Writing Software

I began writing the Ikons trilogy in the stone age of the home computer.  The following thirty-plus years took me through a series of general word processors beginning with Texas Instruments' TI-Writer and ending with Microsoft's Word, and using dedicated authoring software, such as yWriter and SmartEdit.

TI-Writer

While the TI-99/4A word processing ability is laughable by today's home computer standards, it represented a giant step for aspiring authors in the1980's.  Gone were the days of strike-overs, erasures and white-outs.  A writer could now make corrections, replace or move whole paragraphs or sections, highlight and bold text before printing your masterpiece.  Add in a clunky dot matrix printer and you're ready for almost big time publishing. 

Bill Cosby was spokesman for the TI-99A

Then came the dark cloud.  Texas Instruments discontinued making their home system leaving me and other users orphans of advancing technology.  Fortunately, that same technology offered a solution.  Thanks to the invention of the optical character reader, I transferred my dot-matrix printouts to rtf files and plowed ahead with Word. 
Side note: Using the OCR was not as easy as I thought.  My poor spelling plus the resolution of the dot matrix printer made for some very unusual words and many hours of corrections.  Often it would have been faster to rewrite an entire chapter.

Microsoft Word

Word was a massive improvement over TI Writer, especially for the spelling deficient.

With the addition of spellcheck, syntax correction, and automatic formatting, Word was my go-to processor of choice.  However, constructing a 90,000 word document was cumbersome.  Although the program does feature the ability to break a novel into chapters, it did not have a way to retrieve old versions, keep track of characters, and record helpful notes.  Thus entered software dedicated novel writing.

yWriter

yWriter is a free software available from a company called SpaceJock.  Simon Haynes developed the program based on his experiences writing SciFi novels.  yWriter is technically not a word processor,  but rather a tool to write your novel by building scenes and chapters. 

SpaceJocks by yWriter is a very helpful and free tool

I used yWriter to write my latest novel, Slogans.  The beauty of the program is it allowed me, or maybe even forced me, to keep track of characters, POV, goals, time, and word usage and count.  The program was easy to master and once I started, I kept discovering new capabilities it offered.  In fact I might even credit yWriter with giving me the impetus to finish my project.

Often I found myself disheartened at my progress.  But, since I faithfully added descriptions to each scene, yWriter created a really nice summary of the novel.  I then printed the yWriter summary and amazed myself with my progress and storytelling ability.  Thus fortified, I soldiered on to completion.

SmartEdit

While yWriter was very useful for managing the novel, my version did not have a spell check.  It did show repeated word usage, but not in an easily correctable format. Then I found a gem of a program which together with yWriter really improved, I hope, my writing style.  Enter SmartEdit.

Free and very helpful

I used SmartEdit to clean up Slogans scenes and chapters.  It's amazing how many errors and pseudo-errors I missed, no matter how many times I went through my work.  SmartEdit excelled at finding misused words, and trite and repeated phrases.  It finds them by the ton, but it still requires the author to determine what should and should not be deleted or rewritten.

So what began on with a pencil and a notepad, evolved into the futuristic world of computer aided writing.  But there still was room for the printed page, as I will discuss in my next and eagerly awaited installment.