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A Comparison of Writing Programs for the Mac

Mark — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:38:05 +0000

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Scrivener

Website: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
Price: $39.95

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

One of my favorite features is the ability to set up word count progress bars for both the current writing session and the overall draft, and open them in a side window whenever you want. You can set up a word goal for each chapter, too, though these progress bars will not show up in full screen mode.

Speaking of word count — it’s remarkably easy to see the number of words in the entire document, in any chapter or section, in multiple chapters (just click the “Edit Scrivenings” button), or in a particular block of text (just select it and right-click; it’ll display at the bottom of the menu that comes up).

It has a beautiful full screen mode:

Moving your mouse to the bottom of the screen brings up a menu bar, from which you can access your notes (along with any pictures you happen to place there), scale the text size, adjust the “paper” width and positioning, and see word count.

You also never need to save your work. It does this automatically every 2 seconds or so if you haven’t typed anything.

WriteRoom

Website: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
Price: $24.95

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

“For people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in a digital world.” Not that using a typewriter in a digital world is bad, or anything, but WriteRoom excels at blocking out distractions without any unnecessary cheese. It’s like TextEdit, but with a full screen mode and word counter.

Entering full screen is as easy as pressing the ESC key. Default formatting is green text on a black background, but you can customize that however you like.

Microsoft Word

Website: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Word2008/
Price: $149.95 (as part of the Office 2008 suite)

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

My main complaint about Word is that it’s big and clunky and has a ridiculous number of features that no one would ever want to use.

It also doesn’t feel well integrated with OS X. For example, the keyboard shortcuts aren’t changed when I switch my keyboard layout from Qwerty to Dvorak. In any other program, I would press command-C to copy something regardless of the keyboard layout I was using; in Word, with the Dvorak keyboard layout, you actually have to press command-J.

TextEdit

Price: Free (pre-installed on every Mac)
Website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2523

It’s free, you already have it, and there’s really no reason why you can’t write bestselling novels with it. I used it as my primary word processor for half a year or so.

The largest problem is the lack of a word counter – though in a way, you may be better off ignoring how many words you’ve got until after you’re done. And you can always download a free tool like Word Counter 2.7 to use alongside it.

xPad

Price: Free
Website: http://getxpad.com

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

Think of this as an upgrade to TextEdit, while still remaining free and very simple. You can easily manage multiple files (if you want to keep each chapter separate, for instance). You can also sort documents into color-coded categories. It has a built-in word counter, and everything is saved automatically whenever you close xPad.

Bean

Price: Free
Website: http://www.bean-osx.com/

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

One of the only free page-based word processors I was able to find, and certainly one of the best. Has a decent, customizable full screen mode.

CopyWrite

Price: $24.99
Website: http://www.bartastechnologies.com/products/copywrite/

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

CopyWrite includes both “snapshots” and a word count progress bar, though from what I could tell, there’s no way to have the progress bar count only chapters and not your notes. It also doesn’t let you format sections of text individually – there’s a global setting to change the style of all text.

The full screen feature has a completely white background, rather than a white column bordered by black (as Scrivener has) or just light text on black (like WriteRoom).

It does organize notes well: by default there are 7 categories (Unfiled, Chapters, Characters, Places, Elements, Ideas, and Premise) and you can add more.

OpenOffice

Price: Free
Website: http://www.openoffice.org

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

OpenOffice might be called the free equivalent of Word, complete with spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and a whole lot of other things you won’t ever use.

The largest issue I had with it was that the word count isn’t displayed while you’re writing – you have to go to the “Tools” menu and select “Word Count” to see it, and you have to close the window before you can start typing again.

Still, it is free, so there’s no harm in forming your own opinion.

Ulysses 2.0

Price: €44.99
Website: http://www.the-soulmen.com/ulysses/

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

Uses a tabbed interface (sort of like a web browser) that I like – I can see how it’d be very useful to switch between various windows if you need to write things in several parts of your novel, or check something in a previous chapter.

In addition to the regular full-screen mode, there’s a separate “console mode” that lets you type on a black background very like WriteRoom.

But I got fustrated with a lot of things – I couldn’t figure out how to make my text italic, though there has to be a way of doing it – and it doesn’t have much to make it stand out over the other options that are available.

Nisus Writer Express

Price: $45.00
Website: http://nisus.com/Express/

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

Like Word, Nisus Writer Express lets you view your document in either page view or “draft view” (i.e. continuous text). Features include templates, columns, text highlighting, hyphenation, full screen mode, footnotes, section endnotes, document endnotes, and user-defined styles.

Mellel

Price:$49 ($35 for students)
Website: http://www.redlers.com/

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

A page-based word processor. I liked how styles are handled, after I got the hang of them; it’s also extremely easy to organize your document into sections, and it has the best footnote features I’ve seen in any program.

Pagehand

Price: $39.95
Website: http://pagehand.com/

Full screen mode
Converts dashes
Correctly formats quotes following dashes
Progress bar
Separate chapters and sections
Paged layout option
Word counter
Global find-and-replace
Separate place to put notes
Footnotes
Snapshots
Outlining features

Another page-based program with basic page layout features (like columns and styles).

Explanation of items on the feature chart

Converts dashes – two small dashes (--) will automatically change to a single larger one (–) as you type.

Correctly formats quotes following dashes – when you type a line of dialogue with a dash at the end, the closing quotation mark will be formatted in the right direction. (In other words, you won’t see “No–“ he said.)

Separate chapters and sections – means that there is some way to separate chapters and sections and navigate to them easily. This includes having multiple documents within a program, or being able to jump to different chapters in a single longer document.

Snapshots – after clicking a button to preserve a copy of a document, you can continue to make changes but will always be able to go back and look at the older version.

Most of the others should be self-explanatory, but if you’d like clarification, please feel free to leave a comment!

Writing Advice from Fantasy Authors

Thorn — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:02:15 +0000

Click on a name to jump to it, or scroll down to read through the full article.

George R. R. Martin

Best known for his epic series, A Song of Ice and Fire, which draws inspiration from medieval history. The world, though fictional, lacks the spellbooks and magic typically found in fantasy.

The most important thing for any aspiring writer, I think, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you’re trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything. Read fiction, non-fiction, magazines, newspapers. Read history, historical fiction, biography. Read mystery novels, fantasy, SF, horror, mainstream, literary classics, erotica, adventure, satire. Every writer has something to teach you, for good or ill. (And yes, you can learn from bad books as well as good ones — what not to do)

Source: FAQ page on the author’s official site.

Susanna Clarke

Author of the 2004 historical fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and the short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Clarke combines a style similar to that of nineteenth century novelists like Jane Austen or Charles Dickens with decidedly English magic and some less-than-amiable fairies.

I think some of the most sensible advice I can offer is to read a book called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It’s not about plot construction or getting published or any of the stuff they put in other books on creative writing (though that stuff can be useful too). Nor is it mystical or spiritual. It’s common-sense advice about writing every day so you build up creative muscles. She was a great believer that anyone, or almost anyone, can learn to write. She wrote her book in the 1930s, but what she says is still as relevant today as it was then.

Source: B&N Interview, Summer 2004.

Patrick Rothfuss

Author of The Name of the Wind (a fantasy debut of 2007 that drew considerable attention and won the SF/F/H quill award), the forthcoming sequel (which is due next year), and an often-hilarious personal blog.

I think the tendency to over-explain and over describe is one of the most common failings in fantasy. It’s an unfortunate piece of Tolkien’s legacy. Don’t get me wrong, Tolkien was a great worldbuilder, but he got a little caught up describing his world at times, at the expense of the overall story.

Source: Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist interview, March 2007.

It’s my belief that you should never show your work to anyone in the publishing world until it shines like a diamond. Rough drafts don’t shine, as a rule. Mine certainly didn’t. That’s why I was rejected for years and years.

Source: Patrick Rothfuss’s blog, March 2007.

For Patrick Rothfuss’s thoughts on writing action scenes, check out this topic on the Dragonmount forums.
Pat talks about what needs to be included vs. what ought to be left out in the July 2007 Em Sky interview.

Philip Pullman

Partial bibliography: Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US), The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, the to-be-published Book of Dust, The Ruby in the Smoke and sequels, The Tin Princess, and The Scarecrow and His Servant.

Don’t listen to any advice, that’s what I’d say. Write only what you want to write. Please yourself. YOU are the genius, they’re not. Especially don’t listen to people (such as publishers) who think that you need to write what readers say they want. Readers don’t always know what they want. I don’t know what I want to read until I go into a bookshop and look around at the books other people have written, and the books I enjoy reading most are books I would never in a million years have thought of myself. So the only thing you need to do is forget about pleasing other people, and aim to please yourself alone.

Source: The “About the Writing” page on Philip Pullman’s official site.

Neil Gaiman

Books authored include Stardust (recently made into a movie), American Gods (winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel), Coraline, Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book, and several story collections. His blog is here.

Well, I used to have lots of pieces of advice for writers, and these days, I’ve whittled them down to two pieces of advice. Which are, (1) if you’re going to be a writer, you have to write. (2) You have to finish things. Beyond that, I suspect all is detail, but I would add to that, that having written it and finished it, you should send it off to somewhere that might publish it, and not get discouraged if it comes back.

Source: CNN interview, July 2001.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Author of too many books (and in too many genres) to list here, but she’s most best known – at least in the fantasy community – for A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels.

To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don’t realize that. And you can’t write unless you read.

Source: Writing World interview, 2000.

Ursula Le Guin has a section on her website for writing advice.
She wrote a book about writing, Steering the Craft, in 1998.

Peter S. Beagle

Author of The Last Unicorn, which is Patrick Rothfuss’s favorite book – and which, according to Wikipedia, “routinely polls as one of the top ten fantasy novels of all time.”

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to – you write because you can’t not write. The rest is show-business. I can’t state that too strongly. Just write – worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you’re writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.

Source: Scifi.com interview, November 1996 (archive.org).

There’s a phrase, “sitzfleisch”, which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, “If the muse is late for work, start without her”. You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you’re probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.

Source: an older Google cache of http://west-of-the-moon.net/peterbeagleinterview.htm. The original appears to have been taken offline, the Google cache is gone now, and archive.org has no entry for it – so you’ll have to take my word on this one. I did manage to screenshot it, but I can’t seem to find where I put it at present.

Tad Williams

Author of the complted Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (fantasy) and Otherland (sci-fi) series, and he’s currently writing the third volume in the Shadowmarch trilogy (also fantasy).

Read a lot of other kinds of books. Make fantasy a small part of what you read. Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else, finish it before you start rewriting it. That’s really important. It’s to find out if you’re going to be a writer or not, because that’s one of the most important lessons. Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that’s the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.

Source: De Nieuwsbron interview, 2006.

Photo: Ejdzej

Charles de Lint

I’m running out of interesting ways of describing authors, but Charles de Lint’s a fairly popular author of urban fantasy stories and novels. Um, yeah. Random works include Moonheart, The Onion Girl, Moonlight and Vines and Widdershins.

Write from the heart, what has meaning to you personally; have the patience and discipline to sit down and do it every day whether you’re feeling inspired or not; never be afraid to take chances, in fact, make sure you take chances. As soon as you become complacent, you become boring. [...] Read as much as possible, not simply in the genre, or what you think you’re interested in, but other things as well.

Source: The Rose & Thorn interview, date unknown.

Robin Hobb

A character-driven writer of epic fantasy who commonly uses the first-person perspective. She wrote the Farseer trilogy (Assassin’s Apprentice, etc), The Tawny Man trilogy, and the Soldier Son trilogy.

I meet far too many people who are going to be writers ’someday.’ When they are out of high school, when they’ve finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire. [...] You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do.

Source: FAQ on RobinHobb.com.

Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson is a Canadian writer and the author of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which has a “dark, gritty atmosphere” (his words) and leans toward a style of shorter sentences.

[T]wo basic rules — finish what you start and write all the time, preferably daily.

Source: Wavnutz chat transcript, October 2004.

Kate Elliott

Author of the Crossroads series and the Crown of Stars series.

First, READ. And then read more, and especially read widely, in as many different fields as you can stomach. Read classics, read science, read history and archaeology, read philosophy, read lurid adventure fiction, read fiction by foreign writers translated into English, read poetry and essays written two thousand years ago [...] Experience the world. There is no substitute for life, and everything that happens, however mundane, however tragic, however happy or sad or indifferent, is all fodder for the mill.

Source: FAQ page on Kate Elliot’s website.

Kate Elliot has a writing advice section on her website.

Robert Jordan

…is well-known enough that writing an introduction seems pointless. (Hint: The Wheel of Time.)

My advice to aspiring writers is: (1) Write, send what you’ve written to publisher, then immediately begin writing something else. And (2) Read. Read as much good stuff as you can find time for, and try to learn from it. Also (3) Write what you like to read. If you don’t like reading it, you won’t be able to write it very well.

Source: Wotmania interview, April 2004.

Photo: Jeanne Collins, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

J.K. Rowling

…also needs no introduction, but wrote the Harry Potter series.

[R]ead as much you possibly can. Nothing will help you as much as reading. Then you’ll go through a phase and imitate your favourite authors and that’s fine – that’s a learning experience too and you are also going to have to accept that you’re going to hate a lot of things you write before you find you like something.

Source: Royal Albert Hall interview, June 2003.

A slightly modified version of this article previously appeared on Novelish.com. Republished with permission of the original author.

Places to post your writing online

Melia — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:01:17 +0000

Websites for writers to post their work on usually fall into two categories: critique groups (for sharing drafts with a limited number of your peers) and public archives (to let a wider audiance enjoy what you’ve done).

Critique groups

Writers often lack objectivity about their own writing, and it’s always good to be aware of what areas other people think you need to improve in – as long as you understand that each critique is only one person’s opinion. And you can learn a surprising amount by picking apart other people’s drafts.

The following articles from the critters.org “Resources” section are worth a read:

With that said, I’ll go over some websites worth having a look at:

Critters

For science fiction and fantasy only. Membership requires leaving one critique per week.

Yahoo groups

There are plenty to choose from if you go to the main Yahoo Groups site and do a few searches – but critical_writing is one of the larger ones. There’s also Fantasy_Writing if you’re looking for something genre-specific.

CritiqueCircle.com

Works on a point system – giving critiques gives you points, which you can “spend” to post your own writing. Unlike Critters, you don’t have to maintain a certain level of activity to remain a member.

The Internet Writing Workshop

A set of groups that communicate by email. Includes separate lists for short stories, romance fiction, non-fiction, novels and memoirs, poetry, writing exercises, brief fiction, and young adult fiction. Each has a minimum activity requirement.

Public fiction archives

Work posted to a public archive will be available to anyone with an internet connection; most let readers leave their comments or reviews, and your readership will be significantly larger than in a critique group. It’s a great way to gain experience and network with other aspiring authors, but don’t put up anything you might one day want to sell.

DeviantArt

When most people hear DeviantArt, they probably think, well, art. But there’s a large fiction category, a spiffy design and a great community.

FictionPress

Hosts more than 1.2 million original works in a variety of categories.

Booksie

WritersCafe

Has the option of making your writing viewable only to other WritersCafe members.

Places to post Fan Fiction

FanFiction.net (the sister site to FictionPress) is a popular option. LiveJournal has a number of communities devoted to various fandoms, if there’s something in particular you’re looking for (a google search beginning with site:community.livejournal.com might be a good place to start). FictionAlley is a well-known Harry Potter fanfic archive.

In conclusion…

I get asked about online archives and critique groups a surprising amount, and hopefully this will give a basic overview of the more popular options. It is by no means conclusive, though, and feel free to leave a comment if I’ve missed anything important.

I should also mention that Inkify has its own critique section, which is powered by the same system as our forums and is only viewable to logged in members.