How to write your first novel – 3) Choose Your Weapon

One of the most fervent discussions I’ve seen in writers’ forums is about (of all things) software. Not very sexy, but one that can make the difference between a good day, and a day where you pull your hair out in tiny tufts.

Like most debut writers I started out by opening a Microsoft Word Document, writing ‘Chapter 1’ at the top of the page and staring at it intently for a while. Eventually words became paragraphs and I started to look like that GIF of Kermit The Frog at a typewriter, but I lasted a whole two days before it became apparent that MS Word was not going to be my weapon of choice.

You see, I’m quite an organised person, and I like to put things in boxes. Notes, random bits of dialogue, character traits, odd snippets about birthdays and weather. My brain scrolls up and down, but also from left to right, and if I can’t see everything at once I don’t feel entirely in control.

MS Word is, of course, for writing letters and documents in a linear fashion. There’s limited facility for notes and boxes of things you’d like to look at for a while and maybe pull in later. Moving the entirety of Chapter 14 up two chapters is a laborious business involving cut and paste, and it’s FAR too easy to lose chunks of your manuscript with a poorly-timed click of a mouse and a pair of chubby thumbs.

So once it became clear that I was actually going to have a proper bash at writing a novel, I started to investigate software designed for this task. There are lots of options and a headache set in fairly early.

I quickly learned that most writers who aren’t willing to pay plug away with Word or use Google Docs. The upside of Google Docs is that it’s cloud-based and not stored on your laptop, so you can access it from any device. The laptop I was using at the time was on its last legs, so I knew at some point I was going to have to buy a new one. So from that point of view a cloud-based software made sense. But not Google Docs, because it’s just MS Word but somehow SO much worse.

Writers in the know appear to use Scrivener, which had all the fancy features I wanted – chapter organising, note functions, all my books in one place, and it costs about £50. BUT my problem is it’s a download, so it would live on my laptop. Which was a Mac, and I was reasonably sure my replacement would be Windows. So I’d have to buy it again.

What I really wanted was a writing software like Scrivener that was cloud-based, so I could access it from any device. I found one called Novlr, so I signed up for the free trial and gave it a go. It does everything I want, is lovely to use, and costs me about £60 a year. It also automatically backs up everything to Google Drive as often as I tell it to, so there’s no chance I’ll lose everything.

I’ve now been using Novlr for a year, and I love it. I’m sure there are others that have similar/different benefits, feel free to share!