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novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

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Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

#71

Post by Jeff_Brown »

Jtsummers wrote: post #53
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crucial ideas in a piece of fiction, I find I generally can absorb much faster in some other format. It's true that the flavor of the world and the human interactions is lost. But I have an actual world to provide those. I can see the argument that my experience of human interactions is a biased and incomplete sample. That's clearly true. But they are the relevant ones to my experience. And I'm always disappointe…

> And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the…

You're right, evil is not a universal plot driver. But at least one of exceptional evil or exceptionally high stakes drive the majority of fantasy, sci-fi, crime, horror, and political novels.

And not without reason -- if you want drama, they give you that. But I don't think they often do much to usefully inform a person about anything.

Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

#72

Post by olivierestsage »

bitexploder wrote: post #34
maydup-nem wrote: post #3

it's amazing what people will do to avoid using emacs

Long time emacs user. I have been enjoying vscodium with some Emacs and markdown plugins for almost all writing and note taking. Been using PyCharm for Python dev. Just felt I didn’t have time to fiddle with my lisp code and Emacs setup the last few years. I still hop in for org mode once in a while, otherwise, I have moved on. VS code is kind of this generations Emacs. I think it does most things better for most peo…

Vscode/vscodium may be nice for a lot of tasks, and probably preferable for many users overall, but I think there will always be a certain mindset of developer/writer/person who prefers the Emacs approach. When I tried Emacs after Vscode I was blown away by the ability to write my own customizations that can affect every level of how it operates (and I'm not part of a generation that learned Emacs by default).

Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

#73

Post by filleduchaos »

melling wrote: post #51
the_lonely_road wrote: post #12

If anyone is looking for a paid product, Scriviner has been amazing for my novel writing productivity. You can sync your smart phone version to your desktop version using Dropbox. It gives you Jira level power over how your organize your project and has really easy export functionality that turns your writing into all kinds of industry standard sizing and layouts. I know it sounds like I'm affiliated based on that gu…

What are people using to write non-fiction (e.g technical books)? Much of what Scriviner provides is also useful?

Scrivener explicitly targets non-fiction writers as well. There are template projects for essays, papers and proposals, with support for LaTeX as well as various citation styles (I recall at least APA and MLA). The notes and research sections of the project are even more useful for non-fiction writing in my opinion.

For programming books especially I recall Scrivener 3 added basic support for code blocks. No syntax highlighting, but if you export to HTML or LaTeX you can use a library or package for that.

Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

#75

Post by crooked-v »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #66
crooked-v wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be entirely overlooking the existence of books that have very limited stakes and don't even feature "bad guys" in the first place, like Andy Weir's The Martian .

Fighting to survive alone on an alien planet seems pretty high stakes to me. But you're right, there do exist such books. I said "almost entirely". I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%. Also I admit it omits children's lit and romance novels, which are two huge omissions.

If the survival of a single person is "high stakes" in fiction, then what do you even consider "low stakes"?

> I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.

You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.

Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

#76

Post by dubya »

mhd wrote: post #61
maydup-nem wrote: post #3

it's amazing what people will do to avoid using emacs

How an actual author (Vernor Vinge) uses Emacs: https://i.imgur.com/G6HXGCw.png (CW: Emacs^2)

This illustrates what I miss using WYSIWYG programs like MS Word or Google Docs: the ability to easily comment out lines without deleting them, or leave notes to oneself.

Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

#77

Post by filleduchaos »

jonplackett wrote: post #69

What is it that a writer gets from this that they don’t get from Google docs? Genuine question.

Have you ever written anything longer than about a couple dozen pages in Google Docs? Its performance is straight-up atrocious.

Granted, the Docs team recently started rolling out a new canvas-based version of the app that should be faster and more efficient, but honestly I'm not really holding my breath.

Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels

#79

Post by Otek »

gentleman11 wrote: post #56
kayodelycaon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty apt. Scrivener is a large, configurable application. The only real difference in the analogy is stock Scrivener is easier to navigate and nicer to use than stock JIRA.

I think they were saying that hn crowd tends to dislike jira

Well, it’s slow an unintuitive in many aspects but I don’t think anyone will deny that Jira is a powerful tool
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