Wednesday 5 August 2009

yWriter 5 - Review

I have now transferred all four existing WIPS, except for the one I am currently writing, to yWriter 5, and I have to say it's definitely useful. I can understand how it could become more bothersome and time eater, but I do not use all its functions. First thing I like is an extremely easy way to divide chapters and scene, and to transfer them around as well as rename as necessary. It's especially useful once the first draft is finished, and you have to find all the problems, and often change the sequence or even the story as a result of editing. Scene by scene makes it easy to check that you haven't missed out anything. Of course it could be done in just MS Word, but having just a small chunk at a time makes it easier to manage. Usually, I have a list of characters in an excel spreadsheet. But I found that by spending a little time initially putting characters' names in yWriter, each scene can be assigned view-point character, as well as list of all characters within each scene, which makes it easy to check if some character randomly shows up in one scene and then disappears, or in multi view-point story if one one person gets a lot more scenes than another. For existing WIP which are either in half-finished first draft state or at plotting stage, project notes section is handy for keeping notes. Usually I kept them in word documents, and it's bit of a job trolling through them when they go for several pages, and then I end up creating several documents. But being able to keep various project notes labelled, again it's just more efficient and easier. For all new projects, I intend to use it from very beginning and eliminate character spreadsheets and misc. notes documents alltogether.

5 comments:

  1. Glad to hear it's working for you! I was wondering how you'd fare with it. That's what I love about yWriter...you can use as little or as much as you need, and ignore the rest. Much easier to keep track of things. And all for free.

    Congrats! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've been using yWriter for several versions now, and I really like it. I still write everything in Word, but I copy and paste into yWriter for word counts and to make scene reorganization easier. Have you checked out the "read aloud" function? Love that. The voices are software-generated so they sound robotic, but they still help me find "weirdnesses," missing words and the like.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jamie, yes it's definitely easier.

    Disorderely, I don't use it to write either. I find the layout and just look of MS Word more pleasing to type. I haven't used read aloud function yet, but will definitely give it a try. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Neat, I'll have to check that out. I too am following the 1000 words a day challenge! : )

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm using ywriter right now and it's awesomeness! But the scenes in the first two chapters always get replaced and switched around, which really makes me annoyed, so save the writing somewhere else so you won't go into bloody tears when this happens! Besides that, and some saving problems I had, it's okay, yeah, I enjoy it and I've gotten about seventy pages written in my first four weeks of using this program! :)

    ReplyDelete