There’s a lot of people out there who use Ywriter as the free alternative to Scrivener. Ywriter is really good. I wrote my first three novels with it, Once I got Scrivener, I did see that – yes, Scrivener is better.
But I’m most definitely not knocking Ywriter.
My beta reader hit me with the comment of, “You’ve got a lot of spelling errors in your novels.” Mostly their typos, because as I mentioned before, I don’t know how to type – I’ve just memorized the keyboard and can type ridiculously fast for someone who doesn’t know how to type. Three words that give me fits were in that sentence by the way. FAST often is written fsat, and woh is actually how. The keyboard is just backwards – on purpose – for those words. When typewriters were first written, the typist could type so fast that the keys couldn’t keep up. So they arranged the infamous QWERTY keyboard to slow down typists.
The problem for me that eventually drove me to Scrivener was the typos. Ywriter tells you a word is misspelletd, but knot woh to spel it.
So, since I accumulate a lot of typos, I needed something I could click that would tell me, “I think you’re trying to spell either who or how. Which do you want it to be?”
Ywriter doesn’t do that.
So, it meant spending $40. AAAARRRRGHHHHHH!!!! Forty Dollars!!!!!!! Why… that’s a LOT OF MONEY!!!!!
Once I took the plunge and spent it, I felt really stupid. It’s only $40.
My fourth novel was pretty much pant’sed as opposed to planned. That’s why I stopped at the 45% mark, because I didn’t flowchart it the way I did with my other novels.
Getting back to Ywriter, what does it do? You’re presented with a system that encourages you to write in scenes. You can blank create so many scenes. I don’t at this point remember how to do chapters. But there were all kinds of cool tools in Ywriter that actually delayed me getting Scrivener, because I didn’t know there was a way to duplicate those!
Location. Date. Item. Characters present. Those are fields in Ywriter. There’s also drama tension and humor indicators to fill out per scene.
You’ll find on right brain days, you’ll poke at the little elements like that. on left brain days, you’ll write scenes. You need 1667 words a day to write a novel in a month. I set myself deadlines of 150,000 words and my 1667 will get me that in three months.
The problem with the way Ywriter does things is – you’ll get those words EASILY. So now you need a hobby, like gardening or something, because you’ll meet your writing deadlines in Ywriter WAAAY too fast!
My recommendation is this – try writing in Ywriter first. Then if you find you write a lot, then get Scrivener. I agree with the myriads of Scrivenics who all state boldly that “What if I told you there was a program available that would revolutionize your writing immediately?” The answer is Scrivener. I agree with them 100%.
But dont sneer at Ywriter. If I typed slower and with less typos, then I’d still be using it to write all my novels in!
