Years of painful pantsing made it very clear to me that I require the structure of a good outline if I’m going to write anything worth reading. That’s a personal failing on my part - if you aren’t prone to losing hours fiddling around with your software, then Scrivener is probably the only tool you need. It is so tempting to my inner geek that I cannot use it to actually write, which is why it gets relegated to editing and production work. It has powerful outlining and organizational tools, and every time I open it I’m tempted to tinker with its shiny knobs, buttons, and levers. Scrivener is inexpensive ($45), but packed to the gills with features that writers of all stripes will love. I don’t do any real writing in Scrivener, but I do use it for final edits and assembling finished works for export to ePub and Kindle formats. It’s fast and clean and won’t get in my way. I use ia Writer for all my actual writing. Plus, it’s cheap – for $10 you can get a useful, pretty text editor on both your Mac and your iPad. It looks nice, has a useful soft keyboard, and won’t get in your way. Third, it blocks out the distractions of font selection, screen color, line spacing, or any of that other fancy formatting jazz that can prevent you from the Serious Business of banging out words with your monkey fists. Second, it allows me to work seamlessly on my iPad or Macbook Air. This isn’t a super-fancy text editor, but it does some very important things. I know these are the best, because they’re what I use every day. To help you avoid the tedious, time-sucking task of selecting the best writing apps I’ve put together the following list. ![]() ![]() Maybe even a series of novels, if they were short and trashy with lots of nudity and explosions. ![]() If you added up all the hours I’ve procrastinated under the guise of testing writing apps, you’d end up with time enough to write an entire novel. One of my guilty pleasures is loading up on these digital ink wells and experimenting with their functionality for days at a time to see how they’ll fit into my workflow. There are way too many writing tools on the market.
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