Right or wrong, Microsoft Word’s format has become a de-facto standard. They all support writing, editing, organizing, and formatting. So any good word processor will support the first five requirements. In addition, they provide navigation tools to assist in moving quickly to any point in the manuscript. Word processors handle large documents like novels with ease. Using Word Processors for Novel Manuscripts So, for many reasons, text editors are out. Their size quickly becomes a nightmare to navigate using a text editor. Novels contain a large number of words, generally somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 ( War and Peace has over half a million). Before you can send them to a publisher, you will need to remove these.Īnother concern is that most text editors won’t let you insert page breaks for new chapters and don’t support bold, underlined, or italicized characters.īut the biggest issue is size. One of the big reasons not to use a text editor is that you will need to insert extra carriage returns to separate your paragraphs for readability. I’ve used all the above, but I don’t recommend any of these because of other considerations.įormatting on text editors is limited or nonexistent. Finally, Linux users have a plethora of choices like vi or nano. For Apple users, TextEdit is simple and easy to use. For example, if you use Windows, Notepad will work. For this, even the most basic text editors perform this task well. The primary task we expect our writing software to perform is to ease the process of getting the words out of your head and onto the page.
After listening to other writers and experimenting with different applications, I have formed strong opinions regarding the best novel writing software.īefore exploring the options, let’s review the tasks we expect novel writing software to perform. Often the subject of software comes up, especially when we share material for critique. Over the years, I’ve attended numerous workshops and writers’ group meetings.
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