With NaNoWriMo lurking on the calendar I have been busy getting ready. I want to have a working outline. I have plenty of ideas for my characters but not enough yet to feel I can get 50k words. So I have been playing with programs to go through what I have already written during Camp NaNo. In the process I have deleted over a thousand words bring the total there from nearly 21k to 19k. Either way I need to come up with enough story to bake a 70k+.
yWriter is my go-to program to write in. It is writer friendly. Simon Hayes has quite a great program and so far between yesterday and today it seems to be a winner. What it has that other programs do not is the read to me feature so I can hear how the scene sounds. I pick up many mistakes by listening. I can highlight in multiple colors to quickly cue me to things that need research, uncomfortable sentence structure to work with later, mark ideas that need to be elaborated, etc.I can grow the population of characters in one book and into a series should I choose, same with locations and items. The biggest feature of yWriter is the ability to send wordage directly to NaNoWriMo’s wordcounter without a chance anyone reading your novel. It is so simple and I have done it so many times. Nothing beats the feeling when NaNo’s site tells you you have won!! What it doesn’t have are questionnaires to help build character and personality descriptions.
WriteItNow has those questionnaires. So I build my people and places in this program. My husband uses this program extensively. He tried to help me get past the beginner’s stage on this one. He doesn’t seem to need the color coding that I do and for listening to his scenes he uses TextAloud. He picked that up quite a few years ago. Visually, WriteItNow is more exciting. You can click on the name of a person or location or ‘references’ to link items or webpages for your research. I will keep using this program to help develop characters and see the links to make sure no thread of plot gets tangled.
What confuses the life out of me is Scrivener. There are so many authors who swear by this but I can’t seem to get my story started on this one. One feature I want to use it for is the index cards on corkboard. It seems like that would help a person get better organized. But if I could have thrown it across the room today, I would have. Some people even use this one for writing their blogs. Since my IT guy (my hubby) doesn’t have it, he can’t help me figure it out. There is a lot of reading involved at the start and it is all on white screen with small font so it is hard for me to stay with it for long enough to get started. Maybe there is a Scrivener for Dummies book out there. One could only hope.
All of these programs can get your manuscript from outline to draft and to finished product to submit or send to Kindle or other readers.
What are the rest of you using for your writing?
Darswords 
Very best of luck!! What a great concept, Ive never come across NaNoWriMo before.
Thanks for the luck.
Please go to the website to see how it is done. I have done it either with the International bunch who kick out 50k in the month, or just started at a random date and write 1,667 words a day for a month (30 Days) Like my first novel, I had just finished reading No Plot No Problem and though it was the Ides of March I finished on Tax Day. But because we were moving I didn’t get all the words I wanted. So that November I added 50k to that book. I love the camaraderie of local groups and meeting other writers from around the world. Everyone cheering each other on. It’s not too late to try. Many NaNo novels have become published and even movies “Water for Elephants” and others: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/11/nanowrimo-success-stories I have done this for over 10 years now=10 novels. Writing is easy. It’s editing I suck at. 😦
Cool, I will check it out, sounds like loads of fun!! Thanks for the motivation speech!! (Wouldn’t it be great if there was a rule whereby writers only write and editors edit!)
Well, the great thing is that on November 1st, Editors are sent to their rooms and are not allowed out until December 1st.
Glad I could inspire you to try! Good luck and let me know how you are doing. The writers of yore didn’t have the support one finds in November now! 🙂
And to think Dickens and Eliot missed out!!! I’ll keep ya posted!
And they didn’t have computers! Or DragonNaturallySpeaking! Looking forward to it! 🙂
Thank you for this post. I had never heard of this software. I’ve just now downloaded ywriter and it looks like something I will be happy to use. Much easier than managing Word. Off to have a look at Writeitnow. And maybe pop in and check out NaNoWriMo. I keep seeing this in posts and haven’t checked it out fully yet. Quite a challenge by the sounds of it. Best of luck with it.
And thanks again for the tips.x
You are so welcome! I do hope you join in this upcoming craziness. Who knows what genius may come from the novel within?! Oh and let me know which program you like most.And how your writing is going! 🙂
Will do. Almost scared to commit! But seriously considering. :)x
Don’t worry about the commitment. Life happens so if you don’t win the printout at the end, you win by having another idea to continue on. 🙂
Wow, you have a lot of cool software that you can use to help you out with creating a new novel! I wish you the best of luck with your story and I’m very much looking forward to reading it!
Thank you. What do you use for your writing? Are you doing NaNo? Oh, and, I look forward to reading my story, too! 🙂 By the way, the first chapter is in my Stories page. I’ve been messing with it in the original and probably need to edit the blogged one more, but I have gotten into the characters and all the places they will have to go. What other occupation allows you to play: Let’s pretend… and What if?
I don’t plan on doing NaNo. I have a lot on my plate already– crafting, volunteering, singing in a choir…so yeah I’m all set! 😉
I miss singing in a choir! Maybe soon I will have my life back. The meds are making me better and better every day. I bet halfway through the month of November I will be thinking of you and how much fun you are having. It won’t last long. Those crazy blocks just need rethinking. Who knows, maybe I’ll include someone called Jumping Jenny in my novel. 😉
Hehe! 🙂
Oooh, what a lovely resource you have here. I’ll look up the first two programs 🙂 I have thought about trying Scrivener but haven’t got around to it yet. I’m using Open Office which is useless for anything but typing. Even scrolling through anything or highlighting text is difficult.
Do you want to be Nano buddies? My user name is “schvell”. Look me up if you’re interested and I’ll buddy you back 🙂
Great post! I’ll bookmark it 😀
Hey, wow! Thank you! Yes, Open Office is a great program for everyday writing. I like Word a little better but both are long scrolls if you are working on a book. What I like about the three I mentioned is they cut the story down to chapters and scenes so that you can easily see where you’re going and where you’ve been. On NaNo I am ‘Dars Haven’ which I should have thought about it a minute or two. When it needs to be one word it looks like dar shaven. Hey, its winter, do I have to? 😉
Haha! I wouldn’t if I were you, but then again I’m single with no one to impress. 😉
I’ll see you at the Nano site 😀
My man is very evolved and doesn’t mind. He loves me not my form.
Back to oultining! See ya there! 😀
You have a great man there by the sounds of it!
Outlining? I don’t think I’ll have an idea of what I’ll write for Nano until I open a new document on November 1st. 😛 I like to live on the edge. Haha!
I meant was that your profile with the bird for a picture. He’s a lovely bird btw. That was a good shot!
Yes, he is! 🙂
I have written seat of the pants (pantser) for most of my novels but the easiest one I wrote had a very tight outline. It nearly wrote itself and had far more than 50k by the end of the month.
Oh, yeah, the photo was from my cell phone. It was hard to get it big enough to see the bird’s ponytail. And the sun that day was making it hard to see the face of the cell and know if I even caught it.
I do hate that – not being able to see the screen when I’m trying to take a picture! Whatever happened to the viewfinder?
Okay, never thought of that! Oh wait, just looked at the phone and it doesn’t have one. See how phone-ignorant I am!
This phone, by the way, is heading for the trash, soon.as my new phone gets here.This one won’t even make calls half the time. Ugh!
Yeah, it seems to me that they either work as cameras or as phones, but rarely both at the same time. 😛 Technology, eh? hehe
So true!
Is that you with the picture of the bird?
No, not me. We saw the bird while on a walk around our little lake. I had never seen anything but ducks and gulls there. He’s/she’s got a ponytail that gave me the impression of a scholar in a graduation gown and hat.
Dar,
Look at the bottom left…I think. On most screens there’s a thing there to zoom. I usually write with it set to 200% or so because yeah, the writing gets small. I’ve found Scrivener works great for writing because I can arrange my key things around a simple screen. But I’m jealous of the Mac heads because they get thesaurus support :).
Thank you, Margaret, I’ll look at that. It does feel more professional than other programs. I’ll keep playing with it.
Eh, maybe we should have a Scrivener write in where we all bring our laptops and share tips and tricks :). I’m still learning my way around it, but it runs well on my oldest laptop because it doesn’t keep the whole thing in memory. Much less convenient to do the split files myself.
Sounds like a great idea. So far I’ve copy and pasted from ywriter to Scrivener. I do like the index cards.