Writing Apps

[LostMidlander85]

Does any one use an app for their story writing?

I had one called "Character Story Planner" which was great for creating projects, character development, writing.

The downside is I broke my phone and lost all the stuff I'd created as I didn't seem to have a backup, which I hadn't realised.

I'm not looking for a spell / grammar checker, it would be a nice bonus. I want a good place to create drafts, develop ideas and most of all have it backed up!

Any suggestions?

 

[thomas1965]

I am playing around with the free Scrivener trial at the moment. It has lots of useful features but costs around 50 US$ so I am a bit hesitant. If you don't mind the money I would recommend it.

Free alternatives are: yWriter, SmartEdit Writer

 

[Blind_Justice]

I'm using good old OpenOffice. It's free, runs on anything made in the last twenty years, can import and export most file formats and doesn't require an online connection, subscription plan or rocket science degree to set up and run.

Each of my story settings has its own folder, with piles of character sheets, setting info and whatever else I need to write in said settings. Everything is grouped under a "Writing" folder, so when it's time to make a backup, I can simply copy the whole "Writing" folder onto a flash drive, SD card, into the cloud or wherever without having to worry if I've saved the most current version. I keep at least three different backups, which get renewed in varying intervals, from weekly to monthly. I also make sure to keep at least one of those off-site, in case something happens to my stuff at home.

Depending on your tolerance for Big Tech bullshit, you can always give Google Docs a try. It's all online and hosted on Big G's servers, so should you destroy your phone again, you at least have your files in the cloud. But then, are you really going to leave your smut with Google? I mean, I have my Drive contents encrypted and zipped, so no one but me gets to look into it (without extra effort), but still...

 

[Voboy]

How do these differ from word processing programs? I've used Google Docs, and that's what that is (to me). Are these outlining tools or something? Graphic organizers?

I've never heard of this sort of thing, but I'm very far from the most tech-savvy person out there.

 

[TheRedChamber]

As a former programmer, I wrote a very quick program to count how often each word appears in a story to see which I was overusing. I haven't used anything else.

 

[ElectricBlue]

As a former programmer, I wrote a very quick program to count how often each word appears in a story to see which I was overusing. I haven't used anything else.

I use Worditout and it draws a word cloud. Other than Open Office Word with its spell check, it's the only software tool I use. The only writing app I use is the one between my ears.

https://worditout.com/word-cloud/4698911

 

[Bramblethorn]

How do these differ from word processing programs? I've used Google Docs, and that's what that is (to me). Are these outlining tools or something? Graphic organizers?

I've never heard of this sort of thing, but I'm very far from the most tech-savvy person out there.

Scrivener is a sort of combination word processor and outliner. I find it useful for large complex projects, especially if I'm working on them over a period of time. For example, this is what my story "Anjali's Red Scarf" looks like in Scrivener:




On the left-hand margin I have all my scenes, arranged by chapter; if I was writing something really complicated I could apply more layers to that formatting. When I'm done composing, I can select a bunch of scenes and export them to something like a Word doc.

This is handy when I'm publishing across multiple platforms. For instance, when I post on Literotica I'm doing it one chapter at a time, and each chapter has a chunk at the end that's basically "hi, thanks for reading, here's what you can look forward to in the next chapter". But if I'm posting it on another site I might want to leave out the Literotica-specific content, which is just a matter of not selecting that particular snippet for export.

Near the end of the story, I hit problems with the plot and had to do a major rewrite. I wasn't sure which scenes I wanted to keep. So I made copies of the last two chapters, leaving me free to muck around with the new versions and then compare to the old to make sure I hadn't inadvertently left out something important.




The * at the beginning of a scene name is my way of flagging an incomplete scene that still needs work. This is helpful if I'm writing out of order, which I often end up doing for something like this.

Then below the story scenes, there's a space where I can keep notes on characters, locations etc. It provides standard templates although I'm pretty lazy about filling those in. I find it most useful for minor but recurring characters where I'm at risk of forgetting details from one appearance to the next:


Below that there's a space for pinning things like reference material.

It gives me the ability to tag specific scenes and filter by tags, e.g.:


So later on, when I'm writing further interactions with Anjali's parents or more about her studies, I can use the tags to locate relevant scenes and check what I've already established.

It comes with a bunch of other functionality, most of which I haven't explored but which might be useful to other authors. For instance, if you're worried about overuse of adverbs, the "linguistic focus" tool will highlight them for your attention. (Not 100% accurate, as can be seen below, but good enough to be useful.)



It also has some utility functions for things like "turn all double spaces into single spaces", "change smart quotes to straight quotes" (or vice versa), "capitalise all selected text", and word frequencies.

When compiling, there are options for customising. For instance, I can set standard separators for scene or chapter breaks and then change them when I want, rather than having to do it manually for each break. Again, stuff that's useful if you need to publish to more than one style, e.g. on different sites.

For shorter projects, Scrivener is overkill. On a stand-alone story up to about 10k words I'd probably just use Word. But for longer projects I've found it very helpful, once I got past the learning curve.

Red Scarf is a novel-length story with 12 chapters. I originally started out in Word, and got about halfway through before life happened, the story went on hiatus, and I lost my groove. I found it very hard to get back into it; when I'm actively working on a story I keep a lot of stuff in my memory, but during the hiatus I lost a lot of that stuff. It's a complex story with several different things going on at any one time.

In the end, the way I got back on track was to take what I'd already written and migrate it from Word to Scrivener, breaking it up into scenes and tagging/etc. as I went. That was helpful in remembering where I was up to, but it also made it much easier for me to check those details later on as I continued the story, and it was a life-saver when I hit those plotting difficulties in the last two chapters and had to tear Chapter 11 apart and rewrite it. I would definitely use it again for long stories.

FWIW, last time I looked Scrivener had a pretty generous free trial package - IIRC it was something like 30 days of actual use (i.e. 720 hours of app-open time, not 30 calendar days after you start the trial).

One limitation is that it doesn't support collaborative work in the way that something like Google Docs does. I've heard of a product called something like "Writers' Duet" that's supposed to be a collab-oriented substitute for Scrivener but I have no experience with it. Me, I usually write solo, then share drafts via GDocs for feedback/etc.

 

[LostMidlander85]

Thanks everyone, I'll have a look into your suggestions.

 

[Defluer]

Yeah, I use Google Docs. It's really just Microsoft Office stuff in the Cloud. It's all I've used for like ten+ years. I have my own system of tracking characters, which is a table at the bottom of the story that I add pertinent information to as I write the story. But really I have a sort of Google Docs database of "Inspiration" pictures that I've found, was drawn to for some reason, and placed in a file. So my characters usually "look" like one of those pictures, it's just way easier for me. I think recently Google did an update where they'll have an issue or something with porn being shared but my databases are only for me. The few times I've put a document out for editing I've made a copy and stripped out my behind the scenes information. It has revision history built in, which is good because I've had to go back and find paragraphs that I thought I didn't like and then realized I needed and could open the past version, copy the stuff I want into the current version. Mostly though it's in the Cloud. I've lost... Probably more stories than I'll ever want to think about to a bad hard drive. I've got a separate account specifically for Literotica purposes, plus an app on my phone that lets my "real" account reign over the rest of my phone while my "perv" account is hidden and I don't have to worry about some email giving me away if I hand my phone to somebody to watch the funny video I found.

But there is no in depth built in character and story tracking stuff in Google Docs like Bramblethorn showed was in Scrivener. I think I'd just get lost in all that coolness and plot out story after story that I'd never write, but that's me and how my stupid mind works.

 

[Voboy]

Thank you, @Bramblethorn. That's a great tutorial. I'd never heard of anything like this.

I just use a bunch of Word documents to do the same thing, then the Search function on my computer.

 

[jsmiam]

An obscure-ish feature of ms-word and probably other major word processors is “outline view”, where if you use the heading1/2/3/4 styles (hint, you can change their looks), then you can automatically make just the headings visible and expandable. It helps you visualize the overall documents hierarchy.

It’s not exactly the @OPs question, but it is a tool, and it can be helpful.

PS. Nerd alert - things to try - (a) plug the phone into usb. Maybe files accessible even if it’s broke. (B) contact the app support line, decent odds they stored your stuff (so they could sell you ads), and (c) investigate phone repair/file recovery services too. (D) see a.

 

[JGittes]

Scrivener is a sort of combination word processor and outliner. I find it useful for large complex projects, especially if I'm working on them over a period of time. For example, this is what my story "Anjali's Red Scarf" looks like in Scrivener:


View attachment 2153113

On the left-hand margin I have all my scenes, arranged by chapter; if I was writing something really complicated I could apply more layers to that formatting. When I'm done composing, I can select a bunch of scenes and export them to something like a Word doc.

This is handy when I'm publishing across multiple platforms. For instance, when I post on Literotica I'm doing it one chapter at a time, and each chapter has a chunk at the end that's basically "hi, thanks for reading, here's what you can look forward to in the next chapter". But if I'm posting it on another site I might want to leave out the Literotica-specific content, which is just a matter of not selecting that particular snippet for export.

Near the end of the story, I hit problems with the plot and had to do a major rewrite. I wasn't sure which scenes I wanted to keep. So I made copies of the last two chapters, leaving me free to muck around with the new versions and then compare to the old to make sure I hadn't inadvertently left out something important.

View attachment 2153116


The * at the beginning of a scene name is my way of flagging an incomplete scene that still needs work. This is helpful if I'm writing out of order, which I often end up doing for something like this.

Then below the story scenes, there's a space where I can keep notes on characters, locations etc. It provides standard templates although I'm pretty lazy about filling those in. I find it most useful for minor but recurring characters where I'm at risk of forgetting details from one appearance to the next:
View attachment 2153117

Below that there's a space for pinning things like reference material.

It gives me the ability to tag specific scenes and filter by tags, e.g.:
View attachment 2153118

So later on, when I'm writing further interactions with Anjali's parents or more about her studies, I can use the tags to locate relevant scenes and check what I've already established.

It comes with a bunch of other functionality, most of which I haven't explored but which might be useful to other authors. For instance, if you're worried about overuse of adverbs, the "linguistic focus" tool will highlight them for your attention. (Not 100% accurate, as can be seen below, but good enough to be useful.)

View attachment 2153119

It also has some utility functions for things like "turn all double spaces into single spaces", "change smart quotes to straight quotes" (or vice versa), "capitalise all selected text", and word frequencies.

When compiling, there are options for customising. For instance, I can set standard separators for scene or chapter breaks and then change them when I want, rather than having to do it manually for each break. Again, stuff that's useful if you need to publish to more than one style, e.g. on different sites.

For shorter projects, Scrivener is overkill. On a stand-alone story up to about 10k words I'd probably just use Word. But for longer projects I've found it very helpful, once I got past the learning curve.

Red Scarf is a novel-length story with 12 chapters. I originally started out in Word, and got about halfway through before life happened, the story went on hiatus, and I lost my groove. I found it very hard to get back into it; when I'm actively working on a story I keep a lot of stuff in my memory, but during the hiatus I lost a lot of that stuff. It's a complex story with several different things going on at any one time.

In the end, the way I got back on track was to take what I'd already written and migrate it from Word to Scrivener, breaking it up into scenes and tagging/etc. as I went. That was helpful in remembering where I was up to, but it also made it much easier for me to check those details later on as I continued the story, and it was a life-saver when I hit those plotting difficulties in the last two chapters and had to tear Chapter 11 apart and rewrite it. I would definitely use it again for long stories.

FWIW, last time I looked Scrivener had a pretty generous free trial package - IIRC it was something like 30 days of actual use (i.e. 720 hours of app-open time, not 30 calendar days after you start the trial).

One limitation is that it doesn't support collaborative work in the way that something like Google Docs does. I've heard of a product called something like "Writers' Duet" that's supposed to be a collab-oriented substitute for Scrivener but I have no experience with it. Me, I usually write solo, then share drafts via GDocs for feedback/etc.

Does Scrivener have a fully functional Windows version yet? Last I looked, admittedly a couple of years ago, the fully functional, paid version was only available on iOS.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Does Scrivener have a fully functional Windows version yet? Last I looked, admittedly a couple of years ago, the fully functional, paid version was only available on iOS.

Yeah, it does Windows now. Has also been on macOS for quite a while.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I used yWrite for a long time, but kept going back to Word or Word clones. I do most of my outlining in my head so I found yWrite a little tedious.