Hey y’all,
What do you find works best for writing your story on? I’ve been using Microsoft Word on my desktop, but I’m getting frustrated because it takes forever to scroll to where I left off or to find something in an earlier section…plus it’s taking up so much storage on my computer that I’m having trouble with that as well. Is there some sort of online location (preferably free, LOL) y’all use that allows for easier navigation and stores the manuscript in the cloud? With my short stories, I’ve never had the need to consider a different resource, but with my novel…totally not motivating to have to scroll through a hundred pages to find a little detail or to get to where I need to keep writing – especially as my computer has trouble loading that big of a document.
Thanks so much!
Great question! Scrivener is a really good resource, it solves the scrolling problem that you’re describing. It keeps chapters and/or scenes in individual documents, but you can also view the whole manuscript together when you want to.
It’s not a great cloud solution, though. You can sync it, but the software and your file are still going to have a local component on your machine.
Atticus is another option. It’s quite a bit more expensive, and they tout themselves almost like a book design program, but I think it does most of what Scrivener does and it has built-in cloud storage features.
I’d love to hear from others. Has anyone else used a program that accomplishes what Jaela is looking for?
Google docs could be a good option. It’s all cloud storage as far as I know, and you can set headings for each chapter and then open the sidebar to navigate through the document quickly. You could even set a placeholder heading whenever you finish a writing session.
I’m not sure if it would solve the loading problem? I don’t have much experience with it lol
I’m cheap in that the only software I use is Word. Each chapter is a separate file, and the book is a folder containing all the chapter files. As for finding where I left off, my trick is that I type “XXX” at that place. The next time I open the file, I use Find to go to that point. Simple, but it does what I want it to.
I was going to say, you can set up Scrivener to save to a cloud host manually, but like Brad described above, the file is still being hosted on the local machine too. It’s not a purely cloud-based program. I don’t know of any other software or service like Scrivener that is purely cloud based.
I think the larger issue may be the storage and memory limits on your PC. I don’t know how old your desktop PC is but upgrading to a larger SSD and/or getting more RAM would help with her performance and storage issues. I understand that not everyone is comfortable doing those upgrades on their own, but I think getting a machine that has a healthy amount of RAM (8GB minimum, 16GB recommended) and at least 500GB to 1TB of storage would be beneficial. Cloud-based programs like Google Drive and Docs still run in browsers, and browsers need RAM to run properly. Especially Chrome, which is an absolute memory hog. Your PC may have issues loading from the cloud regardless of the cloud-based service if you have a minimum amount of RAM to function properly.
Probably too technical of a response for you, and if so, I apologize! But modern software is really bloated and bulky. Older PCs or PCs with bare minimum specs struggle with most apps nowadays.
I’ve used the Google docs heading feature, and it’s not reliable. I found it to be really glitchy. It’s possible they’ve improved it since I gave up on it though!