Do you have a writing buddy? Someone with whom you either write your stories or who reads and comments on your work? Then Ellipsus may be the writing software you need.
Ellipsus is an online app which has a lot of really good features. It is also missing a lot of good features to be found in other writing apps. So, let me break it down for you:
Pros:
1. It’s online! You don’t need to download anything to your computer. And being online makes it super-easy to write with someone else. Every time you sit down to write your story, you create a new draft, do your correcting and your writing and it’s saved automatically. When your writing partner logs on (or they can be there at the same time as you) they’ll do the same thing. Then with one simple click, you can see your most recent draft or your partner’s next to the previous one. All changes clearly marked. From there, you can merge the two documents to come up with your most recent draft. All drafts are carefully kept so they can be referred back to any time. If you work with someone, this is a nice way of managing your files.
2. There are a lot of very useful templates. They have templates for characters, character arcs, story planning, story conflict, scenes, and even one for themes and symbolism. Each template not only lists what you would expect of such a template, but gives helpful suggestions like explaining the significance of the character’s name, how their age affects their worldview and behavior, etc. Great questions to bring forth more meaning and depth to creating characters and story.
3. If you pay for the software ($6/month, $60/year, or $99 forever), you get access to their writing insights. Very similar to Grammarly or ProWritingAid — only without AI!! — the program will give you analysis of your text complexity, vocabulary diversity, sentence lenght, passive voice, adverbs, word freqency, word echoes, etc. These are so helpful and puts you one step closer to a well-written, edited document.
4. There is no AI. None. Not a bit. There is nothing asking to write your story for you, or suggesting character traits, or giving you prompts. In a world where everything is adding unwanted AI, this app is completely free of it and will always be that way. The developers are very clear on that.
Cons:
1. It’s online. That means that your files are not your files. Yes, you can download them into either a Word doc or as a Markdown file, but they are living in the cloud in someone else’s server. If you don’t download your most recent draft and that computer glitches or the company goes out of business, you are SOL.
2. Those great templates, they’re just ordinary documents and you can’t look at them at the same time as you’re writing because they are separate documents to the one your story is in. If you need to look up someone’s hair color or what that damned dog was called in Chapter Two, you need to exit out of your story, go into the correct template document, look it up, close that, and go back to your story. Whew! There is no notes section where you can keep pertinent information for reference while you write.
3. There is no “bulletin board”, kanban board, or blank canvas of any sort. If you want to see your whole plot laid out for you… well, um… no. You can’t. You are limited to text on a page. Paragraphs from top to bottom.
So… am I going to spend $99 to buy this software? No. I don’t write with a partner and, while it could be useful for my coaching clients so that they can see what changes I suggest in their work, comments on the side of the document in Word works just as well.
It’s a cute app and has some really nice features, but it’s certainly not groundbreaking.