Software to Help You Write Your Novel

Update, May 2023: Do NOT use Autocrit or AuthorsAI until they provide clarity about whether they scan, use, and sell your text to train AI

Nabokov’s wife Vera did all the driving and typing. Dostoevsky proposed to his stenographer, Anna, after she took his novel The Gamblers down in shorthand and then converted it to tidy prose. Sophia Tolstoy copied War and Peace out by hand seven times. If you don’t have a doting wife to cheerfully take dictation, correct your errors, bring you coffee, haul you back on the wagon when you fall off of it, and chauffeur you to fabulous literary parties, you’ll need to do the heavy lifting yourself. Well, not thatheavy. It’s just writing, right?

Do you need special novel-writing software to compose your novels? Absolutely not. Word will do, and has done, for many writers for many years. I still use Word pretty much every day for one writing task or another. That said, novel-writing software can help you streamline the process and make the best of your novel’s many moving parts.

I’ve written five novels (six if you count the novel-in-progress, seven if you count the 18-year-old novel-in-a-drawer), and I’ve used Word for all of them, in addition to Scrivener for the last two. Now I’m exploring Final Draft. Let’s break it down.

Scrivener

These days, I use Scrivener to compose my novels. It’s especially useful if you write in a non-linear fashion, because Scrivener makes it easy to move chapters around and visualize your novel. It also helps you to understand and manage narrative patterns. Let’s say you want your subplot to come back every six chapters; you can easily manage that in the Scrivener manuscript view as well as on color-coded notecards. Project targets allow you to easily see how much you’ve written each day and how far you have progressed toward your goal.

My favorite feature of Scrivener is the digital corkboard that automatically generates index cards as you add scenes and chapters. When you move the index cards around on your corkboard, it also moves the scenes within your manuscript. I also love writing in Scrivener’s Focus mode, because Vera hasn’t cleaned up my desktop in like, ever, and there are so many folders on top of screenshots on top of apps on top of notes that writing with icons in view stresses me out.

Verdict: Scrivener has a ton of features that I don’t use, and you could get lost in the funhouse with all their training videos, but the color-coded corkboard, flexibility, project targets, and minor price tag ($49) make it a no-brainer for me. Try Scrivener for free.

Final Draft

I bought the screenwriting software Final Draft a few years ago because I had this idea I was going to take a screenwriting class. I recently updated to Final Draft 11 because they added new bells and whistles, and I love bells and whistles, and I still keep thinking maybe I’ll take a screenwriting class. At this point I’m just experimeting with it, should I decide to adapt one of my own novels in the future. The Beat Board feature is fun, and you can color code everything — from characters to settings to tags — but because it is designed for screenwriting the communication between the corkboard and the script itself isn’t as intuitive as Scrivener from a novelist’s perspective.

I do like the dictation feature in Final Draft. I must have some lingering remnants of my Alabama accent, because some words come out a little off target, but it’s still surprisingly accurate. I don’t use dictation for writing, because something happens between the brain and the fingers that doesn’t happen between the brain and the mouth, but dictation can be handy for writing notes to myself in the script.

Verdict: Final Draft is a must for screenwriters and a fun, if pricey, playground for novelists at $249. I’d love for someone from Final Draft to come around and show me that FD11 is my new best friend, but for now, it feels too complicated to use for everyday novel writing.

Word

Word remains an excellent, basic tool, especially if you like to keep all of your writing in a single document and just pick up where you left off each day. If you’re using Word, you might like How to Organize Your Novel in Word.

Verdict: Although life without Word would be discombobulating, Word is pretty bare bones when it comes to organizing, so it’s a good idea to supplement it with other software.

Autocrit

Autocrit isn’t a writing program but rather an editing program. You paste your story or novel into Autocrit, and it analyzes the document for all sorts of things: overused words, passive voice, and repetition, among other factors. You can then go through the document line by line addressing all of the issues Autocrit raises. When I plugged in one of my published novels, it was fascinating to see what words I tend to overuse.

One of the more interesting things about Autocrit is that you can select your genre, and the program will compare your book to bestsellers in that field and size your manuscript up for pacing and momentum.

Verdict: I can see how Autocrit could help you submit a much cleaner, more streamlined manuscript. I would recommend it more for novelist’s than for short story writers.

You can get a lifetime or monthly membership here.

UPDATE: I wrote about Autocrit in 2020, when I first used it. In May of 2023, as writers became more aware of the threat posed by AI , I warned users against using Auocrit until there was clarity on whether or not Autocrit uses manuscripts uploaded by users to train train their AI, and if they sell or have sold data to Google, OpenAI, or other companies.

Since then, Autocrit has added this language to its website:

AutoCrit uses generative AI inside the Inspiration Studio. This is the section of the software where you can generate and develop new ideas or find ways to get unstuck through helpful AI suggestions based on what you’ve written so far.

This is a completely optional tool and different to how the editing side of the platform operates. All editing reports are algorithmic and based on comparative data sets, with no generative AI involved.

Even if it’s optional, is my writing used to train your AI?

Absolutely not. We’re as protective of our members’ work as we are of our own.

With that assurance, I feel good about recommending AutoCrit again.

Novel writing software roundup

That’s it! You probably already have Word. You can get Scrivener here for $49. At $249, Final Draft 11 is excellent for screenwriters, but probably not worth the expense for novelists unless you decide to adapt your own novel. (That said, I rationalized the expense because I love buying toys that I can use to distract myself from writing while pretending that I’m writing.) And BEWARE of Autocrit until they are transparent about how your data is used.

That’s all… happy writing!

Michelle Richmond is the internationally bestselling author of five novels, including The Marriage Pact, which has been published in 30 languages. She mentors writers through Novel in Nine and the Novel Writing Master Class Series.

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Originally published at The Caffeinated Writer.