There’s also yWriter (Win/Mac/Linux, free), which does a lot of the above - tracking characters, chapters, and so on - but it’s looking pretty long in the tooth these days. Storyist also has tools to make outputting your final novel a breeze, for those who plan to self-publish. And a Storyist iOS app allows writing on the go, even on an iPhone. On the desktop, it comes with a component to make scripts that meet the Hollywood standard. It focuses on fiction writers, with specialized tools to track the plot, settings, and characters of your novel. Storyist (Mac, $59) is nipping at the heels of Scrivener.
Whole books have been written on how to master the program, as it also can output books directly to self-publishing services such as Amazon Kindle Direct. That includes great corkboard outlining, story and script templates, and character files.
Now available for Mac OS and Windows, it contains extras so specific to fiction writing that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. You could also opt for a word processor that’s ultra-powerful and designed with novelists (like you) in mind. Pages can be accessed on the Web via (free, but you have to upgrade to iCloud Drive) or through an iOS app. It also happens to work with Microsoft Word documents. Mac users may prefer to stay with the home team, which means Pages, Apple’s own design-friendly word processor. There is no better tool for wordsmithing. All are available as part of the Microsoft Office 365 Personal subscription - you can’t even edit a document on iPad without a Microsoft Office account. Word is available for Windows, Mac, and a simplified version for iPad (the latter is “the first app that gets tablet-based word processing right,” according to our review).
And of course, the primo processor in the world is Microsoft Word. There is one primary tool any writer needs: a word processor of some sort.
You’ll have all the tools you need on hand to keep writing. But we can point out some of the absolute best software and apps you can get to make it all a little easier to write, plan, and count all those precious words. We can’t help you with ideas, plots, or characters, not to mention the gumption to spend hours each day clicking on the keyboard.