What is it that a writer gets from this that they don’t get from Google docs? Genuine question.
[deleted]
novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
81–90 of 100 posts
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#82I once wrote in a comment in an Emacs Lisp todo list program that "Of all forms of time-wasting, writing time-management software is most sublime."
I would say that of all forms of procrastinating writing that novel, writing novel-writing software is most sublime. That, or maybe taking a "research trip" to Tibet or something.
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#83If 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?
Madcap Flare is pretty popular in the technical writer sphere.
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#84As a fan of personal knowledge bases, siloing my novel(s) in a separate app from the rest of my writing would bother me. In fact my data is already split between Semantic Synchrony[1] and org-roam[2], and it's a bummer. [1] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ [2] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
I’m the opposite. I prefer to separate domains of activities and often use separate tools for that.
My work notes are in OneNote. My personal notes are in Apple Notes. Long form writing is in Scrivener.
This helps me separate mind space as well as reduces the overhead of managing files and data within a domain.
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#85As a fan of personal knowledge bases, siloing my novel(s) in a separate app from the rest of my writing would bother me. In fact my data is already split between Semantic Synchrony[1] and org-roam[2], and it's a bummer. [1] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ [2] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
Many writers, likely the majority, feel the opposite. The prevalence and popularity of "distraction-free" writing software suggests that having projects siloed away from each other is a popular feature.
That said, if you're regularly accumulating notes in roam, and then wanting to reference those notes while writing in novelWriter (say), then yeah, being able to import those notes would be good.
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#86Earlier 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…
> 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.
Usually authors try to make high stakes feel relevant by making you feel close to the characters or by connecting the high stakes situation to universal themes, although not always successfully. More interestingly, many good novels make relevant and fairly ordinary stakes feel like high stakes. Kurt Vonnegut's short stories[0] and The Bell Jar are great examples.
I don't want to pile on or try to convince you that novels are actually for you (sounds like they aren't), but I think this is an interesting distinction to make about "high stakes."
[0] Presumably his novels too, but I haven't read them yet.
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#87If 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…
Can confirm: have used Scrivener more or less exclusively for books since 2008, in which time I've written and sold about 15 novels. Scriv is a bit gnarly and bloated these days -- feature creep is a thing! -- but it still makes refactoring complex compound documents with multiple narrative threads vastly easier than any mere word processor.
(Best analogy for developers: if Microsoft Word is a text editor, then Scrivener is an IDE. Project oriented, multiple sub-documents, tracks metadata relating to subdocument state, allows tagging and searching, and it's an editor on top.)
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#88My 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-out…
That looks like a really nice tool. I really like the "bunch of markdown/reStructuredText/Org-mode files" approach both KeenWrite and NovelWriter use.
Are you using the variables just for outlines or also for the novels themselves? It seems like it would be more complex to do in the middle of a scene or line of dialogue because there's multiple ways to refer to things. It's an interesting problem to think about, though.
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#89Great idea
Re: novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
#90What 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.
Yeah I have experienced the crankiness - just wondered if there are other things too?