what if you have a cheap computer that doesn't have a word processor?

If you have internet access on it, OpenOffice is supposed to be very good (I haven't used it, but I know a lot of people recommend it).

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Why can't you use notepad?

The only issue I can see is you'll need to break the novel into a few files because notepad doesn't deal well with huge files. But you can just copy/paste them into the verifier in parts.

Definitely not a problem! We have folks who write their novels by hand, being able to type them into a digital format is a huge leap. Just be sure to keep backups - hopefully on a different computer (email them to yourself or a trusted friend).

Some folks also write using Google Docs, if you have online access on that computer.

NaNoWriMo & ScriptFrenzy Staff

There's nothing wrong with writing in simple stuff, I STILL write in a plain text editor. The only issue I have with Notepad is it eats the new lines in Linux text files, and I don't think you'll run into that problem!

If you need something lightweight and free, Rough Draft is great for Windows. If you can't install anything but have a USB stick, both Notepad++ and OpenOffice will run from one. Notepad++ is more laid out for coding, but if you disable all the highlighting/line number stuff it's nice to write in too (I've done it).

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I second the OpenOffice software. I've been using it for ages because my computer doesn't have Microsoft Office and I absolutely love it; my only problem with it is the occasional confusion in their version of Powerpoint, which has no bearing on this discussion.

Also, I personally write it by hand and type it up at several different intervals.

Open Office is good, if you have room to install it. If not, then if you've got constant net access then an online WP. If not that, notepad is essentially fine (and I think it wouldn't have a problem with a 50 thousand word file. I've seen much bigger .txt files than that.) For word count, there's the verifier on here when that comes online, or there's various sites out there to count words.

Make sure to make backups!

Does your computer have WordPad installed? It's a very low-overhead word processor. It can do basic formatting like italic and bold, and is basically the next step up from Notepad.

Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes

CopyWriter is a small word processor and it has a live word count at the bottom. There's always Google Docs, which quite a few are using this year. Google Docs is suppose to have an off line feature but I haven't checked into that to see how it works, others say they use it.

Open Office is good, but it isn't small, so you might want to check on that. Rough Draft isn't bad and has a side bar you can use for notes, some NaNo writers use that one. Jarte is free and also small. WordPad has some tips and tricks to it, like setting it for double space lines, but I can't remember how at the moment. Ah, just found it. After you type 2 or 3 lines highlight it Ctrl+A then Ctrl+2 and it will continue to double space after that.

Let me also recommend Liquid Story Binder... it's a very compact program... it can be installed on a thumb drive, and used anywhere. VERY powerful program, though, and designed for novel-writing.

Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes

I just downloaded the latest version of OpenOffice.

150 MB file

Downloading it with dial-up (and not doing anything else on the computer so it would download faster) took me over 8 hours. Something to keep in mind of you're interested in downloading.

But it is free.

Hope this helps.

2006 (Won): I Can't See Myself!--SciFi/Fan--Invisibility
2007 (Won): The Amber Pendant--SciFi/Fan--Time Travel Murder Mystery
2008 (Won): The Conspiracy Class--Mainstream/Thriller--Conspiracy
2009 (Pending):Gap Year (Working Title) Suspense-Thriller

Google Docs now has an option that lets you work offline. So you can use Google Docs no matter where you are, even with no internet connection. It syncs up when you're online. This is also a good option to protect your manuscript from the occasional devastating hard drive crash.

NaNo 2009 - Simple Human - You are but a simple human whose mind cannot fathom the greatness that is The Collective.

My one and only year of doing (and winning!) NaNo I used an editor called Q10 (http://www.baara.com/q10/). It's a text editor that takes up the entire screen (including replacing the taskbar) so there's nothing to distract you from writing.

It contains some useful features for NaNo, including a timer alarm (X words in Y minutes), target counts etc.

It's 360k in size and (AFAIK) should run fine on any PC that's capable of running windows.

For NaNo too many word processing features are just a distraction, IMO.

2009 - The Significance of Blackberries
2008 - Worm War 1 - WON; 50,218

Open Office works very well. www.openoffice.org. I use it exclusively and took Word off my work computer so I could just use Open Office.

I second (or seventh) the openoffice.org recommendation. I was going to buy Office for my new laptop but then decided to try open office. I am hooked!

Just wanted to add: I love it. I might be using it for Nano if I get used to it in time. Works a lot better than Microsoft Works.

Make sure you also download the complete user guide, you'll need it. It's over 500 pages.

2006 (Won): I Can't See Myself!--SciFi/Fan--Invisibility
2007 (Won): The Amber Pendant--SciFi/Fan--Time Travel Murder Mystery
2008 (Won): The Conspiracy Class--Mainstream/Thriller--Conspiracy
2009 (Pending):Gap Year (Working Title) Suspense-Thriller

It's kind of slow moving, but if you create a google account (gmail) you have access to googledocs, and it's kind of slow to load (actually, it might be better by now, I haven't checked it in a long time) but it works as a simple word processor and a way to save your work (so that no matter what computer you're on, just log in to your gmail account and you have your stories!).

Of course, I mostly use it to just upload everything I write to because I habitually lose or break my flashdrive (and thus repeatedly must replace it), and I got in trouble with that once... I still have an old broken flash drive that just quit working one day, I hold on to it in hopes that some day I may get the stories off it that are saved there. Since then I always back things up in several ways, one of which being loaded to the internet.

Not to mention is auto saves every few minutes so you don't have to worry about accidentally closing it without saving your changes, chances are they'll already be saved, so even if your computer crashes, you won't lose much.

As people have already said, OpenOffice is great. You can password protect your files (which I LOVE!), it's very easy to use, and is very similar to Word, so it doesn't take much learning.

The only issue I have with it is that I have yet to find a hot key for the word count option. I know how to check word count, but I really don't want to have to click-click-click-click to find it every time, haha.

And it's free! :D

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ~Ray Bradbury

"So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it." ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948

The instructions tell you how to put the word count in the header of the document:

Page 108 of the manual:
If you are writing a document which needs to contain a fixed
number of words, you may want to insert in the header or
footer of the document a word count field so that you can
quickly check where you are.
To do that, move the cursor into the header or footer, then
select Insert > Field > Other. In the dialog box that opens,
go to the Document page and select Statistics as the Type,
Words in the Select list, and Arabic (1 2 3) as the Format,
then click Insert.

Hope this helps.

2006 (Won): I Can't See Myself!--SciFi/Fan--Invisibility
2007 (Won): The Amber Pendant--SciFi/Fan--Time Travel Murder Mystery
2008 (Won): The Conspiracy Class--Mainstream/Thriller--Conspiracy
2009 (Pending):Gap Year (Working Title) Suspense-Thriller

I'm going to move this over to NaNo Technology since it really isn't a rules question.

Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes

If you're looking for a lighter weight program than OpenOffice, let me suggest AbiWord. It plays well with Microsoft Office files and is lightning fast.

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I'd say that it depends on what you're looking for.

If you're wanting a full-featured word processor that will do essentially everything that Microsoft Word will do, then go for Open Office. The full program is a bit big, but you can choose to just install Writer (the word processor). I like it because you can export as a .doc which is useful if you want to work on other computers that have Word. It will also read most Word documents just fine, which I like even better.

If you don't need all of that stuff, but you would really like to be able to do simple things like change the font, italicize, bold, etc. Then my recommendation is Rough Draft. This is what I always use for novel writing. It's native file format is .RTF which pretty much any word processor on any platform will read. Rough Draft is also pretty lightweight and has a handy little side bar to write notes in.

If you're looking for specific novel writing software that provides some help with story structure, keeping track of characters, and organizing research, then I would recommendStoryBox which was created by a NaNoWriMo participant. I'm still working on learning it, but it has nearly every useful feature that I ever found in Liquid Story Binder or yWriter, but I find it easier to use than either.

All of these programs also have the advantage of being free.

What DMCole said.

My personal experience is that MS Word or Open Office Writer are not just unnecessary but distractingly so. I always find myself tempted to tinker with fonts and paragraph settings and layout etc. etc. etc.

I find using a text editor (particularly a fullscreen one like Q10) enables me to focus on what's important: the writing.

2009 - The Significance of Blackberries
2008 - Worm War 1 - WON; 50,218

There's always a typewriter.

[crickets]

For NaNo, you don't need formatting or even spellcheck. You just need something that takes down your words and can handle a lot of them. I personally think OpenOffice is overkill, but that's just me. (Heck, I'm using the ultimate word processor--a typewriter--so my sanity is questionable to begin with.)

I'm going to throw out a couple more free word processors. I like NoteTab. It's like Notepad on steroids. You can open humongous files and have multiple files open in the same window via tabs. The light version is free and the whole package takes up only a little over 3mb.

I recently discovered that the word processor I used to use way back is still in development! VDE (or Video Display Editor) was my mainstay word processor back when my computer was a laptop with no hard drive, 512k of RAM, and a 20-line LCD display. I ran it off a 120kb RAM drive. Which just proves that there's no such thing as a computer too low-end to run a word processor.

I wrote last year's novel in notepad and didn't have any problems with the entire document being in a single file. The lack of formatting didn't bother me either, and I actually found it less distracting to not have to mess with centering and bolding or whatever. For editing you might want something like Open Office but for the actual writing of the novel, I don't see why notepad would be a problem.

So far no one has mentioned yWriter5, which is a free download. There's a lot of discussion about it on these forums--look around. I downloaded that and Rough Draft, and may end up using both.

Are you sure that your computer doesn't have Wordpad already installed? It should be under Accessories, just like Notepad; they both come pre-installed on older Windows computers.

Let us know what you decide on!

Edited to add: After posting the above, I became curious about both WordPad and Notepad. Read the Wikipedia.org entries; both programs are actually pretty useful. You can't export to .doc, but you can to .txt or .rtf, and those are very basic. And as many others have mentioned, if your computer has the capacity, download Open Office and you have everything you could ask for.

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Winner: 2007 "Goblin Wine"
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AbiWord!! Google it.

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NaNo 2008: Lost: 1692/50K words. LOSE
NaNo 2009: Pause 0/50KWords

I have an old (1.2GB harddrive) free laptop with a good battery I'm thinking of using. It runs Damn Small Linux (aka DSL). I'm actually planning to use VIM from the command line ....

Anyway I'm going to write in 1 text file a day (01.txt to 30.txt) and transfer the files to my main computer daily (then email myself, can't have to many backups!).

Openoffice is good advice. Or Google docs. GL!

NaNo '08: The Dragon King (won 56k)
NaNo '09: Hidden Rage

"Its written, I just haven't read it yet." Calvin (in Calvin & Hobbes)

If your computer is that low end, then I'd recommend Abiword instead of OpenOffice.Org. The latter is a big program, and you can't install just the Writer. You also have to install the launcher for the suite. It is a very nice suite though.

Abiword is also a very small program, and doesn't require a lot of system resources. I'm not that familiar with the some of the more unusual ones suggested.

Just a note about AbiWord and Open Office. AbiWord isn't a bad program, and it certainly has a smaller footprint than OpenOffice, but I think if you're already familiar with Microsoft Word, then Open Office has a bit of an advantage. It's interface is virtually identical. And you do not have to install the entire suite with Open Office. Just wnated to clear that up. You do have to install the launcher, but it is tiny, but you don't have to install all of the programs. For instance, I only installed Writer and Calc (The spreadsheet application). It's not a huge file, but I don't know your system resources either. I have mine running on an old laptop with a 10 GB hard drive and 256MB of RAM. It doesn't run particularly slow, or get bogged down with those resources.

Also, just wanted to mention that several people had talked about liking a no-frills editor that was full-screen. Just wanted to mention that StoryBox which I talked about in my earlier post, does have a full-screen mode that does away with all of the extraneous stuff. I tend to prefer this option to using one of the super-lightweight editors, because it makes editing later easier. Also, I've done a lot of work on plot structure and character profiles that the program keeps organized for me, and it's very easy to go back to from within the program. I think it's the best of both worlds. When I'm behind on my word count and really need to hunker down and get a few thousand words on paper, I can use the full-screen mode, but when I've got a little time and I'm trying desperately to remember if I've already given my MC's grandmother a name, it's just a mouse-click away.

I recommend OpenOffice.org. It's really good and I use it all the time on my laptop because the computer guy forgot to instal MS Office when I bought this one (I know, it's horrible!) but you'll take sometime to get used to the program even though it's ditto like Word.

And of course, you can go for Wordpad anyday (I'm assuming you use Windows) or the good old Notepad.

Abiword is free, full-featured and under 10 mg. It runs faster for me than OpenOffice, and also saves/opens .doc files.

It's at www.abisource.com