WinXP and above, Mono 2.2 and above
What is yWriter?
First, and most important, yWriter is FREE to download and use!
Second, and still rather important, it's a word processor which breaks your novel into chapters and scenes. It will not write your novel for you, suggest plot ideas or perform creative tasks of any kind. It does help you keep track of your work, leaving your mind free to create.
Please tell others about this software!
Who designed it?
I'm Simon Haynes, the designer and programmer. Not only do I have twenty years of programming experience, I'm also the author of four published novels. (The Hal Spacejock comedy series, published by Fremantle Press and distributed by Penguin Australia. Grab a free copy of book one here.)
Because I'm an experienced programmer AND a published author, yWriter contains a bunch of tools a working novelist will find useful, and nothing some marketing expert came up with to promote additional sales.
This video runs through yWriter's main features with thanks to K.M. Weiland
What's so special about yWriter?
I really struggled with my first novel because I wrote slabs of text into a big word processor file and I just couldn't make sense of the whole thing at once. No real overview, no easy jumping from scene to scene, nothing.
Next I tried saving each chapter to an individual file, with descriptive filenames, but moving scenes between files was a nuisance and I still couldn't get an overview of the whole thing (or easily search for one word amongst 32 files)
My last attempt to use Word involved saving every scene as an individual file - e.g. Chapter 01 Scene 01 - Hal Spacejock Gets a Job.doc. That was fantastic until I decided to move one scene three chapters ahead, and had to manually rename all the files. Then I decided to put it back again! I could never remember which of the 200+ files contained a note I was looking for either.
As a programmer I'm used to dealing with projects broken into source files and modules, and I never lose track of my code. I decided to apply the same working method to my novels ... and yWriter was the result.
I use yWriter for something else, too ... I have a project with chapters called 'SF', 'Fantasy', 'Horror' and 'Other', and each scene within those chapters is a short story. Some of the stories are finished, some are half done and many are just ideas. Here's a pic to show what I mean:
Want to know more? Here's how a yWriter 5 veteran described the program to a new user on the mailing list:
Just to clarify (and because I've had some awfully stupid days, too), you don't have to write multiple scenes per chapter. You can just write one scene and make it the entire chapter. So basically, you create a chapter, and then create a scene for it. And then you just write your story in that scene. Your story is actually contained in the scene.
yWriter also does automatic backups of your work as you're writing, plus it automates the final save when you exit out of it. (You would think I wouldn't fall prey to this after so many years of working with software, but I STILL manage to close files without saving my work!) It also creates automatic zip files of the entire project, by date.
yWriter lets you easily re-order your scenes. Say you realise a character is acting on knowledge they don't possess until later in the story, and you have to shuffle things around. You can temporarily take scenes out altogether if you don't think they fit anywhere, and you won't lose them if you change your mind about it and want to pop them back.
You may, if you wish, do preparation for every scene by adding characters (in the character list), decide which character's Point Of View a scene is about and then easily track which characters are the "star" of how many scenes each, place the chapter in a specific timeframe (i.e. day one, hour one), note if the scene is only an outline, or a draft, or which draft it is, and of course, track word counts in all sorts of ways (by daily progress, by total, or per chapter or per scene, and it even can count letters. It can check if you're over-using any special words (so that it doesn't become an annoying tic for the readers). HOWEVER, these are all optional features that you may use or not use depending on your individual writing process. You can make scene notes, or overall project notes. There's also a timeline feature which lets you see a sort of "big picture" of how your events are moving along.
yWriter also allows you to print out a variety of scene reports and summaries, which I find are helpful to make sure that my story is moving forward and isn't getting bogged down in irrelevant detail or can help me identify where my story might have derailed itself. If you maintain the scene titles and descriptions to match the content of each scene, you can even generate a synopsis of your novel. There are also two types of work schedule which tell you how much to do each day to meet your deadline: one expressed as a number of words to write, the other showing how many scenes to convert from outline to draft, draft to first edit, and so on. There's no setting up involved - just remember to update the status of each scene as you apply edits. (E.g. convert a scene from 'Draft' to '1st Edit')
yWriter isn't a word processor program like Word. Word processors are as much about formatting a document as they are about writing a document. I first tried writing in Word, but found it difficult to organize chapters, much less re-ordering them, and never could figure out where I was with word count. yWriter uses the Rich Text Format with rudimentary text formatting (cut and paste operations, italics, caps, bold) but no more than that. This actually frees you up to worry about your characters and plot, and of course, tracking your progress with the word count.
Once your work, or a section, is complete, you can export your work to an RTF or HTML document which can be opened by any word processor, and then you're free to format away to your hearts content. (This export feature exports your entire project, and the only evidence that will be left of each of your individual scenes is the "***" symbol signifying a new scene. But, like I said, if you don't want scenes, just write one giant scene for each chapter.) You can choose whether to include all your scene titles, descriptions and notes.
So, with all of these nifty organizing and tracking tools, yWriter makes it easier to develop, and actually write your story. However, if it doesn't suit your writing process, then nobody's feelings will be hurt if you decide that it's for the birds. After all, many masterpieces were written using only pen and paper. I might also add that as much as I depend on yWriter for the actual writing of my story, it's not the be all and end all for me. I still use several other pieces of software for capturing my notes, organizing my background research, brainstorming plot ideas, and for working through some intricate plot twists. There are even times when I resort to the old fashioned pencil and paper method, too.
"... much better than the stuff huge corporations make." C
A scene is a pleasant chunk to work on - small and well-defined, you can slot them into your novel, dragging and dropping them from one chapter to another as you interleave strands from different viewpoint characters and work out the overall flow of your book. You can also mark a scene as 'unused' if you've written yourself into a dead end, which will keep it out of the word count and exports without deleting the content.
Of course, you can't just write a bunch of unrelated scenes. You need an overall design goal ... your plot. yWriter will generate a number of different reports from your scene and chapter summaries, from a brief scene list to a comprehensive synopsis. If you update the 'readiness' setting for each scene it will even generate a work schedule showing what you have to do to meet your deadline for the outline, first draft, first edit and second edit.
yWriter also allows you to add scenes with no content - just type a brief description and you can pretend you've written it. This is great for the parts you're not ready to write yet, or for when you get blocked. Skip over that part and come back later! Unfinished scenes, rough ideas ... it's so much harder to keep track of them when they're all pasted into one long word processing document.
yWriter may look simple, but as the author of several novels written with this tool I can guarantee it has everything needed to get a first draft together. Without yWriter, I would never have become a published author.
Best of all, yWriter is free.
Features:
Organise your novel using a 'project'.
Add chapters to the project.
Add scenes, characters, items and locations.
Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total.
Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress)
Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals.
Allows multiple scenes within chapters
Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene.
Multiple characters per scene.
Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work.
Re-order scenes within chapters.
Drag and drop of chapters, scenes, characters, items and locations.
Automatic chapter renumbering.
Changes from version 4:
There are lots of usability tweaks such as drag/dropping.
Full screen editor.
Automatic daily zip of the entire project.
NEW: Text-to-speech built into the text editor.
To hear samples from AT&T Mike and Crystal (and the same speech in Microsoft's engine), see below.
| Microsoft Mike (MP3, 131kb) | Microsoft Mary (MP3, 145kb) |
| AT&T Mike 16 (MP3, 143kb) | AT&T Crystal 16 (MP3, 169kb) |
By the way, if you want to get published you might like to read some of my articles on writing
yWriter now contains an importer. Just save your work-in-progress as an RTF file with chapter headings (e.g. Chapter 1, Chapter 2) and scene breaks (* * *), and you can import it as a fully-laid-out project split into chapters and scenes.
Note that I used yWriter to write my own novels, but I can't guarantee that it's bug-free. If you decide to use it, as with all my programs, the risk is all yours.
Every major version of yWriter uses different installation folders and start menu entries, and they won't interfere with each other.
yWriter 5 follows proper Windows guidelines and installs the program to (program files)\yWriter5, the log, dictionary and ini files end up in (docs & settings)\username\Application Data\Spacejock Software\yWriter5\, and saving a new project defaults to a sub-folder in your documents folder. So, if a second user runs yWriter 5 on the same PC they get their own settings, log file, dictionary, etc.
Why is this software free?
(You can also make a small donation towards my projects while your download completes)
