Description
Twenty chapters in, you notice a plot thread you never tied off, a side character whose eye colour changed, and no clear answer to how many days this chapter covers. Writing a novel in Word always ends the same way: scrolling through a 200,000-word file looking for something. yWriter takes a different angle — a novel is not one document, it is a tree. Chapters hold scenes, each scene stored separately, each one tagged with its viewpoint character, location, props and story date, and reorderable by dragging it in the left-hand list.
Simon Haynes wrote it for himself after four science-fiction novels convinced him Word was the wrong tool, which is why every feature aims at a real long-form problem. It will not write for you; it makes sure you always know where you are and how far is left.
Chapters and scenes: the book splits into chapters, chapters into scenes, and dragging reorders both. Moving a passage from chapter twelve to the opening takes a drag, not a cut and paste of several thousand words.
Character, location and item files: every person, place and key object gets its own card. Pull it up in the side panel while writing instead of digging back through the manuscript.
Scene metadata: tag each scene with viewpoint, status (outline / draft / final), in-story date and time, so the whole timeline and the spread of character appearances become visible at a glance.
Word counts and targets: counts per chapter and per scene, today's total and distance to goal right in the status bar, plus a daily writing schedule.
Reports: generate character appearance lists, scene inventories and timelines — far faster for checking structure during revision than rereading the whole draft.
Portable build: unzip and run. Projects are plain XML, so a USB stick or sync folder moves the whole book to another machine and the data never leaves your hands.
Simon Haynes wrote it for himself after four science-fiction novels convinced him Word was the wrong tool, which is why every feature aims at a real long-form problem. It will not write for you; it makes sure you always know where you are and how far is left.
Features
Chapters and scenes: the book splits into chapters, chapters into scenes, and dragging reorders both. Moving a passage from chapter twelve to the opening takes a drag, not a cut and paste of several thousand words.
Character, location and item files: every person, place and key object gets its own card. Pull it up in the side panel while writing instead of digging back through the manuscript.
Scene metadata: tag each scene with viewpoint, status (outline / draft / final), in-story date and time, so the whole timeline and the spread of character appearances become visible at a glance.
Word counts and targets: counts per chapter and per scene, today's total and distance to goal right in the status bar, plus a daily writing schedule.
Reports: generate character appearance lists, scene inventories and timelines — far faster for checking structure during revision than rereading the whole draft.
Portable build: unzip and run. Projects are plain XML, so a USB stick or sync folder moves the whole book to another machine and the data never leaves your hands.
