Best Results Organizing

[The following post was originally published in November 2017; content, features, links, and prices, have been updated to reflect available information as of July 2024.]

In ye olden days, serious writing required pen on paper or tapping on a typewriter, or some combination thereof. Then came computers with Wordperfect (and MacWrite, for my fellow 80s kids), and now, most people write using some of the standard software and app platforms most readily available to them: Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or Google Docs. Each has its advantages as well as demerits, including bloated features that distract from the writing process or elements that don’t quite do what we wish they magically should.

If you’re writing a term paper or a letter of complaint, these big guns, which are likely already part of your regular writing routine, will suffice. But there are so many other platforms you may wish to consider to help you organize your resources, improve your writing focus, and be more productive.

Previously, we’ve looked at how to organize yourself to write for NaNoWriMo and other projects and how to get and maintain your motivation. As we continue our writing-themed Mondays in November, we are looking at options for selecting a writing platform to keep you organized and focused.

ROBUST WRITING PLATFORMS

Scrivener — For serious writers (from novelists and playwrights to journalists and academics), Scrivener seems to be the biggest poorly-kept secret out there. Everyone seems to know of it, though most seem to have some trepidation about getting started with it.

Scrivener is a heavy-duty professional writing tool created by writers for writers. At its most basic, it’s a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner, and text editor all rolled into one. Use it to organize your thoughts on notecards in the virtual corkboard mode, view your research and writing in side by side windows, and use one of Scrivener’s templates to get the ideal format.

Create narrative or conceptual structure with easy drag-and-drop tools and write in a clean, distraction-free environment. Scrivener makes it possible to write a long presentation or a complete manuscript for a book in a way that a regular word processing application really can’t. Put all your research into it, and break it down into small, manageable chunks (almost like writing on index cards) so you don’t have to constantly scroll up and down 20 (or 200) pages of a document to locate what you need. Then weave everything together to form one unbroken manuscript.

To help you keep track of your goals, there’s a visual feature for seeing your progress toward particular word counts, whether by chapter or document. When you’ve written and edited to your satisfaction, Scrivener lets you format your work to various industry standards and export documents suitable for sharing or for publishing print books or ebooks.

Scrivener is available for Mac or Windows ($59.99), as a bundle of Mac and Windows ($95.98), and iOS ($23.99). To get a feel for what it can do for you, Scrivener’s creator, Literature and Latte, created a video:

Scrivener is complex to customize and comes with an incredibly detailed on-screen tutorial. But the biggest downside to Scrivener is that there’s so much available to you, so many features to accomplish so many different functions, that you’re likely to be overwhelmed. Happily, there’s a particular Scrivener expert I can recommend.

Joseph Michael, AKA @Scrivener Coach on Twitter, is the dude to know. Over the last few years, I’ve taken a few webinars he’s offered via other writers and bloggers I follow, and learned more with less frustration in a no-cost one-hour webinar than I did reading the already superb Scrivener for Dummies. (It’s a good book, but not everyone can translate text instruction into learning computer skills.)

I suggest that if you have or get Scrivener, that you follow Joseph Michael for his Scrivener Ninja Tips:

#Scrivener Ninja Tip: Create a link inside your Scrivener document with this drag and drop tip. #writing pic.twitter.com/37GpBUsvHs

— Joseph Michael (@ScrivenerCoach) November 6, 2017

If you’re really serious about learning all that the software has to offer, though, consider his Learn Scrivener Fast courses. I’m not a shill for him; I just know that no matter where I go on the web, when Scrivener comes up, Joseph Michael’s name is mentioned in short order, and I can honestly say that he ties with my tech-oriented organizing colleagues Deb Lee and Kim Oser for  offering the most detailed, fluff-free, information-laden presentations on the planet.

IAwriter — This platform is designed to help eliminate all of the distractions of the menus, toolbars, and icons that may keep you from focusing on what you’re trying to say, rather than how it should look. Explaining their approach:

The cover letter for your dream job. The business proposal that will turn everything around. The love letter, telling them how much you care. Why is it so hard to get started? Few of us grow up without a fear of being judged for our writing. So we pause, we hesitate, we procrastinate, while others advance. In iA Writer, we stripped away everything that might stand between you and how you feel, so that you can write from the heart. This is how great writing gets started.

Features for creating this distraction-free environment include:

• Custom templates find you the form you need.
• Focus Mode dims everything except the current sentence, allowing you to maintain focus, much like how a typewriter’s limited view kept writers in the moment.
• Night Mode puts light text on a dark screen, which is easier on the eyes, especially when writing at night.
• Syntax highlights find weak verbs, unnecessary or repetitive words, erroneous conjunctions. etc.
• Content blocks allow embedding of photos, tables, and text.
• Document library lets you search, sort, and swap between documents all from your current window.
• File export enables exporting your IAwriter document to WordPress for your blog or website, Medium, or HTML, or to Word (.docx) or PDF.
• Multi-Markdown language lets you format and edit for a streamlined but powerful visual approach.
• Keeps track of which things you write and what you’ve copied and pasted from other sources to ensure you don’t accidentally plagiarize. (External sources are dimmed; what you write is in regular text.)

For the person who needs minimalism but doesn’t want to learn any coding and just wants to click a big B for bolded writing, iAWriter will have some tradeoffs. There are a number of video tutorials to help you learn Markdown, exporting and sharing skills, and setting preferences.

While IAwriter was created for a Mac environment, it is now available for all of your desktop, laptop, and mobile settings. After a free trial, you pay for each version of IAwriter as a separate software item, per platform. It’s $49.99 for Mac and iOS (iPhone/iPad), $29.99 for Windows, and Android $29.99 (or $9.99 for an annual Android subscription).

Also, it’s Stephen Fry’s favorite writing platform.

Ulysses — Are you a Mac or iOS person and who wants a clean, spare writing platform? Ulysses clears the decks. From a focus and productivity perspective, Ulysses is all about keeping your fingers on the keyboard and your eyes on the prize.

There’s a markdown-based text editor, so you don’t have to fiddle with fancy formatting or styles. Ulysses includes a built-in grammar- and style-check to help you avoid mistakes and set the fitting tone for your content. It works with more than 20 languages, offering suggestions for capitalization, punctuation, semantics, redundancy, style and more.

Once you’ve finished writing, you can transform your content into a variety of formats: PDFs, Word documents, blog posts, or ebooks — at a keystroke. (If you use it for blogs, you can create features images, tags, and excerpts directly from within Ulysses.) 

If you have a specific character limit, set your goal and have Ulysses track your progress toward it. If you have various clients, or different types of projects (or project-owners), you can organize your creations in separate folders for easy access.

All your writing projects get store in Ulysses’ library, so they’ll sync and be available on all of your devices, no matter where you are when inspiration strikes.

Ulysses has been around since 2003, but is constantly being updated. As recently as June 2024, they added internal links between projects and navigation history tracking, and if you previously tried Ulysses, you review all the new features since I originally wrote about the platform in 2017.

Ulysses is designed with a basic, distraction-free interface — but you can explore hundreds of styles and themes in dark or light mode.

The organizational tools include a single library, which autosaves everything you create, hierarchical groupings, so you can keep track of sub-projects, and attachments (PDFs, images, keywords, etc.) which can be associated with a document without being inserted into the document, and filtered searches. You can also easily set word or character goals and share your progress via social media.

Syncing with iCloud and across iOS/MacOS devices is automatic, and you can add Dropbox folders to your text library. For exporting and sharing, you can export in multiple file formats (text, HTML, epub, PDF, and Word), or publish to WordPress, Ghost, Medium, or Micro.blog. There’s a Live Preview feature, so you can see how changes will look when published side-by-side with the changes as you are making them.

Ulysses uses subscription-based pricing, so after a fully-functional free trial, it’s $5.99/month or $39.99/year, or $10.99/six months for qualified students. 

WRITING PLATFORMS THAT KICK YOUR INNER CRITIC IN THE TUSH

Ilys, a web-based option, was designed to help writers drop-kick writer’s block and push past self-doubt.

The conceit of Ilys is that it only lets you see one letter at a time, and won’t let you edit until you’ve written your pre-set number of words. There’s even a Ninja mode, where you can’t see any letters you’ve typed at all!

The idea is that Ilys creates a “state of complete absorption and effortless creativity [which] can lead to a profound sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. it can enhance your productivity boost your confidence and self-esteem, and help you express yourself with clarity and ease.”

Obviously, this is only suitable for decent touch-typists, but it’s a huge boon for writers who tend to self-edit every other word stymied by writer’s block. Here’s how it works in the creator’s own words:

Once you get into writing, you’ll have your bare-bones screen with just a few signposts to let you see where you are and where you can go within Ilys.

To start an Ilys writing session, enter how many words you want to write. Then just start writing, because there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t go back, delete, or edit anything until you have reached your word count goal. (There is an “eye” icon you can click to view what you’ve already written, in case you can’t remember the name you gave a character, or if you need to refer to a statistic you’ve typed.)

Ilys tracks your progress, identifying where you excel and where writing output dips. Because many writers profess that consistently writing a set number of words per day (irrespective of quality) is the key to success, Ilys is focused on providing a realm in which to keep on writing.

Everything is autosaved, just in case you accidentally delete something (or change your mind). Your data is stored, encrypted, online, until you’re ready to export your work to a word processing platform for more complex formatting.

Ilys offers a free 3000-word 500-word trial; after that, it’s $10.08 $11.11/month (or $99.99/year for 60% 25% off with an annual subscription).

Editor’s note: prices/trial information is no longer visible on the platform site, and it appears the site stopped providing information to non-registered users sometime between 2021 and mid-2024. However, you can use Ilys Classic — an even more bare-bones version, by going to the link and scrolling to the bottom to set your word goal. If you try to exit without having reached your goal, the page will show you what you’ve typed thus far and prompt you to return to the page. Once you have hit your goal, an arrow appears to take you to your viewable content.

The Most Dangerous Writing App, like Ilys, is web-based, and offers a similar, if potentially-paralyzing, approach to shutting down your inner critic. Instead of focusing on a word count, you set the time frame: 5, 10, 20, 30, 45 or 60 minutes, hit “Start” and commence writing.

While you write on the minimalist, unformatted screen, the web app counts your characters, words, and typing speed. If you stop typing for 5 seconds, everything you have written thus far disappears. Once you hit your writing time limit, you can copy and paste (no exporting!) your writing so you can edit and format elsewhere.

The whole concept is to free yourself from constraints and self-doubt by focusing all of your attention on your words. You can write in night mode or go full-screen to hide your desktop, but otherwise, this free web app is all about scaring you into letting the words flow! 

To Paper Doll‘s mind, this approach is more suitable for Julia Cameron-inspired “morning pages” or following writing prompts than adhering to an outline for a long-form document. In fact, since I originally wrote this blog in 2017, The Most Dangerous Writing App has added a random prompt generator, so you might want to use the browser-based app to warm up before you get started on your serious writing for the day.

ZenPen is another free, web-based platform.

Actually, it’s barely a platform. It’s a bare-boned writing space with no distractions. None. Zip. When you first click on the link, you’ll see instructions to highlight all of the instruction text, hit delete, and start writing. When you do, all you’ll see on the page is:

See the very faint icons in the upper left corner? That will help you navigate. You can toggle to a full-screen mode, invert colors and go to dark mode, set a target word count, or save your text.

If you must format what you’re writing so that it makes sense to you, just click on any word or phrase you type and a tiny pop-up menu appears to bold, italicize, link, or create a visual marker for quoted material. Save and download what you create in plain text, Markdown or HTML for editing elsewhere. 

Whether you choose a robust platform to complete your work of a lifetime or just select one of the web apps to free yourself to write without self-criticism, I hope you find a solution that works for you.

In our next NaNoWriMo Monday, we’ll be looking at wide variety of resources to help you organize your actual text and be more productive with your time. We’ll cover everything from proofreading and editing solutions to transcription options, all designed to help you write faster and create clearer communication, whether for your big novel or a workplace memo.

For related content, see:

• Organize Your Writing Time for NaNoWriMo 2022
• Organize Your Writing: NaNoWriMo 2021
• Paper Doll’s NaNoWriMoMo(nday): Writing Challenges, Dictation Tools, & Organized Writing Advice
• Paper Doll’s NaNoWriMoMo(nday): 10 Tools to Organize Your Writing, Editing, and Proofreading
• Paper Doll’s NaNoWriMoMoMo (Novel Writing Month Monday Motivation)…Even for Non-Writers
• Paper Doll’s How To Organize Yourself to Write for NaNoWriMo 2017
• Organizing Your Writing for NaNoWriMo and More

SaveSave