Best Writer's Software? - Page 3

Somewhat unrelated. but WriteRoom for Mac is going for free right now - www.macheist.com. If enough people bite Mariner Write becomes free too.

Didn't see your response until just now; sorry for the late reply. Your work with markov chains sounds fascinating, coldarchon. What I especially like is that it seems free of some crushingly obvious populist interface and programming goal. iTunes is fine in its place, but the equivalent for a fiction writer (imposed ideas and tools beating you to death instead of other people's music) would be hell. The LOTR stats sound interesting, but not inclusive of characters' importance: The number of times names are mentioned often has as little to do with importance as the conscious mind has to do with motivation. Sometimes the most crucial relationships are deliberately played down or even concealed, to be discovered by readers later. I like it when shattering events occur without most readers even noticing, so that the story continues in an obvious way for them, but the strongest and most nightmarish aspects have to be arrived at by later reflection -- usually by readers who are best equipped to understand them. Again, sounds fascinating. I've known a lot of working fiction writers and the phenomenon seems to be very common: The more we write, the less we're forced to dream. In that sense, I've always thought Cronenberg's "Scanners" was a metaphor for fiction writers: People whose heads are invaded by images and voices. My best friend from the age of twelve is a prolific and fairly well-known science fiction writer. He was eleven years older than I, but I always had to be very careful what I said around him: The wrong metaphor would torture him for days. If I remarked that Mountain Dew tasted like carbonated phlegm, then he couldn't drink anything for a week. I once described someone we knew as a taxidermist who couldn't find anything else to stuff and had begun to stare at his own legs. My friend called me up days later asking why I'd said that to him. He kept picturing the guy working on himself obsessively just as the cops were breaking in to stop him. So, to answer your question, yes, I dream vividly, but I also have very strong eidetic imagery: I'm able to picture anything I imagine clearly, as if I were seeing a photograph or film. If I'm walking across a bridge and imagine a pedestrian being hit by a car and falling to his death, I can see it in front of me: The bounce of his hip and shoulder against the speeding car's door and handle, the curve of his body arced toward the railing over which it flies, the slight untwisting of his torso as he falls, the limbs adjusting to space, head turned in a vain attempt at self-protection, the boulder waiting below, just beneath the side of his cheek, so that it cuts through him (the instant disfiguration hidden), the muffled sound of his snapping neck, the thud of the impact and the way in which he flattens: not visibly broken, from above, as if he could still get up and walk away with a shattered skull and flaccid neck. I feel his sense of shock, too, as well as seeing him fall: The hollowness that takes him over as he slips into drop space, his last chance to think obliterated by recoil.

I do believe Pages 4 has a similar mode.

I use scrivener and it is the best software.Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.

Royal Quiet DeLuxe.

+1

And it needs to be said that, for screenwriting, Final Draft actually is immensely helpful. Formatting manually on Word, and/or going without FD's macros, would be a serious beast.

A little overwrought and on-the-nose, but otherwise, a pretty solid passage marked by excellent rhythm and precise description. 85/100