I feel like Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz. I’ve been everywhere looking for the perfect writing software and I’d already had it with me all along, I just hadn’t realized it.
Thanks to one comment from a completely unrelated question on Reddit, I discovered the Longform plug-in in Obsidian.
I’ve been using Obsidian to organize all of the historical research I do for my books, my books themselves (descriptions and links), and characters (each one of the 618 characters has its own page and I’m not done putting them in yet, I’ve still got three more series to go). What I love about Obsidian is that not only can I manage all of this information neatly in such a way that I can find anything within a few seconds, but everything is linked—characters to books and vice-versa and research to books and vice versa. I’ve even got some research linked to specific characters.
But it wasn’t until I was told about this Longform plugin that I realized that Obsidian was the ideal writing software.
Longform makes it easy to organize a novel (or screenplay). You create a scene template and then it uses that every time you create a new note from within the plugin (which has its own icon to get easily in and out of your book). It then keeps all the scenes you write in the order in which you write them, but if you need to reorder them, it’s an easy drag and drop.
The plug-in tracks how many words you write (either by scene or by day) and tells you when you’ve reached the goal you’ve set for yourself. And, of course, tracks how many words are in the entire manuscript (all the scenes together).
Exporting your manuscript is a three step process: first you have to compile the manuscript in the plug-in. This just creates one long document with all of your scene in the correct order. You then need to export the document to a PDF (all that Obsidian allows) and then convert the PDF into a Word document.
In this point, other writing software is better either converting your manuscript directly into a Word doc, or, depending on the software, directly into an epub (if you want a very plain, ordinary-looking ebook).
However, within Obsidian I’ve got all of my characters, all of my research, and I’ve used the native Canvas to map out my plot (see the picture below). I can close the sidebar menus and give myself a page to write on that has no distractions.
Next time I go wandering off to find something better, I need to remember to look at what I’ve already got and see if what I need isn’t already here because there’s no place like home.