During the slog known as NaNo, I’ve been writing each scene as its own Open Office Writer .odt file. Some months back (could be a year now) I had tried out yWriter and loved it. Except, at the time despite my preachyness here on the blog about structure and organization, for some reason I never really got to using yWriter as a force of habit. It was just another tool I had collected in my arsenal, but didn’t use as often as I should–a bit like Mind Manager. I’m silly like that, I know.
Tonight as I was working on a new scene, I got to thinking about this story folder full of scene docs, and I realized that it was starting to get difficult to manage. Yes, I could just have everything all in one text file but then that defeats the purpose of breaking things out into chunks. I’m all about this modularity scene-by-scene groove these days, the only problem being it makes a new task out of organizing the modules. Then I remembered yWriter. “Oh yeah,” I thought. “That tool I already have and was already toying around with a few times here and there is something perfect for my NaNo story.”
So I fired it up and started transferring my Open Office files to yWriter. It didn’t take long before I started to appreciate some of the finer points of yWriter:
- Wordcounts Per Scene
- Wordcounts Per Chapter
- Draft view
- Outline view
- Status markers ‘Outline, Draft, 1st Edit, 2nd Edit, Done’ for each scene.
- Character viewpoint tab for each scene (drawn from a list of characters you enter).
- Spitting out all your separate scenes and chapters as a text file or HTML.
- Exporting of a synopsis based on your outline notes.
- Export scene descriptions (outline) only.
- Fully customizable daily wordcount targets; Think NaNo’s progress reports and graphs.
- Find Problem Words feature, for catching all those nasty ‘Suddenlys.’
- A Word Usage counter to see which words you use too often.
- Print by Chapter or Scene.
The list goes on and on, and I’d be writing this post all day to give you a full feature list, in which time you could just download it and try it for yourself. yWriter is THE novelist’s tool to keeping track of everything in one program. I can see why Simon Haynes whipped this little tool up. If you can get beyond a little of the confusion of learning the interface, there’s no other tool like it.
NaNoWriMo just got a whole lot better.
I’m an Open office man. I have yet to try yWriter, simply because I know little about its reliability.
I assume that Simon Haynes wrote his Spacejock series using it. Clearly he wouldn’t use his own program if it wasn’t reliable? BTW it has a backup feature.
You are Red Church! Wow. I thought my fever was making me hallucinate. I’ve been reading your comments now for about six months and wondering who you were. Awesome. I’m adding you to blogs I read. Glad to meet you.
In my stupor I doubt I will get to read much of your blog today but I worship your thoughts.
Hey, I tried ywriter at last years Nano. I liked it a lot.
Eric invited me over to comment. Yes, I used yWriter for all three Hal books, and am currently writing Hal 4 with yWriter 3 (beta)
Autobackups: By default it just saves the latest version to YYYY-MM-DD whenever you edit a scene, but the option is there for this more comprehensive setup which takes a snapshot of the scene you’re editing every x minutes, stored in a folder YYYY-MM-DD\(snapshot HH:MM).rtf
(yW3 uses RTF files instead of plain text)
It also has an importer which will break down a file marked with chapter 1, chapter 2, etc and turn the whole thing into a project. If you include scene breaks within the chapters (* * *) it will also generate the scenes for you. I added this so that someone working on a whole novel in Word or OO can just save to rtf and then import the thing with one click.
You can also read in a single rtf file as individual scenes. Ywriter will copy the content to its own file storage, so it’s non-destructive to the original.
As for keeping things on track, I find the word schedule report absolutely indispensible for showing me what & how much I should be doing to meet any given deadline.
Hope that clarifies a few things.
Cheers
Simon
Thanks Simon and Eric. I smell a DL in my future.
Sounds really good. I’ve been using Simon’s Sonar program to track my submissions, looks like I’ll be using yWriter too now.
I’ve noticed this is an older thread, but I’m having trouble printing with ywriter and seeking help! I can’t find anything online just yet and thought I’d try here. When I go to print, it asks me for which chapters, then generates it using explorer. Problem is the text is soooo tiny no one can read it! And nothing I do seems to change that. I’m getting kind of frustrated since no manual or forum seems to address this. If anyone can help, please do- I have a writers group meeting Wednesday night and wanted to take this revision! Thanks!
khristeena, have you tried the yWriter site?
http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html