Thread: Software tools for writing fiction?

Originally Posted by kareman

Find and replace will replace all occurrences of a word, whether it refers to the main character or not. Say your main character is called “Lisa” and somewhere in your novel you mention the famous painting “Mona Lisa”. If you then change Lisa's name to “Anna” using find and replace you will be referring to the much lesser known painting “Mona Anna”.

That's why you name your characters @ag2 & @ab5 until you have a actual name for them.


On programs, word should be more than enough to help with your writing. It makes mistakes, however it does make you think about sentences; which is what you want to improve your writing ability.

Originally Posted by garza

Don't you see, all the old fellows with their ancient motors will be inspired to go where such beauty is.

Well I don't know if Marylin and Jane ever visited Brighton...

Originally Posted by stevesh

I'm with the Ox. You don't need anything more than a simple word processor. I can't imagine why anyone would need any special 'novel writing' software. It's not the tool, it's the workman.

I can - Generally I am unable to remember a name for 30 seconds, not even the beautiful blonde I just met, so trying to remember who is whom is a nightmare of bits of paper and notes, and I've only written the odd short story and play. A dedicated program allows easy tracking of characters and plot points etc. It won't make you write any better, but it's like keeping all your screwdrivers in one place, it makes it much easier to find the one you really need quickly & efficiently.

Originally Posted by Lavender

I'm a little lost as to what my avatar has to to with the London to Brighton run? It's a picture of Marylin Monroe with my distant cousin Jane Russell - explain to me?

It must be my eyes: I could have sworn that blonde was Camilla Parker-Bowles. Who also has nothing to do with the London to Brighton run. duhhh.

I read through the entire first page of posts but decided to just comment after that so I might now have taken into account every previous answer here.

I myself use Office 2007 (which is very similar to Office 2010 just a little harder to use). You CAN buy it cheap as home/student version. If you are a hobbyist writer that is enough, if you do writing commercially and you want to make Bully Gates richer you can buy the more expensive full version.

OpenOffice is weak in comparison, but its mostly in terms of graphs and other pro features you will most probably never even touch. Try it if you want to get something useful that is free.

If you are also a bit of a programmer and want to produce something really professional you can go get LateX. To make it easier to use the word processor frontend LyX. This makes you able to focus fully on writing, while the table of contents and inner design are determined by a template. Many publishers actually use LateX format and have their own templates so this could be a big step towards professional work.

If you are a notepad kind of person, I recommend getting Notepad++. This little free tool allows you to use any kind of character in your text and doesn't come with the original's "oops I ruined all the paragraphs because I suck" feature (because as we all know with Microsoft "it's not a bug, it's a feature").

I hope this helped

Cheers
--MadBen