Have you found any good writing tools?

[Alex]

Not a tool, per se, but a good way to edit/proofread your writing is to change the font type, size, color, etc. It tricks your brain into reading it as if it hasn’t seen it before and gives you a more objective view of it.

Great tip. I would often change my page size to get everything to reflow for the same reason. It’s darn hard to proofread your own work because the brain cleverly remembers what you meant to say, but that kind of thing really does help

[Alex]

Thanks for all the useful discussions and forums - I had to stop replying yesterday because the new forums decided that I was being too chatty for a newby !?!

A tool that I’ve been considering trying is IAwriter. I’m in software development as a day job, and syntax highlighting has been brilliant while coding. The idea of a writing tool which can highlight English syntax has an appeal, so I can check my verbs, adverbs etc. It’s a markdown editor too, and I do like markdown for writing.

Interesting to see a lot of love for Scrivener, it certainly sounds interesting.

[beepeegee]

For plain text files, I’m using FocusWriter. It’s OpenSource and works on Windows, Mac, Linux.

[tina]

Along those lines, I’ve found it useful to have writing being read back to me using speech synthesis. It catches many typos (because the speech processor noticeably stumbles over them) and gives you a pretty good feel abut sentence flow - whether it’s too long, repetitive-sounding, convoluted, stilted, etc.

There are several ways to go about this. MS Word has a read-aloud option, Mac OS has an accessibility option for it that can be turned on with a keyboard combo, you could export to ebook and have the Google Books phone app read your text aloud… there are probably more ways to do it.

[epiclutesolo]

This might not be for everyone but www.workflowy.com
It’s the most minimalist system I’ve seen for idea organization.
Drop all your ideas into a tree. Once they’re organized writing them down coherently is much easier.

[lindevi]

@Ludovico_Alves I know that multiple style sheets is a feature PerfectIt offers, but I haven’t had a chance to dive into it. It definitely looked like it would take some time to get set up, and I was struggling to just keep my external style guides updated for vendors (ha ha).

[aryramsey]

Parenthetically, I also use Scapple in every Hangouts game I play to keep notes on my character, fragments of background which may or may not come into play, and relationship maps. Here’s a screen from a game of World Wide Wresting.

[Alex]

I ended up liking IAWriter so much I wrote a blog post about it https://planesailinggames.com/review-ia-writer.html

[TheGiftOfGabes]

I’ve been working on Notion for the past few months and it’s been working wonders for me. There is some clunkiness in parts but I appreciate the organizational possibilities, the fact that you can sync blocks of texts (and therefore edit the same text in more than one page) and share your pages directly to the web with a link. The closest I got to it before was dropbox paper. It is good for a bunch of things and easier than Notion for sharing and getting comments, but Notion so far has been making me happier.

[Thomas_Junk]

I settled with Obsidian. It is my go to tool for everything at the moment.

It is basically markdown. So what makes it so powerful and why should everyone take a glimpse at it?

Its main strength is that is based on the Zettelkasten Method which makes it good for any kind of knowledge management. Its best feature is the Graph View which let’s you view the (inter-) connections of your konwledge kept in your vault (i.e. “folder”).

It is easy enhancable through plugins (written in Javascript):

• Say you want to get more out of ordinary markdown tables: Check out Advanced Tables

• Say you are a data, stats and charts person: you should have a look at Dataview and Obsidian Charts

• For simple outlining I use: Outliner

If you have programming skills, it is easily extendable / hackable with Javascript.

And the best thing: It’s mostly free - though sadly (at the moment) not Open Source (

You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it to contribute, directly or indirectly, to revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that has two or more people. Get a commercial license for each user if that’s the case. Registered non-profit organizations do not need commercial licenses.

For all other uses, you can use Obsidian for free forever .

Tip for syncing between devices: Use Syncthing.

I use one vault (“folder”) for my work, one folder for personal growth things and journalling and another one for running adventures.

I recently organized the prep for an adventure:

Adventure-Folder
-> Locations
-> Persons
-> Monsters
-> Items

I had a “Meta-Document” where I lay down the general flow of the adventure.
Say you want a flow-chart of a temple, using Mermaid results in this

When I wanted to describe a scene, I could easily link to Persons, Monsters, Items etc. which allows a smooth running of the adventure.

No Marketing - just an enthusiast

P.S.: If you are a writer dedicating a single vault to the story you write and adding git into the mix and use fork as a UI for git, you could version your files or even branch off new versions of your complete story.

Edit: This is a sample repo for prep (german).