OK, I’m going to admit something embarrassing… I am lazy.
I know, I know, it’s hard for you to believe, especially when I haven’t posted a blog entry for over 5 days, but it’s true. I fall so madly in love with ideas, but the second they require true work I buckle. While this usually means a temporary stall in things such as cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, or getting the garage cleaned out, it becomes unsettling when it prevents me from fulfilling a long-held dream. Let’s face it, writing is work. Especially when you create a new Word document for Plot Ideas, each character, each chapter, etc. etc.
I am happy to say I have found the answer to my problem. Best part, it’s FREE! Through the help of the Twitter gods, I was pointed to a program called yWriter.
yWriter allows you to do so much. The best part is that everything is available in the assortment of tabs. Let’s say you’re about to describe a scar belonging to a character you mentioned 100 pages ago. The way I used to do things, I had to minimize my writing, navigate to the folder with all my notes files, open that file, find the information on that character, then close that file and return to my chapter. With yWriter I just click on the Characters tab, find the character, and all the information I’ve created about that person is available.
yWriter also helps you keep track of whose viewpoint you’re telling the current scene from, you can create location information, item information and have it accessible the same way the character sheets are. Each scene is created in its own RTF file so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. But when you’re all finished, you can export the whole thing into Word as a single document so you can do your global print settings and print the thing!
There are a ton of features to this program and I’ve only been skimming the surface so far. I just wanted to pass along this really useful tool to anyone following the blog, because I think it is a fantastic piece of software that can only make the work of writing a novel easier. And that’s a good thing for a lazy boy like me.