Could there be more even more writing apps? Oh. My. God. There are!
Here are four more—two came from the developers asking me to review their app, one from an ad I saw on Reddit, and one I found on my own.
First the ad:
Understory Free just for writing/$10 per month for the AI
This app is a way to have your story read and reviewed by AI. It doesn’t allow for any manual input of plot, outline, or characters, nor does it keep any statistics on what you’ve written. It’s purely an AI analysis of your writing.
Now the requests:
Plottiar A free basic tier/$5 per month for more features/$10 per month for AI
Plottiar is a good program for a brand new author who doesn’t want to do all the work involved in learning writing craft through seminars and reading books.
You can write in the software (although as a word processor it is not great, which is odd because you’d think that would be the easiest and most important thing to get right in a writing app), and it says that it has templates, but when you open one all you get is a document telling you everything that should be in your template. No fields. Nothing for you to fill in. Just a list of what you should be keeping track of—in great detail! There is a “Story Grid” where you can put your plot into a table and that’s very nice.
You can get it to create a story bible for you, but that is all via AI (for which you have to pay, naturally). I was offered two months of their Pro subscription for writing this review, but as someone who tries my best to stay away from AI when I write (when I tick that box as I upload my work on Amazon saying I’ve not used any AI in the creation of my book, I want to be telling the absolute truth), I decided not to accept. If you like—or don’t mind—AI reading through your work go for it! You might find it very helpful.
One note: when I went to download the app to my computer, all of my Mac’s defenses went into high gear and I would have had to override them in order to download the software. As I didn’t 110% trust it, I decided not to do that. However, you can also use the app online, so you don’t have to actually download anything. This can also be nice if you want to work on a different computer, table, or phone as your work is all in the cloud.
StoryLine Scribe 30 day free trial, then $69.99 flat fee
In June, I wrote a review of the Obsidian Plugin StoryLine. Well, the developers have now released a new version as a standalone app—and it’s so much better! I liked the plugin, but I didn’t love it. This new app… well, it’s making me rethink the other software I just bought because it’s so good.
You can write or import your work easily into the app, and then the magic happens. There is a “Board” (either bulletin board or kanban), a “Plot Grid” which allows you to look at your work in a table which you can organize however you want (I put beats down the left-hand column and then each subplot along the top), a “TimeLine” (when you input information about each scene you can specify act, chapter, and/or chronological order, “Plotline” which lists all the scenes in each subplot of your novel, a “Codex” where you can input your characters (in a very nice malleable form), location, organizations, and culture. The fun bit of the codex is the last option, the “Story Graph” which shows you all of the relationships within you novel—from character to character and scene to scene.
And finally, there is formatting — it has the nicest formatting I’ve seen in a writing app — you can choose everything independently, there are no pre-designed layouts. There is also a cover design area where you can upload your images and add text. I’d still hire a professional cover designer, but if you don’t have the funds for that, this is a good second option.
All-in-all, I am really impressed with this software.
Found on my own:
Campfire – Free
This is definitely an app for fantasy and scifi authors. Just look at the basic menu:
This is an interesting app that is fundamentally made up of panels or blocks of information. When you create a new character, location, or whatever, you are given page of panels which you can then add to, remove, rearrange, and edit. One interesting thing with this is that, for example, when I created a character I rearranged the panels exactly the way I wanted and filled them with the information I needed. Then, I went to create a second character, and I had to do it all over again—from scratch. There doesn’t seem to be a way to save your set-up or a template.
Interestingly, once you are finished writing your story, not only can you export it as an epub or PDF, but then you can publish it to Campfire’s own store where others can purchase it.
If you write (or read) speculative fiction, I highly recommend testing this app out.
So, there you have it, four more apps. If you are interested in a list of all the apps I’ve reviewed, you can find it here.