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yWriter - helps you write your novel
If you're a budding author and have never been able to keep track of all of your material well enough to get a real run at writing your novel, the problem could be the tool that you're using. While Microsoft Word and other word processors are great at letting you manipulate text and formatting, none of them really tackle the task of helping you to write a large - really large - document like a novel. Despite the strange name, yWriter 2 by Spacejock is a free application geared towards helping writers get their 'stuff' together, so to speak. It has a bunch of unique features, such as story boarding, text file handling, the ability to export the entire project as one document, and it will show you each of your chapters in a table format with useful information like the number of words per chapter, whether the chapter has been through editing.
It's surprising that such a feature-full tool is being offered for free, but kudos to the developer for doing so. He claims to have written yWriter to help him write 3 full-length novels, which he has used it to do.
Thanks to Michael for bringing yWriter to our attention via our tip submission form.
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsQuang Anh DoMay 23rd 2006 9:09PM
Just one note... yWriter could be better if it supports Unicode.
Not all people use English, you know.
Zaine RidlingMay 23rd 2006 10:52PM
A great tip, indeed. A few years back I used novel software (can't recall the title), and it was so cumbersome it hindered rather than aided actual writing. Thanks for sharing!
MichaelMay 23rd 2006 11:05PM
When I submitted the tip I forgot to mention that the author has instructions for making the application portable. It wasn't immediately clear to myself initially but the runtime files he mentions that you'll need to install to your portable drive are located in the download area of his site. I installed the portable version on a USB hard drive and then simply uninstalled the copy from the local machine and it works without any problems (so far).
IkazuchiMay 24th 2006 2:11PM
Is there anything similar to this for Mac or Linux?
MichaelMay 26th 2006 9:56AM
So far I haven't found anything similar for OS X. My primary system is actually a Mac and initially I was searching for an OS X program. There are several commercial programs similar in nature for Windows and probably a few for OS X, but I've only been looking for free/open source apps lately.
I don't know about Linux. It's been about six months since I operated a Linux box so I haven't been actively looking for Linux software, though if I find one for OS X there's a good chance they'll have an OS X version, or one that could be configured to work in OS X.
Jason ClarkeMay 26th 2006 12:30PM
I noticed that Lifehacker featured yWriter shortly after we did, and the next day they put up a post mentioning a Mac program called CopyWrite that appears to be similar in functionality. I can't vouch for it, but here's the link:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/download/download-of-the-day-copywrite-176332.php