![]() I didn't realize the community has grown so much. If I didn't have a Mac with access to Bear, that's probably what I'd be using. You can even share using different formatting, so that you can write in your favorite font and still satisfy those submission guidelines. ![]() Once you're ready to share your work with the world, compile everything into a single document for printing, self-publishing, or exporting to popular formats such as Word, PDF, Final Draft or plain text. Or check for consistency by referencing an earlier chapter alongside the one in progress. Write a description based on a photograph. Need to refer to research? In Scrivener, your background material is always at hand, and you can open it right next to your work. So working with an overview of your manuscript is only ever a click away, and turning Chapter Four into Chapter One is as simple as drag and drop. In Scrivener, everything you write is integrated into an easy-to-use project outline. Grow your manuscript organically, idea by idea. Got a great idea but don't know where it fits? Write when inspiration strikes and find its place later. Tailor-made for long writing projects, Scrivener banishes page fright by allowing you to compose your text in any order, in sections as large or small as you like. Otherwise, you risk turning your Great American Novel into the Great Internet App review.FROM LITERATURE & LATTE WEBSITE: Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators and more. Pick tools that do what you need (outline, text editing, assembly) and stick with them. You may want them, but don’t make the same mistake that I did. So that’s it – you do not need any other tools to get your writing on. The killer feature, for me, is the ability to group your note cards into neat little bundles – if you’re used to writing your outlines by novel section, this is super useful. Index Card gives me all of the functionality and flexibility of physical note cards, with none of the drawbacks. That system worked, but it was slow, the cards had limited space, and if someone at the coffee shop bumped my stack of cards off the table it was a serious pain in the ass to get them back in order. ![]() Before the iPad, I did all of my outlining with the help of index cards, onto which I would scribble my fevered scene concepts. ![]() Years of painful pantsing made it very clear to me that I require the structure of a good outline if I’m going to write anything worth reading. That’s a personal failing on my part - if you aren’t prone to losing hours fiddling around with your software, then Scrivener is probably the only tool you need. It is so tempting to my inner geek that I cannot use it to actually write, which is why it gets relegated to editing and production work. It has powerful outlining and organizational tools, and every time I open it I’m tempted to tinker with its shiny knobs, buttons, and levers. Scrivener is inexpensive ($45), but packed to the gills with features that writers of all stripes will love. I don’t do any real writing in Scrivener, but I do use it for final edits and assembling finished works for export to ePub and Kindle formats. It’s fast and clean and won’t get in my way. I use ia Writer for all my actual writing. Plus, it’s cheap – for $10 you can get a useful, pretty text editor on both your Mac and your iPad. It looks nice, has a useful soft keyboard, and won’t get in your way. Third, it blocks out the distractions of font selection, screen color, line spacing, or any of that other fancy formatting jazz that can prevent you from the Serious Business of banging out words with your monkey fists. Second, it allows me to work seamlessly on my iPad or Macbook Air. This isn’t a super-fancy text editor, but it does some very important things. I know these are the best, because they’re what I use every day. To help you avoid the tedious, time-sucking task of selecting the best writing apps I’ve put together the following list. Maybe even a series of novels, if they were short and trashy with lots of nudity and explosions. If you added up all the hours I’ve procrastinated under the guise of testing writing apps, you’d end up with time enough to write an entire novel. One of my guilty pleasures is loading up on these digital ink wells and experimenting with their functionality for days at a time to see how they’ll fit into my workflow. There are way too many writing tools on the market.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |