yWriter: My favourite writing software

For most writers, publishing a book means investing a considerable amount of time and money into software, layout & design, covers, editing etc. Depending on how much you can do yourself and how much you can afford to outsource, that can run into thousands of dollars per book.

While editing services and many writing-related programs (such as Photoshop for creating covers) are expensive and take a considerable amount of time and skill, thanks to word processors writing software is relatively cheap.

Word processors don’t cut it on their own as most writers know. A hundred-thousand word file is unwieldly, at best, and you still need other files for notes and outlines etc.

Hal Spacejock omnibus series — Simon’s first Hal Spacejock omnibus.

The best writing software (as far as I’m concerned) is yWriter, which is totally free to use on your desktop computer thanks to its creator Simon Haynes. Simon developed it for himself but generously shares it with everyone.

Over the years I’ve tried different programs, but wWriter is my favourite for four reasons.

It’s simple to use
It automagically creates a backup of the entire project every time you open it (which has saved my bacon more than once)
I can still use Word as my key-pounding software of choice while still using yWriter
You can download the complementary yWriter app (for the ridiculously cheap price of a coffee) so you can keep writing wherever you go (assuming you store your stories in the cloud so yWriter can open and save them).

Cons first

The biggest (and only) con as far as I’m concerned is that it’s not intuitive to use at first glance, but then I couldn’t figure out Scrivener when I opened that either.

What that means is that if you don’t ‘get’ how writing programs work, read on.

Getting started with yWriter – it’s simple

Initially, yWriter leads you through a project set-up process which creates a project ‘shell’ (my term).

To start writing you’ll need to do two more things:

Create chapters to hold your scenes
Create scenes to write in

That’s as difficult as it gets. From there you can double click on any newly-created scene and begin writing in yWriter’s built-in word processor. Story started.

Setting up multiple chapters

Chapter list from yWriter — Chapter list screenshot

There’s a few more helpful things you might need to know, and for that I’ll assume you went through the setup wizard and created a new project.

Now click on the Chapter tab, select Create Multiple Chapters, and choose how many new chapters you want for your book (or go with the default number).

I generally start with 40 chapters for a novel: ten chapters per quarter (you can add or remove chapters later).

That assumes ten chapters for the Beginning, twenty for the Middle, and ten for the End. If you’re not sure why they’re grouped like that, check out Character and Structure.

For a 100k book that equals about 2500 words per chapter and 25k words per quarter. No book’s going to perfectly match those percentages, so do what works best for you.

The chapter list screenshot is pretty close to those numbers / percentages (it’s from my WIP), although the end section needs to be trimmed a little – which is what I’m about to start on.

You’ll notice the chapter word count (W), the number of scenes per chapter (S), and the running word count over the entire project (P). The colour coding on the running word count highlights the beginning, middle and end chapters.

You’ll need to create as many chapters/scenes as works for you.

You’ll probably notice at the bottom of the chapter list I’ve got some unused ‘chapters’ (right click on the chapter, select used/unused). While they’re all technically ‘unused’, I use them to keep additional info such as the outline or chapters I haven’t quite decided to scrap yet.

In yWriter, chapters do several things. They:

hold your scenes
break up your book into chapters when you export it
provide a visual overview of the structure, including:
- an overview of your book at a glance
- chapter descriptions (I’ve cut out the descriptions here, but they’re off to the right of each chapter)
- a running word count
- and plenty of other lovely additional features you can apply, such as colour-coding the beginning, middle and end (as demonstrated in the Chapter list screenshot) for easy visual reference.

To change the chapter section from beginning to middle (for instance), right click on the chapter you want to designate as the change point (in this example, it’s Chapter 9), and choose ‘Mark as start of middle section’.

You can also change the names of the chapters by double-clicking on them and using the dialogue box that opens to rename them in turn (I don’t use the feature, but it’s a nice option to have).

Creating Scenes

Scenes are where you write you story (NOT chapters!).

When you export your book from yWriter, scenes will generally have breaks in between them, although there’s an option to append scenes to each other without the breaks, but that’s another topic.

To create scenes, select the chapter you want to add a scene to, go to the Scene tab, and select Create New Scene (or Create Multiple Scenes). As soon as you create a new scene, it’ll open and you can start writing.

For a new project, I suggest you add another step.

At the bottom of the ‘scene’ window there’ll be a ‘Next’ button. If you click on Next and the following chapter has no scenes, yWriter will create one for you. Do that, and keep going until all your chapters contain a scene each.

It’s a quick way to populate each chapter with a scene.

After that, you can select any chapter you like and add more scenes as you need them.

Scene Preview

If you want to get all frustrated by trying to write where you can’t, there’s a scene preview screen at the bottom of the scenes list (along with half a dozen other very useful tabs) which you’re welcome to try and write in. Good luck with that.

It’s for viewing only, though it does appear as if you could use it for writing.

To write, you’ll need to double click on the scene to open it.

yWriter scenes view — List of scenes within a chapter

To Write Using Word

If you prefer the functionality of writing in Word (as I do) but still want to utilise yWriter to organise your story into manageable sections and keep all your notes together, such as character info, locations, etc., you can.

yWriter’s essentially a story database and organisational tool, with the bonus of a built-in (but simple) word processor.

To use yWriter with Word, right-click on a scene and choose ‘Open Content with Default RFT Editor’. yWriter will open the scene in Word or whatever your default writing software is.

When you’re done, close Word and go back to wWriter, right click on the same scene, and choose ‘Finished with External Editor’. That will update yWriter (word count etc) and let it know the scene is no longer checked out. Simple!