I'm close to 60,000 words into my latest novel and I'm writing in Ulysses using Markdown.
Novels, in particular, rarely need more than headings and occasional italics or boldface.
Novels, in particular, rarely need more than headings and occasional italics or boldface.
Oh, no doubt. I've seen entire chapters devoted to "character evolutions" and the associated spew of repetitive skills/character sheets.
What I personally like is when there's a secondary resource (aka a wiki) which tracks changes to the various character sheets and skills over time. Perhaps this could be done within the novel by using appendices? Wouldn't help extensively with Patreon-based web novels, sadly.
All that said, litrpg - not to mention software development books, cookbooks, etc - do still need these kinds of extended typesetting resources.
starting to write in markdown or even plain text is fine, but once the first draft is submitted to the editor or sent to a publisher for consideration it usually needs to be a word or rtf document in standard manuscript format.
once converted i am stuck using libreoffice to revise and edit the story.
i found tools that convert from markdown to ODF (which i can then load and export as word) but i have not found any way to apply a standard manuscript style in the conversion process.
without that i'd have to manually reformat the document each time i want to submit a new revision.
FWIW, I've been using Vellum for formatting my indie published novels, and would happily use it again if this new work is indie.
My recommendation is to grab a decently long markdown document and give it a try.
The feature that I would miss the most by switching to novelWriter or another open source solution would be the following:
- auto cloud sync across all devices (I can even write on my phone if I think of something while waiting for the bus)
- print quality output in PDF and epub with a single click (and many available themes to choose from).
- nice eye pleasing UI that put me in the right mood for writing
- good integration with my third party writing assistance software (Antidote).
hmmm - if it is an editor that handles text files, then myself, I would rely on one of the myriad of sync tools/platforms available, rather than have someone else's implementation
ps. I followed a conversation about James Joyce novel which was hinted that there is a difference between the two names and Joyce didn't pick "Ulysses" randomly. I'd like to know if you went through the same process.
UPDATE: Ok, I mis-read the comment, I though the name of the Novel was Ulysses, apparently it is an app.
And having it as plain text means adding your own special annotations is easy. E.g. I'm writing my third novel in my own editor using Markdown, and key for me was that it was easy to write small little scripts to e.g. process front-matter with similar "@pov" tags etc. to let me trivially cross-reference things.
* headers
* italics
* maybe 2-3 instances of *bold* through the entire text.
I don't need any additional "quality of editing". Hiding the syntax is irrelevant because the needs are so limited. Hiding the user interface on the other hand, matters to me, because it's a distraction (to others it isn't). My editor color-codes the headers and the italics, and having it stand out matters far more to me than that it looks the way it will in the formatted book, because my draft looks nothing like the finished book will anyway.
If you look at interviews with writers, you'll find a whole lot of obsession over the process, and things like how it feels to write with a pen vs. a typewriter vs. a word processor, and very, very little about what their drafts look like. It's far down the list of considerations you'll find novelists care about.
Nobody cares what the drafts look like, because they are transient. In fact you'll find a whole lot of authors advocate avoiding going back and editing and arguing for things like dictaphones etc. to make going back harder or using tools that won't let scroll up in some cases to simulate the typewriter experience, and all kinds of similar obsessions with spending as little time as possible on formatting and what the manuscript looks like in preference of being able to just dump the first draft into text the fastest way possible (while other authors want writing the first draft to take longer on purpose - to some that is a reason for using pens or pencils).
You mentioned Gaiman in another reply - someone who has talked at length about how since he wrote Stardust in a fountain pen he has come to enjoy being forced to rewrite his second draft entirely instead of being able to go back and forth and editing it since he switched to writing with pen on paper.
I'm sure you can find novelists that want to see a beautifully formatted manuscript while writing it. They have tools they can use.
But to suggest Markdown is some sort of big hindrance compared to some of the barriers novelists create for themselves on purpose doesn't pass the smell test for me.
This.
I chose emacs because I'm a programmer who uses emacs frequently. And its just damn text and I don't have to get all fiddly with everything. And like I don't want to have to fiddle around with Word, I don't want to fiddle around with some complicated markup langage like rst either. I just want to write.
I wrote my thesis is Word, I know what it can be like.
I can format text all day. It's a huge distraction that allows me to also feel 'productive'; which gets in the way of actually writing. Using a markdown editor lets me do the formatting that is necessary for the work (e.g., italics) without being hugely distracted.
> But it should hide the syntax just like rtf editors do (unless you want to see it).
I'm using Obsidian and wouldn't mind seeing this feature. However, it currently offers the option of toggling quickly between edit and preview modes, or opening up a second view for preview, which can optionally be scroll-locked with the editing window. That works great for me.
I use copious amounts of notes in my fiction writing, that sometimes include mathematical/physical formulas, data, and code. Obsidian supports (various amounts of) inline LaTeX, syntax-highlighting, and mermaid. (I'm also not above abusing these things for my own purposes: I've used mermaid graph to create a quick-and-dirty character family tree for my own reference, for instance.) And, of course, I use markdown to tie all these notes together and to the novel.
KeenWrite supports inline TeX, Mermaid (via Kroki), R for calculations, and interpolated string variables:
https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite#screenshots
This allows me to create a family tree and, when I change a character's name, the diagram---along with every other reference to their name---is updated automatically. Here's a video showing how it works:
When I write markdown, I don't even see the syntax. All I see is bold, heading, code block.
I don't need to see some on screen typeset version of the text because this all subject to change anyway when it comes to typesetting the document and that will change depending on the medium (ie. book, web, email etc.)