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The need

One of the frustrations that I have encountered when trying to write anything longer than an essay was project organization. MS Word is not very efficient when you are writing an entire novel. For one thing it doesn’t allow you to separate out individual chapters, or more importantly individual scenes, very easily. Word stores your novel in one long document. To reorganize your novel requires a lot of cutting and pasting as well as a great deal of patience.

Until yesterday I thought MS Word, and other word processors like it, were the only choice a writer had. While surfing around the www yesterday I found an amazing program called yWriter which can be found here. yWriter allows you to break your novel down by scene or chapter. It includes great writing tools like a word count target, for determining if you are meeting your daily word count goals, and the ability to track which characters are in a scene you are editing. yWriter also lets you search your novel for “trouble words”, e.g. words that seem to pop up when you make a writing mistake. One of my trouble words is “that”. Here is an example: I often find that I add “that” when it isn’t necessary. In short yWriter helps you write better.

Behind the scenes

yWriter stores it’s files in .rtf format, which is MS Word compatable, and can import .rtf files that were created in MS Word. This means you don’t have to write the actual book in the yWriter word processor if you are more comfortable with the Microsoft interface. Yet you can still use the yWriter management tools to organize your book into its various parts.

Who its for

yWriter was designed with the novelist in mind. As a matter of fact yWriter was created by a novelist, Simon Haynes. Mr. Haynes has also taken the time to write a few essays on topics such as: organizing your book, writing your book and publishing your book. You can visit his website at www.spacejock.com.

Oh yeah, Best of all yWriter is free!

- Sean

Tags: Writing //