I started out just writing my stories out in the little white box provided.. description area under the image... but that proved really limiting. So I tried using the free text writing thing that comes with windows.

That didn't work out so well, so I picked up a copy of Microsoft Office 2003, but the grammer checker isn't very good. So I found a grammer checker that works really great, called Editor for Windows by Serenity Software. That worked great, but the pure white screen is hard on your eyes.

So I started using JDarkroom, it's free and all I had to do was cut and paste to Office when I was done with the draft. That was ok for awhile but I ended up with hundreds of files quickly, really hard to find anything. So I bought Writeway Professional.

Now all my notes and stories were organized in one spot. But that meant I was now using three writing programs. So I found Scrivener which has a feature like JDarkroom and a very cool structure corkboard thingy. So I only have to use two programs now.

But I was wondering what everyone else was using for writing.

What's your favorite writing software?

I use Corel Word Perfect Office X6.

Many of the writing apps out there attempt to give you a structure to hang your words on. Some try to get you to break things down to scenes, some break the storyline down into conflicts... Some give you ways to organize your background notes... I've never really found an advantage to most of these features except maybe the note organizing if only to keep a "foreign words" (SF / Alien languages) dictionary or give thumbnail character biographies so I can keep my characters and their histories straight.

Mostly I've found that fussing over a writing app is a way for the subconscious mind to resist putting words on a page. At one point in time,  I used to write everything long hand on paper and then put the second draft into the computer. But having gotten older and less nimble with my fingers [driving a pen or pencil is hard work now!] most of my writing starts in:

Textpad -- a programmer's text file editor that also has other features [no grammar checker unless you are writing in a programming language]. It does colors and has a highly capable macro feature. It has a spell checker --  but no grammar checker  -- after all mangling grammer and spelling into a "dialect" is one of those things a writer may be required to do sometimes in dialogue for authenticity.

Such dialects tend to give auto-grammar correction application fits [It would have choked on Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"]... or you end up with dialogues that read like cell phone text messages with auto-complete turned on. I've been using Textpad since version since about 1998 [it's now version 7.1... registration allows free updates to all future releases]. Betterto trust a human editor.

If the story turns out to be is good enough to need be formatted then I'll move it over to MS Word or LibreOffice [a fork of Oracle / Sun OpenOffice]. The point for a writer is after all to write... I figure that it is better to write something that may have grammar and spelling issues than to write nothing at all... After all that's what the second and third draft are all about.

http://www.textpad.com  $27 or 16.5 Pounds

There are some other free text editors available which are just as capable as Textpad. So if you'd like something like that, try Notepad++ http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Just remeber these were designed to write and not necessarily do fancy things like grammar checking

A free Windows file diff app can be found here: http://winmerge.org  -- a great way to help merge different versions of the same story into one version.

yWriter - yet another writer / story plotting program for Windows. . yWriter fully functional and free  and has a low registration fee ($11.95 if you want to register - the author of the app would appreciate it).  If you use Linux, it will install via WINE or Crossover Office (I did this on an HP Mini netbook that has Crossover Office installed on a  Kubuntu Linux install. Works just fine. The downside is that it closed source and there's only one developer.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html

The developer of yWriter recommends  "Schivener" if you are a Mac user. Schrivener can be found here:

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php they now have windows version $40 for Mac or Windows

Celtx -- A scriptwriting  app which will do all kinds of document formating [Film Script, Audio Script, Storyboard, Comic Book, Theater (Play). Celtx is a specially modified version of the Firefox browser to turn it into a "cloud aware' collaborative script writer / sceduler / planner.

Celtx was designed to do media scripting so includes features not found in "normal" writing apps. Among other things it has scheduling features, casting,  it has some "database" like functions where character bios, images, job assignments, etc can be stored.

There are plugins -- "cork board plotting" (aka 3x5 card plotting), "full screen mode" which allows choice of colors and an add-on of icons / images all for a low price). The version I use is version 2.7  but the current version is much  more internet "cloud" focused (after all selling clouds seems to be all the rage and guarantees the app developers a revenue stream) -- you can "rent cloud space" for about $10 a month of $70 a year [the price has gone up]...It has the advantage that you won't lose your work to a local computer crash on the other hand it is on-line and is subject to all of the current snooping of internet traffic.

http://www.celtx.com The basic editor is Free... up to $14.95 for a plugin package.... or monthly / yearly fee if you want the cloud versions

There are several others that I have tried:

Dramatica - which is a story structure application that forces you to think of your story in the terms of the Dramatica idea for story [see http://dramatica.com/theory for an explanation]... I bought it a long time ago [the late 90's] and while it might be useful for story analysis, I found  (at least for me) it was useless as a writing app or as a way to put together a story. You spend more time trying to wrap you thinking around the theory and so never get anything written.

Storybook Pro -- very similar to yWriter above. I actually bought a license for version 3.2 but did not really use it the way intended. Recently the program's publisher seems to have gotten into trouble with the tax authorities in Switzerland who seized the web site and so the "pro" version is unavailable...

BUT since the "basic version" was open source software that was hosted on Sourceforge, someone has stepped forward to restart the opensource  project with the goal of adding the pro features as free open source software. requires Java to be installed... The basic version can be found here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ostorybook/

Other tools:

Microsoft OneNote -- just for research notes can also be used as an OCR app to convert images of text to in text... it's pretty much useless for anything else.

Plotto -- Not an writing app but a e-book of a book written in the 1930's  with an algorithm for generating plot ideas / plot threads... Available at Amazon for $3.99

http://www.amazon.com/Plotto-The-Master-Book-Plots-ebook/dp/B008913086/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1387004160&sr=8-2&keywords=plotto

TableSmith: written as a role playing game aid for Windows this app can generate names [modern, ancient, elven, etc.] , places, and so forth. Low registration fee of $10.

http://www.mythosa.net/Main/TableSmith?from=Utils.Html

regards!

Makes you just want to go back to paper and pencil..........................

Omgosh, that is a brilliant list of stuff. I didn't sleep last night researching all that. I honed in on Plotto and went and bought the book. Everything I read said the system is too old and only good for plot study.

I mean really, a guy falls in love with a girl that eats some berries and becomes a zombie,

oh wait! how ever so close to an episode of The Walking Dead is that!!!!!

hmm.. not so outdated I think, just needs tweeked.

I love Plotto. and William Wallace Cook is amazing, talk about OCD. He wrote a Dime novel a week.... oh wait, I do that almost everyday.. maybe not a Dime Novel.. Rendo doesn't give me enough room.

More character space I say!!!

You always have the best stuff to research.

Quote - You always have the best stuff to research.

One might say I've spent wholly too much time researching these things and not writing enough. :)

Plotto is one of many "systems" for creating plotlines for writers.

There is another plot system in book form from the 1930s that is even rarer called "The Plot Genie" created by Wycliff A. Hill. It is contained in seven volumes [one main book and six genre volumes] but the system is so rare that a single genre volume is selling for $350.

Robert Silverberg remenises about "The Plot Genie" here: http://www.asimovs.com/2011_03/ref.shtml

The link didnt work, but i noticed something about the generators. The late 1800s were all about intrapersonal.. romance was all the rage, then the late 1930s it all changed to way out there scifi, just some crazy stuff, then in the last 30 years its all about personal conflict, man vs man, man vs nature, that kinda thing. Thats just what ive noticed.

Wow.  It's so much easier, being a poet.  I write my poetry in Yahoo email, then do a copy/paste into the RR text box and clean up the spacing. 

Ta-da!

(Sorry I couldn't really add anything to the conversation.  Whatever you use for your writing tools, what I'm really interested in is Cody's adventure or Fox's thought process or the Hatching Mother's latest plot.)

Seriously, I did write much of my 2 and a bit novels on paper with a pencil - in my lunchbreaks when I had a job. My co-workers thought I was writing a report for the company .  In the evenings at home I would type it up on a realy cool electronic typewriter. Later, I retyped it into a word processor - Amstrad PCW - which saved to a floppy and then managed to get it loaded onto a PC.

I can't imagine going back to paper and pencil though. I love the fact that I can see what my work looks like in print, not to mention the joys of a spellchecker and all the other bells and whistles MS Word has.

The treasure I came away with here is plotto. Im not using it exactly as it intended, I just grab a theme and that's good enough for me, I get a thousand ideas off that. Plotto has become my most valuable tool.

Plotto encompases what Michael Chase Walker calls the "Premise" and the "High Concept" [Power Screenwritng].

The premise is of course the result of "A clause" + "B Clause" results in "C Clause"

The high concept (call it the story / plot) in a capsule form is the "conflict event(s)" connected to the "B Clause"

The Story should "prove" the premise...

More stuff connected to Plotto -- the publisher of one of the recent release of Plotto (FIGApp.net) has some related downloads--

http://figapps.net/downloads.html

There is also "Fiction Idea Generator" app for the iPad or the iPhone...see the links at the bottom of the page here: http://figapps.net/fig.html

There is a free version available at Amazon for android devices --  http://www.amazon.com/FigApps-Net-Limited-Fiction-Idea-Generator/dp/B007IUQCCU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387635302&sr=8-1&keywords=Fiction+Idea+Generator