Since the software creator is a programmer, he’s included the ability to automatically back up to your email or an FTP site as well as locally.

Below the word processing window there’s a place to identify the viewpoint character and an area for scene notes.Īn auto-backup feature makes it difficult to lose something you’ve been working on, which is fantastic for people who forget to back up frequently as they work. As with Scrivener, scenes and chapters can easily be compiled into a single document. The main project window, with chapter list on the left and scenes on the right.Ĭlick on any image in this post to enlarge it.ĭouble-click on a scene and you enter a word processing window where you can actually write the scene. You can easily drag and drop scenes within a chapter or between chapters. It also tracks how many words you’ve written in each scene, along with totals for each chapter. The software encourages you to use descriptive titles for scenes, which makes it easy to see what’s going on in each chapter. You can name the chapters anything you want (e.g. Rather than working at the chapter level, yWriter has you create a chapter and then each scene within the chapter. A project wizard helps you set up the project, prompting you for your project title, your name, and where you want to store your files.

yWriter helped me with all of those things. And I couldn’t see everything at once, so it was hard for me to figure out where things went best. Trying to outline something on a regular word processor or in a spiral-bound notebook was a nightmare for me. My tablet PC is so old it’s slooooow, and I kept dropping and losing my notecards. But the two methods I was using to brainstorm-writing on an old-fashioned notebook tablet PC or using physical notecards-had problems. Like Sarah, I was reluctant to try writing software, stymied as to how it could help me. For example, if you don’t want to work in English, you can switch over to everything from Spanish and Hebrew to Russian or Chinese. It also has bunches of little bonus tools (discussed further below) that you won’t find with a lot of other software.

And by free I mean FREE: it costs nothing and has no ads, popups, unwanted toolbars, or other annoyances to interfere with your work. YWriter was developed by an author/programmer, and it’s a PC-based freeware alternative to Scrivener (that will, according to the creator, “also run on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X using Wine”). Of course, there’s other software out there, so today I’m going to share my experiences with another option- yWriter. In December, QueryTracker Blogger Sarah Pinneo talked about why she uses the Scrivener writing software.

Ywriter for mac