Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

As you know, November was National Novel Writing Month. I decided to participate this year, and while I didn’t reach 50,000 words in 30 days (I made it to 35,000), I still plan on finishing the book in the next week or two.

To write this 1.5-month masterpiece, I used yWriter, a free piece of software developed by author and programmer Simon Haynes, who wanted a program that facilitated writing long pieces of fiction. While yWriter is geared toward novelists, it’s applicable to any long-form writing project.

What differentiates yWriter from other word processors is that it makes it easy to divide your writing into individual scenes and chapters, making them accessible without having to open multiple files. You can reorder scenes and chapters just by dragging and dropping. When you’ve got your narrative the way you want it, you can export the whole thing to RTF or TXT format, readable in any word processor. Do you need to jump from scene-to-scene easily without scrolling through a huge document? Just point and click to a different scene or chapter. Did you write a section that you don’t want to use but can’t bring yourself to delete? Just set it as inactive, and yWriter will ignore it when printing or calculating word count. yWriter has lots of other advanced features, too. Enter characters, place names, and valuable items, and yWriter will keep track of them, highlighting them whenever they appear in the text.

Some of yWriter’s best features promote good habits for all writers, not just novelists. You can set daily word-count goals, as well as set deadlines for the project you’re working on. yWriter can ferret out “problem words,” so if you find yourself automatically putting an “-ly” adverbs next to every verb, it will promptly bring this bad habit to your attention. You can set your own problem words, too. I set yWriter to find “probably” and “actually” because I myself use those words far more than I probably should.

Obviously yWriter would work for longer creative writing projects. However, it might also be good for group assignments, having students each write a section of a report. You can then import them into yWriter, allowing you to change up the order as you see fit. If you’re working toward a graduate degree, yWriter might be handy for that thesis or dissertation, too.

yWriter

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