Unleashing the Writer: Jer’s Novel Writer
As a writer, one good piece of advice is to “Just write!” There are many others, but this one is foundational. Last week I discussed how the Mac - for me - allows me to do exactly that. It doesn’t get in my way with maintenance, support, and instability. Again, this is my experience. Read last week’s article, Did the Mac Make Me? if you want to find out more.
But the Mac can’t do that alone. It takes good software as well. Software that also gets out of the way and lets you do the task at hand. In my case writing.
I have looked at several applications dedicated to writers and have found things to like about them all but none inspired me until recently.
Jerry Seeger has created a word processor, to use the old cliché, by a writer, for writers. Jer’s Novel Writer really caught my attention. First impressions are important, and JNW leaves the others in its dust. Others may be more feature laden, but that adds a degree of difficulty and features get in the road of what you are there to do. To just write.
“This program is all about keeping your momentum when the juices are flowing,” says Jerry.
As soon as I opened JNW and saw the clean, straighforward interface I was reaching for my wallet. My enthusiasm to part with my hard-earned was put on hold though, as JNW is still in beta.
When JNW runs the first time, it opens its ReadMe by default. That in itself is a nicety that the others could learn from.
Margin Notes
Importantly, that ReadMe gave JNW an immediate chance to demonstrate one of its best features. Leaping off the screen at me to say “Hi” were the margin notes. When I write, there’s only two things I want to do
1) Write
2) Make notes
As I write I often have little tangential ideas that I jot down somewhere else. Or sometimes when I get a bit of a block, rather than laboring over it, I just make a note in the text and keep going.
But these are inefficient ways of writing - especially when I come back later for the editing. What I need is something like paper, where I can make notes on the side of the page and directly linked to the point of text they apply to. Enter Jer’s Novel Writer and margin notes as shown in the image below:
It’s worth noting that, in that image, I’ve still got the asterisks which were my old method for indicating that some change had to be made. As you can see, JNW’s margin notes are a much, much better way to handle this.
JNW lets you create different categories of notes and colorize them, so you might have notes for Rewrites, notes for things to Elaborate on, notes about Continuity etc. What’s more, you can show or hide different margin notes categories, as Jerry says:
and when you’re checking continuity you could show only that category. That way when you’re zooming through the text, continuitizing away, you can get straight to the issues that matter.
Other applications have tried notes before and even margin notes, but JNW gets it right.
Sections and Levels
JNW handles the heirarchy of the book using what it calls levels. These are things such as chapters and parts. And you can create your own or rename existing ones. For a simple novel, you may just want the first level to be the Book, the second level the Chapters and the Text as the third. Or for something more involved, you could have Book, Part, Chapter, Text or Play, Act, Scene, Text or Journal, Year, Month, Week, Day, Notes. Being based on an outliner model, is one of the things that gives JNW power, in both organization and navigation
Each document is divided into separate sections made up of chapters, parts or whatever you chose. You can see the sections listed in the outline drawer. As your project grows, you will use the Insert... menu to add more sections. The section will be added at the point that makes the most sense following the part you are working on. For instance, if you add a Chapter, it will be inserted into your project after the chapter you are currently working on.
Navigation
The hierarchical approach of JNW, makes navigating the work quite easy using the outline viewer - not to mention organizing it - being able to easily find and select the section you’re looking for. You can also use bookmarks which are assigned a shortcut key.
Project Management
JNW has a popout drawer that provides quick access to the outline, general notes and a built in database for making specific notes on people, places and things in your work. From the project settings, you can change the appearance of the document on screen; the author, titles, headers and footers; the format for printing and the structure of the levels.
Like any good writing tool, JNW also shows a character count, word count and page count estimate. It can do this for both your current print settings and for a “Typical Paperback”
Printing
JNW understands that you don’t always want WYSIWYG as a writer. In fact you want the screen interface to be clean, easy to read and productive - for example, most sans serif fonts are easier to read on screen than seriffed ones. But when it comes time to print, you might need things like double spacing, a different font - such as a seriffed one, etc. Consequently JNW provides multiple customizable printing format presets. This is fantastically useful for writers, as Jeremy explains:
Jer’s Novel Writer allows you save any number of printing format presets. You could have one for short work and another for novels, perhaps, or presets tweaked to match the preferences of individual publishers. You can set up the document just like you want it to look on the page - without changing the way it looks on the screen.
The End
JNW is beta but quite stable and I haven’t found any bugs in it yet, although there are a few listed on the forum for fixing. Despite that, many people are happily using JNW from everything from research papers to novels.
If you use a Mac and you write or fancy yourself as a writer, give Jer’s Novel Writer a decent look. (If you’re a writer and don’t own a Mac, JNW is a good excuse to buy a Mac!) Get involved with its development too by getting on their forums and make suggestions and helping to find bugs.
A good tool begs to be used and JNW does that. By keeping the process as simple as pen and paper, it inspires you to want to write
I’ll leave the last word to Jerry:
And now, if you will excuse me, I have a novel to work on!
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Comments
Hi, your links to the JNW web site are bad. They look ok in the source code, but they just take make back to the page at AppleMatters. Mike
Thanks Mike. Are fixed now.
Please don’t use “simplistic” when you mean “simple.”
I write for TV and movies, so my app of choice is Final Draft. And I must admit, FD on the Mac just looks better than it does on the PC. The same is oddly true of Word, which seems a bit difficult to explain.
One thing I don’t like, however, is the default scaling of the window. In Windows, you simply expand the window and it covers up the distracting desktop. On the Mac, you have to manually drag the window to do the same thing. Be nice if they fixed that.
Thanks Mave. Have changed that to “straightforward interface” which sounds better than “simple” (or simplistic!)
It’s a nice, clear and positive review of Jer’s Novel Writer, but maybe a bit too positive. I am a recent user of JNW for about a month and have just redone a 93,000 word document in JNW to send to the New York agent. But he wanted it in Word.
Please see my recent comments on the JNW forum about trying to get the ms out of JNW and into Word, which the agent wanted. It is taking all day to redo the titles of chapters since JNW does not export the Outline View as I see it with my limited experience.
Have you actually used JNW for a book ms? Would it not be good for readers to know it is not all plus yet with Jer’s and tell them the main difficulties? You say it is beta but don’t give the details of the difficulties.
I have experienced four types of crashes though Jer says he knows of only two. Margin notes don’t print as far as I know. Shouldn’t your readers know what beta means, what still is not working right?
So in effect, if you take your text elsewhere after creating it in Jer’s you have no table of contents! That’s a lot of extra work which he wants to eliminate in a future upgrade.
On Jer’s Forum I compared Jer’s to the other writing software I have recently used. It would be nice if you looked at this and did so as well, or included my comments, or evaluated them.
From your review here you say that the margin notes can be categorized as to subjects and color. I said this is needed in the future. I did not know about this feature now. Did you use it and make sure it works well?
One of my difficulties is that Jer offers no help text, only the notes you point out that he includes. So it would be good to tell readers this, and that they are on their own at this point, don’t you think?
Maybe the biggest difficulty at this point is exporting your text out of Jer’s into Word for the finished product. It took me a couple of hours on this. I would like to know if you have done this and what the best way is to do it. Do you know?
Jer seems to be kinda busy with other things in his life so I don’t get the most secure feeling about his development commitment. I looked all over the forum for something on understanding the notes and on exporting from Jer’s. Found almost nothing by him or anyone.
StoryLines is similar. The developer responds to my emails but keep apologizing about having so little time to support and develop StoryLines. So there I am a bit insecure also.
We writers need these programs and are terribly grateful, I am sure. But please don’t give the impression that things with these solo developers are moving ahead just fine and that you can depend on them.
When I commit to writing a full book I want my software to be really stable, easy to learn, and useful.
The state of the art of writer’s software for the Mac is that there is no state of the art.
So should not reviewers like yourself also give writers specifically the difficulties with a program in development?
All in all, I appreciate your review as giving a positive lift to Jer to help him continue development in a rapid manner. This is what we are all hoping for.
Please see my review on his forum because I point out some of these things.
Another point is that Jer’s is the only writing software to give you both a good Outline View and the main body of your text on the same screen. But is this true in your experience? Such a feature is a great help in keeping organized as you write.
--Strephon
for my writing needs, I’ve looked at DevonThink, OmniOutliner and sundry other tools before reverting to Text Wrangler.
Plain text files (one for each chapter) are easy to use, Text Wrangler handles search and replace jobs easily, and when the MS is ready for sticking into Word or whatever that’s no problem.
And I don’t get distracted with extraneous features when I should just be writing.
Hey, wow! Thanks for the review. I hope JNW helps you write better.
Strephon has posted many helpful comments in the Jer’s Software Hut forums, and I look forward to his continued feedback. He’s the kind of friend who tells you where it’s really at.
As far as my commitment, I have been working on Jer’s Novel Writer for two years now and I will continue to do so. It will move forward. Having said that, I am a writer first, and a software developer second. It’s taken me fifteen years to get there, and I’m not going back now. So, I’m committed, but the timetable for releases can take a sudden lurch if, say, I have to leave home to work on a film for two months, or I get a cold.
It’s true, the help is really lacking right now. Most things are obvious, some even thoughtless, but there are parts that just don’t work the same as other word processors - not things you have to worry about much (which is what makes them different) but when you’re setting defaults a little explanation here and there would be nice.
For screenplays, I also use Final Draft, but in the next year I intend to give them a run for their money—at least for blue-sky script writing. I’ll likely never do things like pink pages, though.
I have used plain-text editors, and still do, but for fiction, when I want italics, I just want to hit cmd-i, type, and hit cmd-i again. And margin notes are addictive.
I hope you and your writing readers find success with JNW or whatever tool works for them. In the end, it’s not about the tool, it’s about what you make with the tool, and a good writer will make a good product no matter the technology.
Thanks once more for the very kind words.
Oh, and it’s “Jerry”.
Jerry Seeger
Jer’s Software Hut
Ok, is there any chance this will ever be released for Windows as well?
Thanks Strephon, I probably should have emphasized the beta nature of JNW more strongly but I did assume my readers would have a full grasp of what beta meant. Also, having encountered no problems myself, meant I didn’t have any negatives to report. I haven’t been using JNW quite as long as you nor used it on a large manuscript yet.
The point about not exporting table of contents is a good one, though the export to Word I found works perfectly otherwise and only took a minute. Further, my searching for “Chapter” in Word, I could then highlight the next line and change its style to a heading. I then could easily generate a table of contents. A little slow but not a huge inconvenience.
Not sure why colorized and categorized margin notes aren’t working for you. I am using JNW 0.5.2.1
Again, with Help text, it’s not something I always expect with beta software and once I’d found all the help I needed in the ReadMe.
I do appreciate your comments and will take you points on board, especially my assumptions about what the reader would know about beta software.
The primary objective of my article was to highlight how JNW makes the writing process easier and I hope we agree on that point. This was why I recommended the software. Although as you’ve found there can be some chores in the final preparation of the manuscript, JNW at least makes it easy to get to the point of having a manuscript.
PS Oops sorry, Jerry, fixed that now.
Chris,
Thanks for the comment. Of course I was asking for help, partly because it is beta yet I want to use it now. I am not beta as a writer. Your technique on making a table of contents is helpful. It’s these little things that count.
I learned about using margin notes from you, but have not used them yet but will on my next manuscript.
What is your way of exporting to Word? Just so it is clear and on paper. But maybe by the time of my next export in three months the software will be glorious.
I fully support your review to get the word out. Thanks.
Strephon, to export to Word, go to the File menu, select Export, then change the File Format dropdown to either “Word Document\” or “Word Document using print settings”
Just did some testing in Word. Couldn’t get it to automatically identify styles. But, try this next time to do a TOC.
1) Open your document you exported from JNW
2) Select the line of text you want to include in the TOC (eg chapter name) and create it as a new style called for instance, Chapter. (Style editor/creator is under the menu “Format” “Style"). Also tick the Add to Template box and Automatically Update.
3) Do this once for each TOC level - eg chapters, parts, scenes - whatever.
4) Now go thru the document and set the correct style for each line that you want in the TOC
5) When you go to create the TOC, go to the Options and select the styles you created to be in the TOC by giving them an order number.
6) Generate the TOC.
If this isn’t clear enough, let me know, and I’ll knock up a detailed instruction and post in on JNW forums.
By ticking the Add to Template adds it to Word’s default template, so next time you can just copy your new styles form it to you document using the Style Organizer in Word.
Also, by checking the Automatically Update, you can then make changes to the style, and it will be reflected wherever you use it.
Good luck.
Many thanks. I will try this out and file it as well for the future.
Amorde, somewhere in the business plan is a Windows version. My sincere hope (OK, it’s a pipe dream) is for a port of Cocoa to wintel before I have to tackle the software from the ground up all over again. I will have to pay some big bucks to Microsoft before I can even figure out how much work it will be.
Possibly it’s not relevant here, but Apple has made some Earth-shatteringly good tools available to developers - for free. When you’re playing catch-up, a strategy like that makes sense. To use the latest Microsoft technology, I am out of pocket some serious cash - even before I spend the significant amounts of time required to get things working (here, I assume things have not improved since the last time I installed and configured a Windows development environment).
Uh… but I digress.
I know the code exists over at OpenOffice that would allow me to export a styled document to Word, but the much more likely approach I will take is an XML-CSS export that Word could subsequently import and interpret, with structure information intact. It’s two steps, but much more versatile for other folks, like the LaTeX folks, for whom “Word” is the dirtiest word of all.
Don’t overlook Ulysses, a very strong and elegant word processor specifically for “creative writers” using Macs. It enables one to organize source materials, notes, and drafts without leaving to the Finder, and it is designed to help the writer concentrate on his or her writing, without being distracted by formatting, styles, myriad buttons to push and options to choose. 30-day demo available from makers, in Germany: http://www.blue-tec.com/ulysses/