November looms, and National Novel Writing Month beckons once more.

I'm not completely sure that it is a good idea for me to do this again under the circumstances, but I feel the lure of high velocity writing and the hope that if I write in Novemeber I might feel energised enough to get back to editing last year's NaNo in December.

I have a premise, and a plot, and even some characters. I have done what I think is probably enough world building to allow me to write a plausible approximation to a story. And so I stand ready to take finger to keyboard once more.

But what program to use to hold my words? Microsoft Word is obviously out since I don't have it. OpenOffice/NeoOffice would be the default choice since that's what I used last year and I know it can do the job.

However, in the interests of exploring all the options, I have been trying out various other tools.

Jer's Novel Writer attempts to apply some kind of organisation to a novel file so that it is easy to see (and change) the structure of the story. It also includes margin notes and a simple database to theoretically make it easier to find information about elements of the story. Unfortunately, it has two major failings to my eyes: it is impossible to import stories to work on them using the organisational features; and it doesn't scale well.

Ulysses on the other hand uses project-based organisation but takes away a lot of the 'distractions' of a WP program to allow the writer to concentrate on the text. It seems to be a pretty solid piece of kit, but it takes away too much as far as I can see. I mean, concentrating on the text is one thing, but not allowing the user to change the screen font is another entirely.

Finally for now, I have signed up as a beta tester for Scrivener. This seems to use a similar project structure to Ulysses, but it also seems to include more flexibility in what the user can include in a project.

But the way things are going I will probably end up using OpenOffice again.

Posted by Dunx at October 17, 2005 03:40 PM