yWriter [freeware]

[Tami]

yWriter
What is it? Free story writing software

Who wrote it? Simon Haynes, an author with two science fiction novels in print and a third to be released in 2007.

Why are you qualified? I've been designing and writing software for twenty years, including multi-user accounting programs and stock charting software. When I write a program it has to satisfy my needs, and I'm the end-user from hell. One little bug is enough to ruin my day, and so my programs might not look all that flash but they're very stable.

Okay, enough of the background. Tell me about yWriter.
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. Of course, you don't want to lose sight of the overall project, so you give yourself explicit outlines for each piece of code. Then it's just a case of coding each of the little pieces and hooking them together into the finished application.

Despite the mystical arty aura surrounding the process of fiction writing, at the end of the day most books can be written in a similar fashion: Break each novel into chapters, break each chapter into one or more scenes, and give each scene a goal, some conflict and an outcome.

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.

I'm a programmer and a novelist, and yWriter is the result of 3 or 4 years of development. 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) In the end I realised a dedicated program was the way to go, and yWriter is the result. It 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.

Best of all, yWriter is free.

Features:
Organise your novel using a 'project'.
Add files to the project, each containing a chapter.
Add a summary to each file, showing the scenes in each chapter.
Print out summary cards, showing the structure of your novel.
Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total.
Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress)
Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals.
Allows multiple scenes within chapters
Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene.
Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work.
Re-order scenes within chapters.
Move scenes from one chapter to another.
Automatic chapter renumbering.