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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

#51

Post by melling »

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?

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

#52

Post by KingOfCoders »

faceplanted wrote: post #31
KingOfCoders wrote: post #29

Why is use Scrivener, is I need a tool where I can easily move sections and subsections around and give each a status/flag. There some other things in Scrivener that are nice, but this is core to me. Any other editor for writing books where I can easily see and move sections around is not for me.

Didn't you mean to say "where I _can't_ easily see and move things around"? or are you making a different point I'm not understanding, because it looks like you're negating yourself and I'm not sure what you mean.

Yes.

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

#53

Post by Jtsummers »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #47
torh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's amazing what people will do to avoid reading a novel

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 important drivers of what people do.

This very much depends on both the author and the genre of fiction. Not every fiction novel even has a notion of "evil" (or outright evil, there may be characters who are "bad" in some sense or the antagonist, but not outright evil in their nature or quality in an over-the-top fashion). From your description of fiction it sounds largely like the fantasy genre in particular which is very often written as good vs evil kind of stories (though not universally, just very common). Other genres or other writers within that genre are often more interesting.

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

#54

Post by yottalove »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #47
torh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's amazing what people will do to avoid reading a novel

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…

Often you must lie in order to tell the truth.

After all, language is a poor simulacrum of life, but, then, we use it else "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" and forced to use shadow puppets deep in Plato's cave.

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

#55

Post by thangalin »

My open-source plain text editor, KeenWrite, is strikingly similar:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/scr...

I've taken a slightly different approach for novel outlines. Rather than use the `@` syntax, KeenWrite includes support for pandoc's ::: div syntax, which is quite flexible. Here's a screenshot showing an exported PDF generated from a Markdown document:

https://i.ibb.co/gTytTs1/novel-outline.png

On the left, variables are shown. Those variables can be fed into R statements. In the screen shot, the R code performs date calculations so that the dates are guaranteed to be consistent and correct, which is useful to keep complex timelines straight.

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

#56

Post by gentleman11 »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #39
brtkdotse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It gives you Jira level power I’d rethink this analogy for the HN crowd

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

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

#57

Post by IncRnd »

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…

I've used Scrivener for a few years, too. Prior to Scrivener I used text files with lots of back end work. When the day came for me to switch I looked at both Ulysses and Scrivener. Today, in retrospect I am extremely happy that I chose Scrivener, since it has treated me so kindly!

Recently, Vellum was recommended to me. Vellum looks very good, and I will test it on my next work.

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

#58

Post by crooked-v »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #35
flenserboy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of writers who are fond of Scrivener. My personal choice for a paid product (as I use a Mac) is Ulysses — going back and forth between the Mac & iOS versions is painless, and its bare-bones, grouped-file interface fits right with my workflow. Export options are plentiful, and it pairs well with Pandoc. Both are good.

Note for those interested: * Ulysses is plain text markdown. * Scrivener uses RTF. (There is markdown support but iirc it's on top of rich text, not in place of it.) :)

Ulysses is "sorta Markdown". There are a bunch of fiddly proprietary differences from "real Markdown" that get in the way of things like being able to cleanly copy-paste material across, especially the second you touch images or other media (which are just magic placeholders in the Ulysses UI rather than properly handled Markdown text).

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

#59

Post by spookybones »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #47
torh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's amazing what people will do to avoid reading a novel

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…

This comment reads as someone who doesn’t read much fiction. Your misconception is that fiction is merely a capsule for the delivery of ideas rather than being a multifaceted work. It is like someone who proclaims that cuisine is not the best delivery of nutrients, that it’s much easier to blend ingredients, and then, impressed with his assessment, proclaims that he should make his own smoothie.

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

#60

Post by crooked-v »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #47
torh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's amazing what people will do to avoid reading a novel

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…

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.
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