Any writers out there?

[Rhea]

I have had a book series brewing in my head for several years, but no idea how to get it down on paper. I took creative writing in high school in college. None of that actually prepared me to write any kind of novels.

So… To the writers out there, what do you use to organize and write your books?

[Starla Yilmaz]

There’s a fine/lone balance between prewriting and writing. I use a good old notebook and oen to keep track of workdbuilding/character development…but I also make sure I get words on the page EVERY DAY even if I have to put **City Name** or whatever other detail I don’t have sorted yet in every now and again. You can spend a life time building a world and making characters, but it won’t mean anything until you get words on the page. No one cares about a brilliant half written thing, but they are interested in an okayish finished work.

[ionsecret]

snake game

On 1/10/2026 at 12:42 PM, Starla Yilmaz said:

There’s a fine/lone balance between prewriting and writing. I use a good old notebook and oen to keep track of workdbuilding/character development…but I also make sure I get words on the page EVERY DAY even if I have to put **City Name** or whatever other detail I don’t have sorted yet in every now and again. You can spend a life time building a world and making characters, but it won’t mean anything until you get words on the page. No one cares about a brilliant half written thing, but they are interested in an okayish finished work.

Totally agree! Getting words on the page every day, even with placeholders, keeps your story alive and moving forward. Prewriting is important, but action is what turns ideas into something readers can enjoy.

[Rhea]

Well... I am a bit old school anyway so a notebook sounds lovely for development. What about the actualy story? I am not a fan of MS Word. Do you use any online programs? I see many of them out there but not sure if they are worth it. I mostly use GoogleDocs but find it a bit cumbersome with story telling. 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

I would shy away from calling myself a writer as I have never managed anything outside of Nanowrimo,  but I came across a program called yWriter. It is just a word processor more or less but it has some nice touches like allowing you to put the point of view, characters, setting, outline and such per scene or chapter. So you can for example check that your main character's pov has more words than a secondary character, and you can generate an outline by only showing each chapter's, etc, and it is just useful to have all that info without having it in a separate document or in the main narrative either.  Each chunk is separate so you can move them about while looking at the higher info, such as pov and word count. 

 

It is free to use and it is an author who just shares the tool that he uses. It is still being kept uptodate and may have more features now as I haven't used it in years and years. 

 

You can find it here if you think it sounds interesting yWriter8 by Spacejock Software