Any programs useful for writing?

Question

I was wondering, which programs would you recommend for writing. Whatever they possess general functions to correct your texts and grammar, and/or functions specific for storytelling/worldbuilding (characters, places, events, etc).

I already know scrivener, Quoollwriter, and ywriter.

The previous I mentioned are great in their own ways, but always lack somewhat important.

Ywriter its very complete, light and I liked it a lot. But its like, it took the actual text editor part a bit too lightly. Almost feels like its a lot preferable to write in word, and then paste everything there or something, because making corrections and formating directly in ywriter its a bit awkward.

Scrivener... Not going to lie, despite having practically the same stuff than ywriter it makes everything look so overwhelming and difficult to use. It wasnt really intuitive, at least not for me.

And finally, Quoll, looks nice. Its text editor and corrector its an improvement to ywriter... But its somehow kind of lacking in simple little QoL functions that were already in ywriter. One of them being the ability to separate your story's chapter in scenes, where in ywriter was straightforwards, in Quoll theres something simmilar, letting you add little tags but its kind of weird.

Guess, all of this is understandable, each program has a slightly different focus. But Im still kind of looking but the perfect program for me, so I wonder which others software like these you know?

Specially, free or at least cheap enough ones (Sadly my budget is not much)

PD: Im a windows PC user.

Answer 1

My primary tool is MS Word 2019 (a significant improvement over 2010 which I was using before). However, I also use Grammarly to check my writing, and if it's important, Language Tool. (Language Tool, I think, was a better tool when it was a downloadable program because it was super fast and would check huge files in seconds.)

ProWriting Aid is a style and grammar checker. I don't use it very often because it is relatively slow and finds problems where there aren't any. It has one report, the summary one, that can be very useful for picking up things like overused words.

At times I have used Hemingway but it is generally inferior to the others.

These four programs have free versions which are perfectly adequate -- you may have to check your work in chunks.

Answer 2

There are some lesser-known writing programmes which work well if you're a modular writer.

Gingko is very intuitive and exports well to Word. Unfortunately they don't support import, but I've found it particularly good for planning.

Plottr is another visually intuitive programme which is impressive in its functionality, but it has slightly too many clicks/taps for me.

If you need some guidance or wish to write in a particular genre following a prescribed model, take a look at Living Writer.

On the whole, I prefer MS Word - I use Outline view and Heading styles to organise material. I also find the autocorrect feature useful - I can programme a character code to save me typing lengthy terms that appear frequently. When writing non-fiction, the in-built Bibliography function is great.

Answer 3

It kind of depends on your writing process. When I'm working on fiction of any sort I prefer stripped down programs like Fast Notepad (a free Android app) I can teach it new words, and it has the two edged sword of an autocorrect/autofill function but otherwise it stays out of my way and lets me put words down as fast as possible. I personally write fast with little regard to punctuation etc... and then edit repeatedly, that's my process and it works for me. If you want something that checks all your grammar etc... as you write then you need something more sophisticated than I have ever personally found useful for story writing. I use Microsoft Word for work and formal material like CVs etc... and it does preform all those checks live as you write and it has a number of free pretenders that do the same.