Through NaNoWriMo (or, more accurately, through the-NaNo-boards-which-I-read-while-procrastinating) I discovered there’s a whole subgenre of applications designed specifically to help writing. They’re not word processors — at least, they’re not page layout programs or office control programs, the way MS Word is. This has its upsides and downsides, but I’m definitely enjoying checking these out.

The general theme of these programs is “project management,” specifically “project and document management for writers.” You create a project, which contains all of the files for whatever the project is: novel, nonfiction book, whatever, and you can easily access any file quickly. The most common way is via tabs (these are in a lot of web browsers as well, so you might already know how to use them)

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A guy named Jerry is developing Jer’s Novel Writer (aka JNW), which has the best possible price currently (free) but is also in development. Which means some stuff isn’t implemented yet, and there can be problems with the software, like suddenly quitting. Hasn’t happened to me, but another user reported it.

But Jer has some really cool features as well, enough to make me wish he’d stop doing whatever other nonsense he’s doing (like trying to find work and a place to live) and grind on JNW.

Pros: The best feature is the automatic addition of elements to the database. If you write deathless prose like, “Diane had gorgeous brown hair and a stylish way of wearing cable sweaters,” you can select Diane and ctrl-click (or right-click) to add the name to the Database list. Then select the description part of the sentence, ctrl-click, and you add that to the description of Diane. Very quick. Makes keeping track of what in the hell you’ve said about various characters or places or things or whatever really, really easy.

When you want to see what you’ve seen about these various people or places, you just click on the database and choose what you want to read about.

Another great feature is his automatic section and chapter numbering. None of the other programs does this, at least so far as I’ve been able to figure out. He also keeps a line under each Chapter name in the Outline where you can put a brief description of what’s in that chapter.

Another great feature: margin notes. You’re typing along and decide you need to remember something, but you don’t want to put it into the text? Stick it into the margin right next to the text.

Cons: Development software, which means it could have weird bugs. It keeps all the chapters in one file, which isn’t terrible (especially given the outlining feature), but I’d like the option of keeping chapters or parts in different files. The writing page isn’t big enough, although it’s bigger than some of the others.

Jer has a forum for reporting bugs and adding to the wish list, and he’s great about responding to feedback.

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The snazziest program is Ulysses. It’s also hella expensive, at Euro 100.

The best feature by far, which makes Ulysses very attractive (though not as of yet $135 attractive) is the full screen mode. The text you’re writing is the only thing on the screen. No dock, no desktop, no menu bar. It’s like having a sheet of paper in the typewriter. I understand MS Word on Windows does this, but MS Word on Mac doesn’t.

In the few times I’ve used it, I wuv this feature. I covet this feature.

Pros: Did I mention Full Screen mode? Well, the Full Screen mode is just faboo. There’s a preview window so that when you’re in one document, you can “peek” into another document and see what brilliant things you said in that one without leaving the current file. Every document has a “notepad,” somewhere you can store notes about that file.

Cons: Formatting within the text is, shall we say, non-intuitive. No, you can’t just do Command-U and expect one word to be underlined — the entire damn document gets underlined. Neat. No, you have to choose “Emphasize” from the menu. The main window is way too busy and complex — the full screen mode is almost a must have, given how busy that main window is. The documentation for such an expensive program is appalling. I’m still wondering what the window in the lower left corner is. (Update: Now that I’ve used the program some more—and I definitely like it—I see this is the window to peek into the notes file for another file.)

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There’s also CopyWrite. ($30)

Pros: You can keep links to URLs or files that are related to this document.

Cons: The writing window isn’t nearly big enough for me. I also find the list of related files right above the writing window to be a big distraction.

I thought this seemed to be a relatively good project manager, especially for the money! If I weren’t so interested in JNW, I might get into this one.

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I didn’t care for WriteItNow ($44) at all, because I think it’s a Windows port that takes advantage of none of Mac’s advantages or even its standard interface.

Pros: Each project also has a “Records” file, which allows you to keep track of where you’ve sent this particular project, the dates, the result, and how much you got paid.

Cons: Awful user interface. I don’t know if this sort of look is acceptable on Windows, but it’s godawful and unacceptable on Mac. The app itself is more than a little buggy. When I was just trying it out, I kept running across weird interface behavior.

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The downside to all of these programs is, of course, formatting. They don’t do page layout the way Word does. I think the program designers will have to give a little leeway in the area of formatting, because otherwise what I’d have to do after finishing my novel is export all of my files to a word processor like Word to print them out correctly. Oh, yay, just what I’d want to do Since the intended target for these programs is, like, writers, I think they ought to make manuscript format part of the design.

I already do a lot of this stuff in Word — I have my book file, I have my Notes file, I have my Characters file, and it works fine. Except for three things: 1) It’s a pain in the ass switching back and forth between the files. 2) I get very nervous having big files in Word, which is not, shall we stay, the most stable of programs. 3) It’s Microsoft, which I would like to deal with as little as possible.

I haven’t done any major writing in any of these programs yet. I’m most interested in diving into Jer’s Novel Writer, but if someone wants to give me a copy of Ulysses for my very own, I wouldn’t turn it down. Did I mention it has a Full Screen mode?

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By the way, I recently discovered Word (OS X version, at any rate) has a mode they call “Full Screen.”

They lie.

(Like that’s a damn surprise, right?)

The full screen mode mentioned in the applications above (plus Jer’s, which now has it) are true full screen—that is, they take over your monitor entirely. You don’t see your desktop, or your icons, or nothin’. Just the text. Which is what writers are always saying they want!

But Word’s is yucky and should not be how Full Screen Mode is judged.

And don’t worry, this will undoubtedly be my last NaNo-related entry…until next year.

Doing NaNoWriMo this year was a blast. I mentioned it to a couple of friends on October 31, thinking, Maybe I could do some writing…but fifty thousand words? That’s a lot of pages. (Many people on the NaNo boards are in shock because they wrote 100 pages of text, and my first reaction is, You didn’t use manuscript format, did you? I had 240 pages.)

I don’t know when it became apparent to me that I was really going to go for the whole fifty thousand word kit and kaboodle. Sometime in the first ten thousand words I realized that I had to throw out the outline I was so carefully working on. Why? I don’t know. There have been many debates on Wordplay on the utility of outlines. Terry and Ted and other pros recommend them highly. I can totally understand why they are a crucial part of screenwriting. So why didn’t my outline work for me? A couple of reasons, I expect:

1. I wasn’t outlining the right way for me—I was doing it in too clinical and detached a fashion. Scene 1, scene 2, scene 3. Instead, if I wanted to do an outline, I think I’d have to start by telling myself a story (“Once upon a time there was a woman who wanted to steal a jewel, and the five Feds who wanted to stop her”) and flesh it out that way.
2. I also think outlines may work better for screenplays than for novels. Having a tight story is absolutely crucial in a screenplay: forget page count, you only have so much screen time, and everything has got to count. In a novel, though, you can meander a little more. Yes, I believe you’ve got to have structure in a novel. You just don’t have to get there right now or the audience is out buying popcorn.
3. I got very much caught up in the “get words out, any damn words” frenzy, which produced, as it is wont to do, some very weird words. I had a vague idea who the killer was going to be, but once I dreamt some of this stuff up I realized that having that person be the killer wasn’t going to work.

I haven’t gone back to read what I have at the moment—I think I’ll let it rest for a bit—but I know one thing: it’s given me text to work with, and a story to go after.

One of the most popular complaints of the writer is that the next idea seems so much more attractive than the one you’re working on now, and this is totally true: it always does. Of course, everyone always wants to drop the one they’re working on at this moment and go on to the next one, which is a bad idea. Why? Because the next one is going to have the same problems as this one does. The current one is real and extant and horribly flawed and little mutant, whereas the next one still exists in a state of perfection in your mind. Anyone can dream about the perfect next project. It’s getting the current project into good shape that’s important.

Rewriting doesn’t scare me the way it used to. I used to think, I got it out once, now I’ll just tweak it. Now I rev up the chainsaw and say, Where do we start? It’s just words. I can always produce more words.

One of the best things this NaNo exercise did for me was force me to write big and long. I have a tendency to write spare, which doesn’t happen to be a kind of fiction writing I particularly enjoy reading. I don’t want to be rushed through things, I want to find out what’s going on. It’s pretty clear where the spare writing comes from, of course: it’s helpful if you can write short and pithy in a screenplay. Not so much in fiction. I would rather write long and wordy and then cut down than figure out where to bulk up in later drafts.

I’m not at all surprised I came in “short” (at only 50,000 words!)—my first full-length screenplay came in short too. I’ve never had that problem again. Writing longer began to feel good during this past month.

Anyhow: doing this was an exercise I recommend highly. I am totally doing this again next year.

Yay me!