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July 21, 2010 by 31 Comments Outlining Your Novel
In anticipation of my convalescence from Lasik corrective eye surgery, I skipped the usual how-to video this week and, at the request of a viewer on YouTube, created a short sequel to my popular yWriter tutorial, showing how I use yWriter outlining software once I’ve typed up all my outline notes and am in the midst of the story.
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About K.M. Weiland | @KMWeilandK.M. Weiland is the award-winning and internationally-published author of the acclaimed writing guides Outlining Your Novel, Structuring Your Novel, and Creating Character Arcs. A native of western Nebraska, she writes historical and fantasy novels and mentors authors on her award-winning website Helping Writers Become Authors.
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I downloaded yWriter almost two years ago but never made use of it. Now your tutorial has sparked a desire to use it with my current manuscript. Thanks for posting about this and I hope you recover well from your eye surgery.
It’s a fabulous program. I can’t praise it highly enough. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line, and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Being an impoverished amateur writer (ie: without a Mac), I absolutely adore yWriter. If memory serves I am on my third version of the program and use it quite often. Thanks you so much for posting the tutorial, I’ll be recommending other writers I know come look at it because it will save them the initial weeks of trial and error I went through.
Here’s wishing you a speedy recovery from your eye surgery.
I’ve been using yWriter since last year and love it. I can’t believe it’s free. Those looking for software to organize their writing (from short stories to novels) should check it out. http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html
@Sam: The fact that yWriter isn’t available on a Mac was actually was one of the chief reasons I decided to stick with a PC when I updated computers last month.
@Jonathan: Simon Haynes is doing us all a good turn, that’s for sure!
W.O.W. -! That looks so much easier than trying to carry it all around in my head (or sort through the lists of notes I’ve made at my stopping point.)
scooting over right now to download… Again, KM. What can we say? ;p THANKS!
P.S.
all the best in recup and your book sounds interesting… :o)
It’s a lovely program. I’m sure you’ll find it as helpful as I have. And thank you, all, for the well wishes on my recovery. It’s been a week since the surgery, and my eyes feel great. Even better, I can see!
I found yWriter after watching your original video, and have never looked back. It rescued me from a muddled manuscript.
Yay! I’m thrilled to hear it. I’m just as excited about yWriter as I was when I discovered it three years ago. Always glad to convert people that excitement!
Prayers and best wishes for your quick recovery from Lasik surgery. I have never been brave enough to try it!
I would also like to let you know that my Blest Atheist blog went down. I replaced it with 100th Lamb. I explain why at the site (www.emahlou.blogspot.com).
@Elizabeth: Oh, the surgery was a breeze! Five minutes of discomfort, and you’re done. I’m so pleased with the results. Thanks for letting me know about your blog’s new address. I’ll go switch my feed right now.
So you just use it as an outlining software? That’s strange. I never thought of using it like that. yWriter is actually an editing software (you can actually write your novel in the software), and there are some benefits to using it like that. By having each scene as a separate file, you avoid the problems that sometimes occur with large word files for the entire manuscript, and you also don’t have to keep closing/opening files if, say, you have one for each chapter.
The tools it provides in the writing process, and especially the editing process, are great. It displays word count for scene, chapter, and the novel. It provides word count tracking, which is great for those with writing goals. And you can drag and drop scenes. This is very helpful when you realize that a scene really needed to happen earlier. You can drag and drop it, which is much easier than copying/pasting. You can even import a manuscript in, and it will split up the word file automatically into chapters/scenes.
The one downside to the software is that there is no grammar check and the spelling check only works if you download the additional plugin. Still, for a first draft (or for an editing round that you plan to follow up with a spell/grammar check in Word), it’s great.
PS: I used yWriter to write the whole novel, then copied and pasted to word as I prefer the grammar and spell checker. 🙂
Microsoft Word has its problems, but it’s still hard to beat in the basics, in my opinion.
Prayers and well-wishes on your Lasik surgery; can’t wait to see you back all healed and 20/20!
Prayers and well-wishes on your Lasik surgery; can’t wait to see you back all healed and 20/20!
Thanks! I stopped in for a post-op appointment yesterday, and I’m actually seeing 20/15 – which is *better* than 20/20. Very cool.
Thanks for putting together another video – I’ll be sure to let the many other users know about it.
Re Macs and yWriter, I deliberately chose dotnet 2.0 as the programming language for yWriter5 because the Mono library can also be installed on Mac and Linux, allowing you to run the program on those operating systems. (Speech won’t work, alas) There’s a tutorial for getting it running on this yWriter5 wiki page: http://sites.google.com/site/ywritersj/installing-on-mac-os-x
Bear in mind that while it runs 100% on Windows, and I also have Ubuntu installed so I can test it on Linux, I don’t have access to Mac. I can’t say whether every feature works as it should, possibly because most Mac users are running Scrivener or some other Mac-specific app.
Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for your continued support, and also I’m glad to hear the eye surgery went well!
Cheers
Simon
Just spotted a couple of other comments. The latest version of yWriter allows you to export an entire chapter to Word, do your editing and grammar checking, (or maybe email it to someone else for their input) and then you can re-import the chapter back into yWriter without losing your scene titles, descriptions and so on. It does this by tagging scenes in the exported chapter so it knows where to put the content again when you read it back it. PS it’s VITAL not to mess with these tags while you’re editing and correcting the chapter in Word/OpenOffice.
Whoops, last comment: The benefit with writing your novel in the yWriter editor? Autobackups. It’ll take snapshots of your scenes by second, minute, hour, day, month, etc so you don’t lose any work, zipping them all into timestamped files. If you write in Word you lose this advantage.
Thanks for stopping by and lending your expertise! yWriter’s a great program. I’m more than happy to spread the word!
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome!
My thoughts exactly. It’s great software!
OOOHHHHHH my!! That looks SOOOOO awesome!!! I can’t wait to download it but I am using my sister’s computer right now and will have to wait til mine is done being repaired before I can get the program.
Thanks for posting this! I enjoy your posts; they are so helpful!!
It’s a fantastic program. Have fun with it! I hope you find it as useful as I have.
I love this program! I downloaded it a year ago and it beats the heck out of fiddleing with 3×5 cards. Thanks for the great video!
Thanks for watching! I’ve been using yWriter for years now, and I just love it to pieces. It streamlines the whole process.
I am using it these days and finding it really helpful for my work. But from what I know, you stopped using it, right?
I recently switched over to Scrivener, which costs around $40. It’s like yWriter on steroids.
I will too, when I actually earn 40$ from MY writing 😉
It is one of the things I want to earn, instead of get.
You won’t regret it!