If anyone is looking for a paid product, Scriviner has been amazing for my novel writing productivity. You can sync your smart phone version to your desktop version using Dropbox. It gives you Jira level power over how your organize your project and has really easy export functionality that turns your writing into all kinds of industry standard sizing and layouts.
I know it sounds like I'm affiliated based on that gushing review but I am not, just a really happy writer that finally found a good tool and wanted to share!
I think it's pretty apt. Scrivener is a large, configurable application. The only real difference in the analogy is stock Scrivener is easier to navigate and nicer to use than stock JIRA.
Can confirm: have used Scrivener more or less exclusively for books since 2008, in which time I've written and sold about 15 novels. Scriv is a bit gnarly and bloated these days -- feature creep is a thing! -- but it still makes refactoring complex compound documents with multiple narrative threads vastly easier than any mere word processor.
(Best analogy for developers: if Microsoft Word is a text editor, then Scrivener is an IDE. Project oriented, multiple sub-documents, tracks metadata relating to subdocument state, allows tagging and searching, and it's an editor on top.)
I know plenty of writers who are fond of Scrivener. My personal choice for a paid product (as I use a Mac) is Ulysses — going back and forth between the Mac & iOS versions is painless, and its bare-bones, grouped-file interface fits right with my workflow. Export options are plentiful, and it pairs well with Pandoc. Both are good.
Ulysses is "sorta Markdown". There are a bunch of fiddly proprietary differences from "real Markdown" that get in the way of things like being able to cleanly copy-paste material across, especially the second you touch images or other media (which are just magic placeholders in the Ulysses UI rather than properly handled Markdown text).
I've used Scrivener for a few years, too. Prior to Scrivener I used text files with lots of back end work. When the day came for me to switch I looked at both Ulysses and Scrivener. Today, in retrospect I am extremely happy that I chose Scrivener, since it has treated me so kindly!
Recently, Vellum was recommended to me. Vellum looks very good, and I will test it on my next work.
The Mac version is actually a package. (folder pretending to be a file; OS-level feature) The text files are RTF. It uses xml for some metadata. But the structure is a byzantine nest of folders with uuid (or hash, can’t remember) names.
It’s effectively proprietary but if you’re desperate, you can retrieve all of the individual files as they are standard formats.
Scrivener explicitly targets non-fiction writers as well. There are template projects for essays, papers and proposals, with support for LaTeX as well as various citation styles (I recall at least APA and MLA). The notes and research sections of the project are even more useful for non-fiction writing in my opinion.
For programming books especially I recall Scrivener 3 added basic support for code blocks. No syntax highlighting, but if you export to HTML or LaTeX you can use a library or package for that.
I've taken a slightly different approach for novel outlines. Rather than use the `@` syntax, KeenWrite includes support for pandoc's ::: div syntax, which is quite flexible. Here's a screenshot showing an exported PDF generated from a Markdown document:
On the left, variables are shown. Those variables can be fed into R statements. In the screen shot, the R code performs date calculations so that the dates are guaranteed to be consistent and correct, which is useful to keep complex timelines straight.
That looks like a really nice tool. I really like the "bunch of markdown/reStructuredText/Org-mode files" approach both KeenWrite and NovelWriter use.
Are you using the variables just for outlines or also for the novels themselves? It seems like it would be more complex to do in the middle of a scene or line of dialogue because there's multiple ways to refer to things. It's an interesting problem to think about, though.
The variables are for use in the novels themselves. Mostly for aspects that won't change often: names, places, invented nouns, nick-names, character tics, vehicle velocities, dates (relative or otherwise), and so on. One of my favourite uses of R and variables is this piece of dialogue:
> Plus, we'll be about `r#cms(round.up(travel.time( v$location$protagonist$latitude$value, v$location$protagonist$longitude$value, v$location$proximal$latitude$value, v$location$proximal$longitude$value, v$location$proximal$travel$speed$value )))` minutes to the `r#x( v$location$proximal$name$short )` by `r#x( v$location$proximal$travel$mode )`
The preview panel shows:
> Plus, we'll be about thirty-five minutes to the redwoods by maglev.
This allows me to change the locations' latitude and longitude and not have to remember where that particular blurb was written: the travel time will be recomputed and the resulting number rewritten according to the Chicago Manual of Style (cms) rules. (What's more, the travel time is first computed by a REST call to a map API to get the distance by vehicle; failing that, it performs a Haversine distance calculation.)
Although I'm happy to stick with vim, so I'm not in the target audience, I do appreciate these additions to markdown:
1. `%` for comments
2. `synopsis:` for helping with indexing etc
3. `@` for a keyword-value system
Regarding the last, it seems a shame that this collides with a scheme commonly used for bibliographic references, but I guess the idea is that a novel won't have such things.
I don't know if the developer will see this, but I don't feel like it's worth making a bug; I almost always prefer screenshots to be near the top of a readme like this. I could glean most of the selling points from a glance at the screenshots, and especially for an interface for creative outlet I need to see the UI anyways.
Many writers, likely the majority, feel the opposite. The prevalence and popularity of "distraction-free" writing software suggests that having projects siloed away from each other is a popular feature.
That said, if you're regularly accumulating notes in roam, and then wanting to reference those notes while writing in novelWriter (say), then yeah, being able to import those notes would be good.
The crucial ideas in a piece of fiction, I find I generally can absorb much faster in some other format. It's true that the flavor of the world and the human interactions is lost. But I have an actual world to provide those.
I can see the argument that my experience of human interactions is a biased and incomplete sample. That's clearly true. But they are the relevant ones to my experience.
And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do.
This comment reads as someone who doesn’t read much fiction. Your misconception is that fiction is merely a capsule for the delivery of ideas rather than being a multifaceted work. It is like someone who proclaims that cuisine is not the best delivery of nutrients, that it’s much easier to blend ingredients, and then, impressed with his assessment, proclaims that he should make his own smoothie.
To your broader point, it depends what you want out of the novel. If you want world-building and dialog -- as I pointed out -- you won't get those from the Cliff notes.
I think that's fine, as I don't want them. Or rather, I don't want them as much as I want other things I can spend my time on.
And you're right, I don't read much fiction. The only piece I remember reading all year was The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, a short story by Hemmingway. It was fine.
> And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do.
This very much depends on both the author and the genre of fiction. Not every fiction novel even has a notion of "evil" (or outright evil, there may be characters who are "bad" in some sense or the antagonist, but not outright evil in their nature or quality in an over-the-top fashion). From your description of fiction it sounds largely like the fantasy genre in particular which is very often written as good vs evil kind of stories (though not universally, just very common). Other genres or other writers within that genre are often more interesting.
You're right, evil is not a universal plot driver. But at least one of exceptional evil or exceptionally high stakes drive the majority of fantasy, sci-fi, crime, horror, and political novels.
And not without reason -- if you want drama, they give you that. But I don't think they often do much to usefully inform a person about anything.
> They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life.
Usually authors try to make high stakes feel relevant by making you feel close to the characters or by connecting the high stakes situation to universal themes, although not always successfully. More interestingly, many good novels make relevant and fairly ordinary stakes feel like high stakes. Kurt Vonnegut's short stories[0] and The Bell Jar are great examples.
I don't want to pile on or try to convince you that novels are actually for you (sounds like they aren't), but I think this is an interesting distinction to make about "high stakes."
[0] Presumably his novels too, but I haven't read them yet.
After all, language is a poor simulacrum of life, but, then,
we use it else "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" and forced to use shadow puppets deep in Plato's cave.
You seem to be entirely overlooking the existence of books that have very limited stakes and don't even feature "bad guys" in the first place, like Andy Weir's The Martian.
Fighting to survive alone on an alien planet seems pretty high stakes to me.
But you're right, there do exist such books. I said "almost entirely". I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.
Also I admit it omits children's lit and romance novels, which are two huge omissions.
If the survival of a single person is "high stakes" in fiction, then what do you even consider "low stakes"?
> I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.
You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.
Great point. I love biography. The myriad details that don't matter at all to me if someone made them up are absolutely fascinating when they're (more likely) real.
Genuine question: as a long time Emacs user, and someone with 0 hours writing novels, I feel I would already have a general idea of how to set up Emacs org-mode to be comfortable for novel writing.
How would you approach this task in vim? I use vim extensively, but only on remote servers and without configs or plugins. What plugins or settings would you use to set up vim for novel writing?
It’s not a correct analogy though. In case of Emacs the house has a bathroom for you, a sauna for your whole family, separate bathrooms for your cat and your dog and at least one bathroom for an extraterrestrial entity that breathes helium. And yeah, in case you’re not satisfied with that amount of bathrooms you can build up your own after some training.
Long time emacs user. I have been enjoying vscodium with some Emacs and markdown plugins for almost all writing and note taking. Been using PyCharm for Python dev. Just felt I didn’t have time to fiddle with my lisp code and Emacs setup the last few years. I still hop in for org mode once in a while, otherwise, I have moved on. VS code is kind of this generations Emacs. I think it does most things better for most people.
Vscode/vscodium may be nice for a lot of tasks, and probably preferable for many users overall, but I think there will always be a certain mindset of developer/writer/person who prefers the Emacs approach. When I tried Emacs after Vscode I was blown away by the ability to write my own customizations that can affect every level of how it operates (and I'm not part of a generation that learned Emacs by default).
I do agree, ultimately it comes down to a few factors: inclination and time being chief among them. Does tinkering in Emacs actually save me time or is it something I am doing because I like doing it. There is a non-trivial cost to living in the Emacs ecosystem.
That’s why I caveated things. I have used Emacs a long, long time and I still do, but I have simplified my setup and backed off of it for many editing chores.
I don’t think the utility is there for someone to spend the man hours customizing an editing environment for say Python dev when something like Pycharm exists, for example. Even vscode with a few extensions is very powerful and reaching IDE levels of capability.
Emacs and living in its lisp machine is amazing and Zen and something I leveraged when I enjoyed the whole process. These days I simply don’t have time :)
This illustrates what I miss using WYSIWYG programs like MS Word or Google Docs: the ability to easily comment out lines without deleting them, or leave notes to oneself.
I've been using vs code more and more for markdown editing. A couple of extensions help make that a decent experience. There are a few extensions that help with grammar and style as well that are really helping me to write better text.
Vale is a nice one (a bit of work to configure and figure out) for enforcing style rules. Ltex for spelling and grammar. Markdownlint for making sure the markdown is right. Proselint is another one. Some of these overlap in what they do of course.
I also configured vscode to turn soft wrapping on for markdown.
I once wrote in a comment in an Emacs Lisp todo list program that "Of all forms of time-wasting, writing time-management software is most sublime."
I would say that of all forms of procrastinating writing that novel, writing novel-writing software is most sublime. That, or maybe taking a "research trip" to Tibet or something.
Why is use Scrivener, is I need a tool where I can easily move sections and subsections around and give each a status/flag. There some other things in Scrivener that are nice, but this is core to me. Any other editor for writing books where I can easily see and move sections around is not for me.
Didn't you mean to say "where I _can't_ easily see and move things around"? or are you making a different point I'm not understanding, because it looks like you're negating yourself and I'm not sure what you mean.
One poor man's highland is putting together the requisite functions in VSCode or Atom. Neither currently has an add-on with the ability to move sections of .md, but if someone adds this, it would be a huge contribution to the writer community.
I don't suppose anyone knows of something like this, but for a thesis? I have trouble keeping clarity and pulling disparate sections together. Though there is a chance that this is procrastination talking....
Have you ever written anything longer than about a couple dozen pages in Google Docs? Its performance is straight-up atrocious.
Granted, the Docs team recently started rolling out a new canvas-based version of the app that should be faster and more efficient, but honestly I'm not really holding my breath.
If you're speaking of writing a novel, that alone is a complete dealbreaker all by itself.
By ~40 pages in, it already takes multiple seconds for letters to appear when you type them. I don't even want to imagine writing a 300+ page book in there.
I know it sounds like I'm affiliated based on that gushing review but I am not, just a really happy writer that finally found a good tool and wanted to share!