Wiki for Fiction Writing

Posted by JohnK
Dec 12, 2008 at 02:14 AM

I’ve been looking at this area recently—software to produce a first draft of longer pieces of fiction. A text editor with a few bells and whistles to help me organise my thoughts. No bloat allowed. I looked at Whizfolders but it just seemed like….too much. A bit over-the-top for the relatively simple task of structuring long pieces of text.

At the moment I’ve got my list down to two options. First up is Writer’s Cafe/Storylines, which others have already mentioned. Version 2 does have a nicer feel to it, and it does everything I need, including outputting the completed draft to a single text file, for final preparation in Word.

The other option is NoteTab Pro (http://www.notetab.com/). The “outline file” option in NoteTab Pro works well—breaking a single document down into units (e.g. chapters/scenes) and again with a straightforward export option to a “standard” text file. And if you can handle a little bit of scripting, the NoteTab “clips” feature allows you to do a lot of tidying up of your project before you export. I wrote a script to remove all headings in the outline file, check the number of spaces after periods and remove blank lines, leaving me with a perfectly formatted document. Powerful stuff.

I’m still not sure which is the best option, but the minimalist in me is leaning towards NoteTab. The only annoying thing is that it’s probably the only text editor in existence that I don’t have a licence for. My existing editors (EmEditor/Textpad/Boxer….) don’t have an outline option that works as well as NoteTab. Might be time to complete my collection of text editors…