I'm a techy-kind of person. I love programs that promise to organise my ideas, or give me fifty new ways to arrange and look at the same collection of concepts. I've tried most of the writing software out there, played with it gleefully for about half an hour until I inevitably realise that while I love all the crazy wacky things it does, that's just not how I work.

yWriter is one of the very few programs I've found I can actually work with - and not only can, I prefer to. Compared to yWriter, word documents are giant marshes of forgotten plot points, misplaced notes and vanishing character arcs. yWriter keeps my stories organised without me having to actually spend time on the organising part.
The beauty of this program is that it does its job and then gets out of the way. You can use as many or as few of its features as you like - like many other packages it has dossiers for characters, locations and items, it has scene descriptions and summaries, chapter summaries, scene-durations and time-periods, timelining and a whole lot of other things, but they're not essential to the program; it doesn't assume you're going to have anything to do with them.

When I first started working with it, I tried to use them all, and found (like always) that I was spending most of my time setting up the scene to write, and hardly any time actually writing. So I stopped bothering - I use the software to keep my chapters and scenes clearly visible as I work, to have an easy access to scene notes as I'm writing, and easily structure or restructure the book as I go, and I happily dart about the book picking up and putting down whicever scene I feel like, notes always handy for something that has to be included, excluded, avoided, rewritten, etc.

This is, I think, the only piece of software I've found that's been written to work with a writer, instead of dictating how they should work (or, more likely, dictate how someone who has never written a book in their life thinks they should work.). There's no endless prelim of setting up characters and locations and plot points and outlines or goals - unless you want to, of course.

It does have some faults - while it stores each scene in a separate .rtf file (which you can edit externally), it uses its own numerical file-naming scheme that can't be changed, which makes finding a particular scene outside of the software largely a case of trial and error. That's only an issue in exceptional circumstances - for people who want to edit the files without using yWriter - which is, thanks to dropbox and yWriter's cross-platform-ness rare.

Additionally, it equates a book with a project - so if you're writing a series where you want to share characters, locations and items between the book, you have to either import all that information manually (if you're using it) - so your characters can have goals for their books, or change after one book, etc, or find a way to codify it for yourself so you know which book any piece of informration (or scene or chapter) is referring to.

That aside, it's a solid piece of software that works the way you want it to. And best of all - it's free. Go check it out.

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Comments (1)

• |2010-07-22 12:46:08 Mujtaba Hussain
  I still cannot get past using a pen and paper when I want to write! I think more freely and creatively when I do that.
  Reply

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