YWriter word processor for Authors

Download Ywriter Word Processor for Authors

From the YWriter Website:

“To me, writing a book is just like writing computer software. When designing a software program you break big problems (tasks) into little ones. Then you break those down into smaller and smaller problems until each can be tackled easily. In a similar fashion, you can divide a novel into three parts (beginning, middle, end), then break each of those into chapters, and then break those chapters down into scenes. ‘All’ you have to do then is write the scenes.

A scene is a pleasant chunk to work on – small and well-defined, you can slot them into your novel, dragging and dropping them from one chapter to another as you interleave strands from different viewpoint characters and work out the overall flow of your book. You can also drop a scene completely if you’ve written yourself into a dead end, without feeling you’ve ground to a complete halt.

Of course, you can’t just write a bunch of unrelated scenes. You need an overall design goal … your plot. yWriter will generate a number of different reports from your scene and chapter summaries, from a brief scene list to a comprehensive synopsis. If you update the ‘readiness’ setting for each scene it will even generate a work schedule showing what you have to do to meet your deadline for the outline, first draft, first edit and second edit.

yWriter also allows you to add scenes with no content – just type a brief description and you can pretend you’ve written it. This is great for the parts you’re not ready to write yet, or for when you get blocked. Skip over that part and come back later! Unfinished scenes, rough ideas … it’s so much harder to keep track of them when they’re all pasted into one long word processing document.

I really struggled over my first novel because I wrote whole slabs of text into a great big word processor file and tried to make sense of the whole thing at once. I then tried saving each chapter to individual files with great long descriptive filenames, but moving scenes around was a nuisance and I couldn’t get an overview of the whole thing (or easily search for one word amongst 32 files)

yWriter may look simple, but as the author of three books written with this tool I can guarantee it has everything needed to get a first draft together.”