Rich with stats and heavy on structure, yWriter encourages you to compose scenes rather than chapters because the former are more manageable. It also gives you dozens of places to store details about your work and compiles all this metadata into useful charts and tables. If that level of information won’t distract you, yWriter is a wonderful tool. That said, it doesn’t provide any templates or support collaboration features. Scrivener and Ulysses remain our Editors’ Choice winners for writing apps because they offer a wider range of features and more flexible interfaces, especially for long-form projects.
How Much Does yWriter Cost?
yWriter is free to download and use for Windows users. You can support Simon Hayes (the app’s developer who operates under the business name Spacejock) and register your software with suggested donations of either $11.95 (Silver) or $24.95 (Gold). The Gold tier entitles you to a discount on Hayes’ ebook creation services. The macOS app, which is still in beta, is free to use for now, though it will eventually require payment. The iOS version of the app costs $14.99, and the Android edition goes for $5.49.
(Credit: yWriter/PCMag)
Even yWriter’s Gold tier is very reasonably priced. Apps for novelists and book authors typically go for between $50 and $60 for a one-time license or per year as a subscription. Novelize ($65 per year), Scrivener ($59.99), Storyist ($59), and Ulysses ($39.99 per year) are all around that range.
Screenwriting apps tend to cost more. Fade In ($79.95) is the most affordable option. Final Draft ($249) covers the high end, though you can sometimes get it at a discount. Script Studio ($199.95) comes with sample content from movies to help you write. These apps have tools for tracking characters, lines of dialogue, locations, and so forth, not to mention auto-formatting, which ensures the people producing a script can understand it.
Lightweight, distraction-free writing apps tend to cost the least, at anywhere from $10 to $30 apiece. Byword ($10.99 for macOS) and iA Writer ($29.99 for Windows) are two examples. They are better for writing blog posts, memos, and short-form articles than 50,000-word manuscripts or 100-page screenplays.
(Credit: yWriter/PCMag)
Getting Started With yWriter
The most recent version of the app for PCs is yWriter 7. It works on Windows devices running Windows 7 and later. Beta versions with the latest features are available to download, though you are likely to run into bugs with these releases.
After you download and install yWriter, you can immediately start a writing project. The interface and menus are intuitive, whether you start from scratch or import a work in progress from some other app as an RTF file.
Creating chapters and scenes is simple enough, though the app restricts you to working on one scene at a time. From the default interface, you can read the text of each scene, but you can’t edit them—you have to click on a section to open an editing window. In testing, we found it frustrating not to be able to directly type text into a visible scene without opening a new window.
Another minor annoyance is that the on-screen text is pretty small. There isn’t a simple zoom tool anywhere in the main interface, though you can click Ctrl and scroll in to make the text larger or smaller. Moreover, the ability to pick a font and text size is within the Scene menu rather than a part of the main interface.
A Data-First Writing Approach
In yWriter, every chapter and scene has multiple fields where you can add more details. For example, you can describe the location, mark which characters appear in a scene, organize project notes, and specify whose point of view the scene is from. You can even add inspirational pictures, mention what items appear in the scene (highly useful if you’re going to bring them up again later on), and add specific locations. Each scene also has a status, which denotes whether it’s in the draft phase, first edit, second edit, and so on.
Some of these data collections, such as character sheets, are for your reference only. The software compiles others into reports and tables. For example, when you look at any chapter, you can see how many words are in each scene, the names of all the scenes it contains, and whose point of view it is from.
(Credit: yWriter/PCMag)
But yWriter doesn’t stop there. With two clicks, you can pull up a report that shows how many scenes each character appears in. Maybe you want Gwendolyn to be a main character, but in the report, you notice she’s in just a handful of scenes. And whereas many writing apps let you set a daily word goal, yWriter allows you to set an hourly one.
Whether you find all this information valuable or distracting depends on the type of writer you are. If you tend to lose an hour per writing session looking at font options, then the amount of data in here is likely to overwhelm you. You might be better off with a distraction-free writing app, such as Ulysses.
(Credit: yWriter/PCMag)
No Prebuilt Templates or Collaboration Features
You don’t get any default templates with yWriter, though you can create custom ones. It doesn’t provide any auto-formatting features, either. Of course, auto-formatting is not a requirement for novel or book writing.
The software doesn’t support any type of collaboration, meaning real-time co-authoring and editing isn’t possible. That said, only a few writing apps, such as Fade In, Final Draft, and Writer Duet, have that option.
Decent Saving and Export Options
yWriter automatically saves your work, and you can specify exactly how often it does so in the settings. These automatic saves let you revert to an early version of your work whenever you need.
To back up your work to online storage, such as Box or Dropbox, you must enable that setting in the Tools menu. We wish this option was more prevalent. Once you do enable this, however, yWriter saves your work both locally and to the cloud.
As for exporting your work, yWriter’s options are average. You can export to HTML, LaTeX, PDF, RTF, and a few other formats. There’s also an option to Export to Ebook; you can either use Calibre or one of the app’s integrated methods to do so chapter by chapter or in its entirety.
Verdict: yWriter Keeps Track of All the Details
yWriter might not appeal to the conventional creative writer, but it’s worth exploring if you seek out data and organization. It encourages you to think about scenes as movable parts, which may be helpful if you struggle to get away from long, rambling, and seemingly unending chapters. That said, yWriter’s lack of default templates and tendency to hide some settings are downsides. If you want a writing app that better balances features and ease of use, you should spend more for one of our Editors’ Choice winners, Scrivener or Ulysses.
The Bottom Line
The stats-heavy yWriter is ideal if you crave organization and like to track data about your writing, though it doesn’t provide any templates to help you get started.
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