Best Free Software yWriter 6.0.1
WRITING TOOL www.snipca.com/25109
What you need: Windows Vista, 7, 8/8.1 or 10
The hardest part of writing a book is keeping track. Scenes, ideas and characters soon descend into a disorganised mess, even if you’re writing something as familiar as your own life story, and traditional word processors don’t help much. So author Simon Haynes created ywriter to plug the gap.
This free program lets you manage your whole book at a glance, using menus of chapters and tabs for scenes, characters, notes, location and ‘items’ (such as photos and audio files). It’s simple to build, edit, move, clone and search. The menus are full of easy-to-use tools that help you weed out duplicated scenes, create a work schedule and plot your book on a visual ‘Storyboard’. New version 6.0.1 adds a step-by-step New Project Wizard for getting started, along with the option to auto-save your work in markup text format instead of the default RTF.
There are limitations. You can’t export to EPUB, for example, and you can’t import Word documents – only RTF, text or HTML. But at just 5.58MB - tiny compared with the likes of Libreoffice and Calibre - this beautifully designed tool punches above its weight.
ywriter is safe to install, but my antivirus (Avast) initially disagreed. The installer gets a clean bill of health from security sites Virustotal and Metadefender, so I overrode Avast and didn’t find any malware or PUPS. To get it, click Downloads then ‘ywriter6 installer (2.1mb)’. To get the portable version, click ‘ywriter6 zip file (1.5mb)’. Avast didn’t attempt to block the portable version. There are now ywriter apps for Android and IOS as well, but both are in beta mode, and the Android app costs £4.19 ( www.snipca.com/25112). You’re better off sticking with the PC version for now. To get started using the new step-by-step wizard, click Project, then New Project Wizard. The Project menu also lets you import existing work (HTML, text or RTF). To create a chapter and add it to the sidebar, click Chapter then ‘Create new chapter’. The Scene, Characters, Locations and Items menus work in a similar way. Each chapter’s content is organised into tabs. Click the Scenes tab then double-click a scene to open it in a new box for editing. Alternatively, right-click, then click ‘Edit…’ To see your changes on a colour-coded timeline (‘Storyboard’), click Tools, then Storyboard. The Tools menu also lets you track word count and create backups.