PCs.
yWriter5 uses dotnet 2.0 and is will run on modest hardware with a minimum of Windows XP. (You CAN run it on '98, but it's not really worth the hassle of installing all the service packs etc.)
I prefer function over form. I really don't care what it looks like as long as it's fast and everything is a mouse click or two from the main screen.
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Just downloaded yWriter about a month ago and I've been playing around with it. Planning to use it during NaNo this year and am plotting away. I've found that I think in scenes here lately instead of chapters, and yWriter is perfect for that. I've really been enjoying it so far and am looking forward to a real bench-test in November.
My only issue with it - or rather upgrade WISH (because it's free and I don't want to complain when it's FREE) - is I'd like more fields with the character notes, maybe some guidance. For example, sometimes I remember to give my character a hobby or a unique habit or trait and sometimes I forget, or I'll forget that I gave a character some quirky habit and drop it. If there was a prompt for it in the character notes that would help. Or maybe a little more structure, when you click on the character's name the notes displaying at the bottom all run together. I put in " / " to force organization and it helps.
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I was using (and loving) yWriter until I discovered Scrivener (now available for the PC, in Beta) - it's like yWriter with extra added shinyness. I'm a convert!
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mmmmmm.....yWriter, I love you.
Usually I do NaNo on MS Word, but this year I'm giving yWriter a go. Super excited :D