Software for Authors

Posted by JohnK
May 18, 2011 at 10:55 PM

The only big mistake I made in this area was trusting single Word files to hold large chunks of text (tens of thousands of words). The scars still remain. Don’t do it.

Using a different Word file for each chapter can make sense, particularly if you use a nice organisational tool such as Chapter by Chapter (http://sites.google.com/site/sebberthet/chapter-by-chapter).

I think Scrivener is a more elegant solution. I’ve played with the Windows beta, and it’s promising. You can export finished work to Word docs for sending to editors etc. I’m also starting to use Noteliner for some things (http://www.noteliner.org/i/Main.html).

For shorter pieces of writing, I tend to use WriteMonkey (http://writemonkey.com/). Like Steve, I’m also a fan of Notetab.

And also like Steve, I’m also old enough to remember a very different way of working—while at college, I was given permission to use the college’s pre-PC “computer facilities” to write a paper. It was a dumb terminal, attached to a mainframe the size of a small house. All formatting was entered in code (as would become familiar in later years using DOS word processors). It was agony…