Using yWriter for novels, short stories and blog posts












  1. I HATE the y-writer, but mostly because it takes more than 5 minutes to figure it out and I don't do instructions well. :)
    Actually, the biggest problem I have with it is not having any formatting after pasting it into Word. I've set up a pre-made formatted chapter shell in Word so the chapters are already formulated for printing.

  2. Laura, if you cut and paste from the scenes, you can lose a lot of the formatting - italics, bolds, fonts, etc.

    However, if you use the "Export to RTF" feature, all of that stays exactly as you have it in yWRiter.

  3. I didn't know about the export feature (don't read directions, remember?). That's good to know. Maybe I'll try it again sometime.

  4. I'm asking this seriously, not snarkily ... what does this do that I can't do in Word?

  5. Janet: Excellent question. Word will let you write, spellcheck and (using cut and paste) move things around. Assuming you don't mind scrolling back and forth among different places in a single big Word file, you can also write in a nonlinear fashion in Word as well as you can in yWriter, working on whatever scene needs it. From the writing prose standpoint, Word is fine. However, from the standpoint of organizing a big story arc and managing all the background details, Word falls short.

    yWriter will give you a 50,000 foot "storyboard" view of your file, which makes moving chunks of text much easier than select-cut-paste in Word. yWriter will also let you make detailed notes on characters, scenes and items. It will make a color-coded note of which POV each scene is in, and show you a graph of how those POV are represented across the entire book. It will record who appears in what scene, give you a report of how many scenes (or words) each character is getting, which will let you make sure that each character gets as much time in the spotlight as he or she deserves. It will let you print out a the entire file with or without unused scenes, print a list of just the chapter titles, just the scene synopses, or any combination thereof. This is great for brainstorming. You can rate each scene for action, humor, exposition, sex, or any other factor; this helps to make your pacing what it should be.

    Now, you could just have one Word file for the book and a separate set of Word (or Excel) files to keep track of all this background detail. The advantage of yWriter (or other programs such as Scrivener) is that all of these extra organizational tools are in one place.

  6. Scrivener and yWriter do many of the same things, perhaps all of them (dunno if yWriter does exports to common eBook formats). Which one you use likely depends on what OS you're running.

    One thing I'd like to see is some built-in mindmapping tools for the planning stages. It's easy enough to use Freemind for that, but there's a lot of info that could (should) be able to transfer into the organizational section of the writing tool — characters, settings, even plot elements.

    Laura, people like me put a lot of time into writing the instructions. We like when people read those too. ;-)

  7. Being a PC user, I tried a number of different programs to manage my writing:
    * Word + Excel sheets
    * StorYBook
    * Liquid Story Binder
    * programming tools

    I actually blogged about this journey before, so I won't belabor the point here.

    Since Scrivener has come out for PC (in beta), I've downloaded it and tried it out, but honestly, aside from being a big more polished, it seems pretty equivalent to yWriter in functionality. Making the transition would mean a learning curve that wouldn't be justified by what I see in the PC version.

    Mind-mapping, eh? Shoot the developed of yWriter a line, see if he has any plans for it.

  8. FARfetched - I prefer the "hammer" method to reading instructions...sorry. :)

  9. I downloaded and tried yWriter off of your recommend a while ago. I played around with it a bit, but I can't say that I enjoyed it. Part of the problem is being in a Linux environment. While I got yWriter working with Mono, the menu names are the same color as the background unless you actively have it highlighted with the mouse. I plugged through anyway but soon found that yWriter doesn't think the same way I do.

    I found celtx later on and have had better luck with that. I'm planning my NaNoWriMo entry in it and so far it fits my way of thinking better.

    I'm glad you found such a good tool for yourself though! Anything that helps your output is great for us!

  10. D. Paul: I only use PC, so I can see how this might be a bit platform-centric. Thanks for the kind words - I'll keep up the output!

