Since I work in software technology at the day job, I tend to use my left-side of the brain a lot and it bleeds into my writing.
I’m a plotter and an outliner. I give props to other writers who can just start writing and let the story lead them to where it needs to go.
Not me.
I need to know what’s going on. I don’t need to know everything, but I need to at least have a structure.
So I’m a fan of spreadsheets. They are helpful to me during the draft and revision process. But now even the spreadsheet is getting harder to manage.
I write in scenes—and I save my scenes in separate files—so I could literally have 30 to 50 files of scenes that will eventually turn into chapters. If I decide to move scenes around—it gets a little tricky and confusing.
So to help me during this revision process, I decided to try this software called yWriter. I’ve heard about it a while back, but I decided to try it out. I put in my outline and Act 1 scenes for my novel and it’s cool. And being the tech geek that I am, it also was easy to figure out.
You can also write directly into the software, but I still like using Word because of the formatting it has. But I can still use yWriter at the end of a writing session to keep track of scenes, chapters, characters, and notes. Everything is all in one place, and since it doesn’t mess with my computer registry, I can load the software on my thumb drive and take it everywhere I go.
And it prints out all of these cool reports and I can even create a synopsis from chapter and scene notes. There are also other cool features that I haven’t yet played with but so far so good.
Plus yWriter is free shareware software, which doesn’t hurt either.
I’m going to continue to use it during my revision for this novel. If all goes well, I’ll send the developer (who is also a writer) a donation for his effort and time for creating this software.
So if you’re looking for some organization, you may want to check it out.
