i just began writing and i want to know where can find a free writer's software?

Question

i just began writing a novel, and i am using microsoft works word processore, the thing is everything is cluttered, and i need to jump from one chapter to another with no trouble. so does anyone know where i can download a software that will allow me to do so, or more?

Answer 1

The best writing software is Corell WordPerfect. It's cheaper than Microsoft Word and MUCH easier to use and you CAN open Word documents and save documents in Word format with no problems.



I use Microsoft Word only under protest.

Answer 2

As others have pointed out, OpenOffice.org is a free download, and it should be able to read the files from your current wordprocessor.



I haven't looked at MS Works in a long time, but you will probably find OO more cluttered to begin with. You can customise the toolbars to remove buttons you don't use.



You can put bookmarks into your document so that you can jump around. I would recommend you learn about paragraph styles and outline levels. If you set it up properly, you can have a list of your chapter headings in a little panel off to the side, and use that to jump to the start of any chapter.



I don't find it necessary to have one file for each chapter. The whole book is in one file, though I have another file for background and timelines.



Edit: forgot to mention - if you get into the habit of tagging your chapter headings with the right style, then the list of chapter headings in the little will update automatically when you start a new chapter.

Answer 3

I know there is OpenOffice but that is even more cluttered than Word to me.

Here's a tip that I use though. I split up my chapters into different documents and keep a folder with the title of each story (or an identifying idea) with the chapter documents in it. It's a lot more organized and you can tell if your chapters are too short for a novel. Here's what it looks like in directory style.

My Documents (folder)

Story A (folder)

Chapter 1 *document*

Chapter 2

Story B (Folder)

Summary (I often do a synopsis for myself) *document*

Chapter 1 *document*

On the Moment (something I find myself doing, I like to go in order) *document*



It keeps it nice and organized, if you have a special header or font that you use on your stories, just copy it from the previous chapter (header or first word) and paste into your new chapter. Wa-la, your header and/or favorite font are there. Edit what you want (if you are using a header) and you can erase the word you used to get your font. It gets fairly easy with little hassle once you figure out how to do it. It's just automatic for me and it's so organized that it really helps and I never have to worry about a single document going over the two gigabyte limit or having a slow document load time.



If you are willing to spend the time to organize and the few seconds to keep it maintained, you will find youself much happier, more organized, and with slower wait times than to install a whole other software and spend the time importing all your individual parts of documents as chapters to write your novel.



Remember, organizing into folders for your stories will take you just as much time as it will to copy and paste into your new software that you took extra time to install and you won't even have to learn how to create a new chapter, just copy, new document, paste, edit, save. Done, how simple can that be?



Anyways, hope it helps and good luck finding a writer's software that will do what you want (especially a free one). Let me know if you find anything.

MattBatt

Answer 4

Novel page sizes are usually between A4 or A5, so you might want to experiment with the settings first to get a size you want. It also might help is you inserted a tab at the beginning of each line, like normal novels do.



I don't know any type of software that can possibly help you with that, but you can try OpenOffice if you don't like MS Word. Some people say that OpenOffice is much more useful to writers than MS Word is. I'm not sure if this is true or not (since I don't write regularly), but you might want to give it a try anyways.

Answer 5

I like Chapter-By-Chapter which works with MS Word (and other word processors), so that it separates each chapter into a separate document. I can then use find/replace in ALL the documents, make notes, and keep track of things.

This is a free program

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/sebastien.berthet/cbc/index.html

Answer 6

MS Office (Microsoft Word) is what I use... *shrug* Why not just save each chapter as its own file? (that's what I'm trying with this book) ... You can open all of them to read & its as if there's a break between the chapters, lol...



...



Works for me.

Answer 7

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