Hello everyone,
I wanted to ask if anyone has a preferred software for the purpose of creative writing.
Libre Office Writer is great of course, but just as software like LogSeq or Obsidian exist for the note taking process, I was wondering if there is anything that is specifically geared toward the creative writing process.
I know that there are federated blog platforms which focus on this in their presentation, but was curious about applications specifically.
FOSS is definitely preferable.
Thanks!
I’ve been enjoying novelWriter for a few months now.
It’s FOSS, works on every OS, and is created by a writer who was frustrated with the other options available. She and another writer co-designed it initially, and there’s a respectably sized community built up around it at this point. It’s got the kinds of features that writers actually need, and avoids bloat. So they say, and in my experience that’s certainly been the case.
Now this is what I was thinking of. Incredible and glad to see that it exists. Thank you!
I also like Novelwriter. It’s very organized, and I think more stable than Manuskript, which has similar features.
NeoVim i write in a text file open in libreoffice and resave in the format i wantedn
I also write my books in Vim. I use Pandoc to convert markdown to other formats.
On the simple side, Ghostwriter is a markdown editor with no frills.
I’m writing a novel in Obsidian and it works great. Currently closing on 70k words and it’s just as fast as a file with 50 words in it. I also like that it’s a simple markdown file which I can easily back up anywhere and open with anything. It can also organize multiple files and link to them if needed, which is nice when starting out if you use the snowflake method.
That’s interesting. What does the structure of that looks like? New notes per chapter and then back-linking them together, or everything in just one note?
I started with a single file that had bullet points for each story beat, then those grew into chapters. I then had files/notes for specific things that I needed to remember but didn’t want in the novel itself (character backstories, etc). After a while I found the single file overwhelming so I split it into one file per chapter, that way it was easier to focus on one at a time; when I felt they were all in decent shape I put them back together in one file. I use headings for each chapter title so that I can jump to each one in the table of contents. I’m now doing a final pass for tone and for minor fixes; when something needs attention I highlight it so that I can find it later.
I tried a LOT of different apps but Obsidian was for me the best combination of being very responsive, not too distracting, easy to navigate, and not locking me into a proprietary format.
I also love iA writer but it doesn’t work on Linux, or with Wine…
Celtx used to be a great Foss desktop screenwriting application, based on Firefox. Eventually they tried to go web based, and I had to move over to the closed sourced, industry standard, final draft when my work started getting produced.
Now there are a thousand open source screenwriting tools, and not one that I like.
I use a text editor called micro for most writing tasks. It’s simple enough that it doesn’t distract me, but flexible enough that I can use it for most things. Creative writing, code, notes all the same application.
Before I heard of micro, I was just using nano. Same thing, different key bindings. Though until recently I didn’t know it could be setup to show line numbers. Which is why I liked micro when I found it.
