Novel software

Why do you love it? How does it help? What does it do, beyond the normal word processing?

I'm a visual person so I love the bright colors and graphics of the prompts (for chapter summaries/ideas, character development, diagrams, etc.). I find the question prompts it gives for describing characters, settings, scenes, etc. helpful. I like how it guides me through Act I, Act II, Act II and how I can move the diagrams of events/plots/subplots around under those Acts. (For me, being an unorganized person by nature, this is much more beneficial and efficient than using note cards...and it's fun). For me, the prompt to discribe or consider my novel as a plot-driven or character driven; heroic quest or rescue or pursuit, etc. gives me a better idea of just which direction to go with my novel. It gives some ideas, although rather simplistic, for when you get stuck and don't know what to do with your character or plot or setting, etc....but enough I have found to get me going again. It has a spell check and a colorful Flesh Reading Scale (which you can use for each chapter and/or the novel as a whole...I find this very helpful to see how balance or unbalanced each chapter is in word count and readability).

And, it's just plain fun! :)

Powerwoman

Oh, and the guy at the MyNovel.biz site who helped develop the program is very nice and helpful...he responded promptly to some questions and concerns I had both before and after purchasing the software. He even thanked me personally and used my suggestion to include the Flesh Reading Scale in the updated program they released a few months ago.

I had purchased NewNovelist following reading customer reivews and used it for a few days and I tried a couple of other novel writing software programs, but for me personally, MyNovel is the overall best. I had already written the first draft of my novel from last year before I discovered it, so I haven't received the full benefit of it for that novel. But just today I began using it for outlining and developing ideas for this NaNo novel and already the prompts are causing ideas to flow that I didn't have before.

Powerwoman

On the topic of noveling software, I have a couple of programs for those who haven't got money to be spending on their noveling pursuits (silly college, making me poor...). I currently have 3 specifically-novel-oriented (or screenplay/script oriented) programs on my computer, partly because they're useful for different aspects of noveling and partly because I haven't decided which one I like better.

I tend to get distracted with lots of bells and whistles when I'm writing my first draft, so I use either Q10 (http://www.baara.com/q10/) or RoughDraft (http://www.salsbury.f2s.com/). Q10 is great because it's very minimal on the surface - and full screen, so there's no chance of being distracted by other programs blinking at you for attention. Oh and it displays your word count across the bottom of the screen. And it has a built-in timer for word wars. AND, it makes cool typewriter sounds as you type. Which is made of awesome. RoughDraft, on the other hand - while it hasn't seen an update since 2005 - is wonderful because it has a section for notes which opens up beside your novel file but isn't a part of your word count or your novel - that's where I put all my plotting from October, along with reminders to myself like "Grace has GREEN eyes" and "don't forget that you abandoned Fred in a hole, unconscious, at the end of chapter 4 - you have to go get him before they can go back home!" That feature alone makes it invaluable to me - last year I had a character named "His Grace Seamus Allen Randal Denvoir, Duke of Lëonn" and another named "His Highness, the Crown Prince Christopher Edward Gilbert Howard Reginald Denvoir III," and it was great to stick them in the notepad and copy and paste whenever I needed them. I would never have remembered that whole list without it, it's not like I went around introducing them by that name throughout the whole novel.

Anyway. The third program I have is yWriter 4 (http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html), which is good for editing because it has a lot of the organizational stuff, like breaking it up into chapters and scenes which you can drag and drop to move around - and if you type your rough draft in a different program, it can import it and split it up into chapters and scenes automatically. I haven't used it quite as much because I haven't had it as long, but it's been great for editing last year's novel.

... and if you made it through all that, I'm impressed. I tend to be rather verbose. Good for NaNo, not so good for forum posts. :)

-Jaya-

Jaya,

The typewriter sounds would be cool. The RoughDraft sounds like it has some good features, too. And I've seen some good comments about ywriter.

I absolutely love the MyNovel, but I admit, it is a bit pricey ($54 download...and a bit more, I think, for the CD and download). I had planned for a year before I stopped "lusting" after it and gave into owning it. : )

Powerwoman

I downloaded RoughDraft, and I love it.

it's more straightforward than even good old Microsoft Word, and I love love love the notepad thing on the side. very helpful. thank you for suggesing it! It's also compatible with Word, so a lot of my Word files can be loaded on it. But really, the notepad thing is awesome. I hate having to look up the names of my more obscure characters in my actual writing, plus I can start some basic outlining and random comments on the side now.

I tried the one with typewriter sounds (whatsit, Q10 or something?) last year but I didn't like it very much. I think if I'd taken the time to figure out how to change the settings and stuff, I might have liked it, and it does have the running word count, but I was just too used to Word to like it.

I'm more a discrete tools kinda guy, rather than an all-things-to-all-people sort. As such, I use Vim for my editor, with command line utilities and simple programs I write myself to fill out my writing tool needs.

Over the last few years, I've cobbled together a number of simple tools I've found useful, and store them at my NaNoWriMo Doohickeys page. None of them have been updated or in any way maintained since last November, of course, and I barely remember what they do. If you find 'em useful, though, have at 'em. They're all pretty simplistic, and I can't swear to them being written very well at this point (as I said, I barely remember the things).

Note: They're designed primarily with Unix-like OSes in mind, since that's what I have used for NaNoWriMo every year since I first started (back in 2003). If there are some that can be easily made cross-platform compatible, though, I might see about making them that way in the near future.

I'm so glad you love RoughDraft! I've gotten a couple of people hooked on it and that notepad feature seems to be what sells it every time. Quite possibly the most useful feature of a writing program ever. :)

Do you use a particular mode or configuration with vim for straight out word processing? It seems a bit of overkill for anything that simple, which is why I've always tended to use nano [that and not wanting to fumble and delete my last page with the wrong keystroke].

I did just build up a Mercurial server the other day for revision control, though! So excited.

I may try out some of your conky-fu this year, as one of my laptops actually has graphics now.
Last couple years I just used a split gnu-screen session with watch wc running in the top few lines.

Oh man, you guys are my heroes :D Where else can one geek out about stuff like this?

I'm another die-hard vim user. I'm using plain text files for each subsection in the novel, which makes word-counts easy (cat *.novel > full; wc -w full; rm full, though maybe I should look into this conkyness), and in order to pull everything together into prettypretty output, I've got a LaTeX shell (PDF) that just includes all those files when compiled, all of which is kept in a subversion repository. That way, not only am I not distracted by syntax highlighting, but I have something to procrastinate with when writing escapes me.

Nope -- I just use the same configuration for Vim when writing English as I do when writing Ruby (as I mentioned to you at the meet-and-greet). Are there some particulars of Vim workings that get in your way when writing plain English language text?

I may want to switch over from svn to Mercurial at some point. Maybe I'll get you to give me some getting-started pointers.

Let me know how that works out for you.

---
all original text licensed PDL [ http://pdl.apotheon.org ]

One of these days, I need to figure out how to use LaTeX.

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all original text licensed PDL [ http://pdl.apotheon.org ]

LIQUID STORY BINDER FTW!!

I used it last year for my fantasy novel. You can have a gallery of images, and it has four or so different ways to help you map out timelines, story events, point of view, character bios, chapters, etc.

I simply love it. I got my copy for free, but I'd gladly pay the $20 for the full version. Also, if I'd been smart, you can install it on your external/jump drive and take it with you. I didn't do that. Wish I had.

This year, due to me having to write in several locations, Microsoft Word will be the most probable choice. It's a lot less exciting, but as I said before, I wasn't thinking when I installed LSB.

Does anyone have any experience with Writer's Cafe (http://www.writerscafe.co.uk/)? It's multi-platform, and since I switch back and forth between Linux and Windoze, it's an attractive prospect, but I don't have any experience with any of the apps listed here. I did d/l the demo, and I'll give it a try, but I thought maybe if someone had used it...

Thanks!

Rick

Uh, no . . . I'd never even heard of Writer's Cafe. I'm a little put off by the fact it evidently isn't open source software, but I'm surprised and delighted to see it has been ported to almost everything. Usually, from what I've seen, people use "cross-platform" to mean "Oh, it works on MS Windows and MacOS X," or "It works on MS Windows and a couple of Linux distributions." This is much better, in that regard.

I might even give it a try some time, though I'm sure to go back to Vim for the editing productivity.

I'm using Writer's Cafe for Nanowrimo this year. It has a very colorful, pleasant layout and has a number of useful tools. These include Journal, Scrapbook, Pinboard, Notebook and Storylines. Storylines is the meat of the software with tools for outlining as well as the word processor. I'm using Storylines for all of my notes, outlining and character devlopment. When I do my actual novel writing, I'll use Word as I have it perfectly, idiosyncratically customized from many years of use. I'll transfer my writing from Word to Writer's Cafe using a macro I've written.

I can't say that Writer's Cafe has anything that you can't find in any of the other software titles already mentioned, but it's worth a look. As with anything else, it's a matter of your needs and preferences. They have a downloadable demo, so that would probably be the best way to find out if you'd like it or not.