Writing software

Anyone got any suggestions for novel writing software? Formatting and such.

Do you mean professional formatting or organizational formatting?

For professional formatting LaTeX or LyX is probably your best bet.

For organization, I recommend Scrivener, but that's mostly because it very quickly loads very large documents (like 150k+ words) which makes it easier to handle WIPs.

However, I don't think you use either of these when submitting for publishing.

edited 28th Feb '12 7:55:54 AM by ohsointocats

A basic word processor which you likely already have on your computer.

yWriter is free, and helps you organise writing a novel far more than something like Microsoft Word would, e.g. it shows individual scenes and chapters, and lets you mark each as outline/draft/2nd draft/done. There's also Focus Writer, which basically does what it says on the tin and (ideally) stops you getting distracted from writing. (If you pay careful attention to the information yWriter gives you, you can combine the two fairly easily.)

If you want a word processor, there's Libre Office. (Where the people who wrote Open Office migrated to)

I myself use emacs. () That plus writing in plain text plus a revision control system can give you quite decent results.

I guess the question is what kind of problems the OP is having right now. Usually you don't think to switch unless you're having problems with what you have. Using a format that pretty much everyone uses, like .doc has definite advantages. I've had a lot of trouble with word formatting, but never for writing normal prose. Like, if the OP is having trouble formatting stuff into script format, yes, for formal script format you really have to wrestle with Word. There's specialized software for writing script like Celtx, then.

I like using wordpad and .rtf format. Word's endless tabs, highlights and menus make me feel like a wannabe graphic designer.

http://writer.bighugelabs.com/

Always found it hard to edit drafts in word for some reason. And keep track of scenes and such.

It's called "having a separate document for an outline". Or, possibly, "a line separating one scene from the next".

In addition to separating each scene with a line, I also make a separate document for each chapter.

I tried using a few free writing programs, but in the end, I just prefer the simplicity of an ordinary text editor.