All writers know that the Internet can be their enemy. There are endless possibilities for distraction and delay. But, used properly, the Internet can be your best friend. From research to great writing tools, there is plenty of good to be found on the World Wide Web.
One of those great tools can be found at Spacejock Software. Every writer has their own system, and some (like me) have their own system for each book. But Spacejock’s yWriter software seems to be helpful for most of those systems.
Do you like to write your first draft straight through and then break it down for editing? You can import from .rtf into the program and it’ll break it down (much faster than copying and pasting into separate files).
Do you like to outline? Or maybe you start with a synopsis and flesh out scenes from there. You can create new scenes and fill out as little or as much of the description information as you want.
Do you want to track how many scenes each character is in? Create the characters in the program and when you flag the scenes that they’re in, you can get detailed printouts showing how many scenes they’re in.
Need a timeline? Flag each scene with the time that it occurs and the program can generate one for you. If you take the time to fill in all the little boxes as you go, you can get a lot of information out of things when you’re done or preparing to edit. Or, you can keep it to just your text, broken down into scenes that are easy to move around. It’s a highly flexible program.
If the program doesn’t appeal to you, Spacejock Software has more to offer. He has an ebook reader, several other programs with various uses, and a number of articles. I particularly enjoyed the article on How to Plot a Novel using Freemind, a free mind-mapping program.
Debra Childers
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