Just a wannabe writer here. I’ve only ever strung a few paragraphs together, maybe an essay’s worth occasionally. I used to work on blog posts in Evernote and I still use it for capturing stray thoughts. I use it as a place for ideas and that’s exactly what happens. I never develop the idea, I just write down another one. Years ago I used Word, but thought maybe now there are apps better suited to the writing process. What do others use for an application/ platform?
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I am a terrible writer that does it purely for my own edification.
I use spiral bound notebooks with the coil at the top and whatever pen.
Every night I try to write one page.
Sometimes it’s a scene that advances the story or shows something about a character.
Sometimes it’s a history of some faction or region, or an anecdote that the characters know from their past, or maybe a note about politics or trade.
Occasionally, I’ll write a character sketch or map and describe a location.
I just like writing and this way creates the least pressure on me to “write”. It’s just fun.
If I ever get a complete story I’ll maybe type it into a document and try to edit it.
The last time I finished something was seven years ago. It was a short story. Wasn’t great but I enjoyed the process. I’ve always got ideas going but this current work is a Yankee in King Arthur’s Court type adventure that I’m really having fun with.
I use google docs. That way, whenver i have a note or phrase to add, i can add it. From phone, laptop, work pc, gaming pc, or my fridge.
Best option. Has made sharing work with friends and getting feedback a lot easier. Despite everyone else’s responses, I feel like Google Docs is by far the most popular options, and I don’t see a reason why not to use it (besides AI training material… but I’m not sure about that yet)
I do as well. I have a massive document where I just paste everything I write into, sort of like a portfolio.
I love Scivener
Same! It’s helped me organize my writing a ton. Writing longer stories feels easier because of how you can work with specific sections at a time and then piece it all together. Plus it’s nice having any research or story related info in one place.
I use vim as my text editor. Its good if you find using a mouse distracting.
There is a steep learning curve and most people use it for programming. However i can give u a copy of my vimrc file and you can use the novel writing plugin in that file. :)
Bibisco & Manuskript are popular feature rich options.
Generally if you just want to write your thoughts using something logseq or trilium might be more what you want.
I just use Word, but so many people swear by Scrivener that I think I’m going to check it out.
Scrivener is fantastic for large projects with a lot of moving parts. It lets you keep all of your character sheets, locations, research, notes, etc in one place. It lets you easily move scenes around and will automatically format your manuscript.
Super powerful tool. However, it has a learning curve, and I have definitely used it as a means of procrastination. If you struggle with the habit of actually sitting down to write, maybe stick with Word for a while.
You don’t need anything fancy, Imo. I just use LibreOffice
I stick to strictly Markdown. because it’s easier (for me) to convert to eBook, PDF, or website - or all three.
Depending on the platform, I use different Markdown editors. At the moment I’m using Markor on Android and VSCodium on Windows and Linux.
Joplin. It’s Markdown based, supporting math, tables, Mermaid diagrams, and more. You can organize notes into notebooks, including sub-notebooks, as well as with tags. The desktop app supports full text seach. And it has open-source apps for desktop and mobile, and it’s easy to set up synchronization between all devices using standard cloud storage (I use free Dropbox), which is encrypted whenever it’s not on your devices.
Wonder how it compares to obsidian now 🤔
Joplin was on my radar for a bit, but haven’t thought much about it since I’m using obsidian.
The paid sync is kind of a rip off IMHO, but the CouchDB local sync works just fine. Plugin ecosystem is probably what gives me the largest number of niche features.
It’s all markdown, I push it to a GitHub repo.
Obsidian is the gold standard for notes apps IMO. I don’t see any reason to move to Joplin if you’re using Obsidian.
I recently switched over to using Campfire to do all my writing. Super helpful for keeping world building details and manuscripts all in one place.
On PC, I use KDE’s Kate (it’s like the Windows Notepad, no formatting, just a plain text editor). On mobile, I’ve been testing Notesnook (migrating from Joplin), but sometimes I even use Telegram’s message composer to write.
If my writing gets too long and chaptered, then I copy-and-paste inside Google Docs, applying the chapterization.
Most of my writings are short/medium stream-of-consciousness texts (also, they hold a spiritual/esoteric component), so formatting is not a important thing for me to write them down.
However, I’m yet to find a good fediverse platform/instance to publish them. I’ve been hopping between Mastodon instances. Most of them are limited to 500 characters (as by standard), insufficient for non-short texts. I’ve been finding instances that allow for more than 500, but they aren’t active enough for people to interact with them, nor federated enough for reaching a broader public.
I’m over engineering the heck out of it. My editor is neovim, which I use for work and to write software too. I write markdown, but it’s not just markdown.
My stuff is somewhat inspired by the SCP wiki in style, so I’m making it a website with fancy styling via CSS and so on, using Jekyll in the backend.
It’s a lot of fun and I keep learning more about web dev stuff, but even though I spend a large part of my day today working on it, I hardly wrote any new content. But I have a fancy fake login form for classified data, nice colors and a search feature now.
Just in case, does anyone know a good markdown editor that with good integration for languagetool, or alternatively one that runs in the browser?
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions! I have a lot to check out.
