Software question for you writers out there.

[Kaie]

I am looking for a simple and easy (but detailed and good) software to help me organize a book I am writing. I need the capacity to organize chapters and character studies, research,etc. Plus things I might not have thought of like assistance with plot development.

Anyone know of a good one? I have a Mac.

[tod]

You might not like this answer, but I just finished a novel and the absolutely most helpful software has been Emacs. It's free software. Here's the OS X version.

Emacs is often called a text editor for programmers (of which I am one), but it can do much more than that. It takes some learning to use it, but don't let that turn you off. There are all kinds of things I made it do that made writing my novel so much easier.

For example, there were a thousand places in the text where I would want to make a comment to myself, to review something later, change it in a way I wasn't sure of yet, etc. Basically annotations. I set up Emacs to change the color of any text that was preceded by //. So my story, while developing it, might have looked like this:

// is this the best way to open the chapter?
Nolan Cooper aimed for a cloud. As he sped toward the fluffy pillow in front of him, tendrils of moisture enveloped his plane. Then the cloud seemed to suck him in, and the world disappeared.

Now, certainly you can highlight lines in Word or Pages or whatever. But is it as easy as just typing two characters? No, you have to pick up the mouse and apply formatting. Sometimes the formatting spills over into the next paragraph. When you have hundreds of lines, it's so much easier just to type // and then type your comment, and have it highlighted.

Emacs also has org-mode, which can help you organize your notes, plot, whatever. I used it extensively.

You can make Emacs do anything you want and behave in any way you want. At one time I had code that automatically highlighted every instance of the names of my characters, highlighted all dialogue, stuff like that.

By the way, I link to my novel in my signature. It's only 99 cents, if you're curious.

[Kaie]

Thank you, Tod I will look into that, it is really helpful. I was looking into MS Word for the Mac, this sounds interesting though . I will check out the link in your siggie when I get back from dance

[ragtag]

While I love emacs, and use it for all my programming, I'm not sure I would like to use it for novel writing. For me it works better for code, because code constist of short lines, while prose is generally whole paragraphs in one line and harder to jump around in with emacs. That, and if you don't know how to use it, learning it is not exactly trivial.

For Mac, I would pick Scrivener. I've used it in the past, but don't have a Mac anymore. An alternative cross-platform tool is Writer's Cafe. Celtx might be worth a look too, though it's mainly focused at screenwriting.

[Kaie]

Wow, Scrivener looks really comprehensive and awesome. I am a bit intimidated by Emacs as I am not really good at working code. Taking notes and working away on Pages until I make a decision

I am tempted to get Word for Macs, advice on that? Advantages? Disadvantages?

I need easy, or easy to learn.

[danthony]

I personally like mindmapping software to keep everything organized. Simple, yet intuitive. You can pickup the free open source FreeMind software by googling it.