Story Writing Software

Started by Zexion, April 10, 2014, 05:11:30 am

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Zexion

I was looking for a good program that would make writing a story easier, and I managed to find something that was both simple and helpful. It is called FocusWriter. What it does, is that it clears your screen of clutter and allows you to focus on only the writing. It's very simple and plain, but it supports the different font options such as bolt and italic, and it is very lightweight (under 2mb if I remember correctly). It is also portable, so you can take it on a usb anywhere, and it has an optional typewriter sound effect lol. I thought it was a pretty good program for creating a clear writing environment. It helped me brain storm some ideas last night, and it's extremely easy to use.

It's available for free (with optional donation) on linux, mac os x, and windows, so anyone can download and use it. I thought it would be a good thing to share for those who are writing stories for projects and what not.

locowhiteknight

I'll check that out sometime. I've always been a big fan of ywriter (it's free also).
"Let's get down to brass tacks. How much for the ape?"

WhiteRose

For my story writing, I use a combination of Scrivener and WriteMonkey. Scrivener is used more for organizational and planning purposes - it allows you to break up the story by scenes and organize them as cards, as well as track characters, settings, and other things. I actually don't do much of my writing in Scrivener; I just use it to track the different pieces. It would be a little excessive for just a short story, but for anything longer than a few pages, it really helps. It's not free, but it goes on sale quite often, and you can get a student discount as well, so it's possible to get it for pretty cheap.

WriteMonkey is very similar to FocusWriter. I actually really like FocusWriter, too, and used that before WriteMonkey. However, FocusWriter had some troubles for me on Windows 8 for some reason, and WriteMonkey has a few extra features I really like. I find its word counter to be a little more in my style than FocusWriter, and the ability to focus in on a single paragraph and dim all the rest is really cool and helps keep me focused. At the core, they're pretty similar, though, so it's more of a matter of what works best of your system and which you prefer. Like FocusWriter, it's free with the option for a donation.

For really complicated stories, I also throw Aeon Timeline into the mix, which syncs with Scrivener, and allows you to have a visual view of character relationships over the course of the story, timeline of events split by plot threads and sub threads, and character development throughout the story as well. I'm actually just trying this one out, but so far, I really love it. My only complaint is that sometimes all of the organizing can start to take time away from the actual writing. :P

Magus

I'll definitely look into these softwares. It'd help me rewrite a previous novel of mine on my next project. 
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